Wines, caves, and strange kinds of cameras.
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006Hello to all, I hope this post finds you well. Alex and I have reunited with Emily at last, and the three of us have made it to Bangkok. But first, I have some more catching up to do…The end of our Hungary adventure can be found below…
After Budapest, Alex and I headed off to take a train about 2 hours north to the medium sized town of Eger. Not quite sure where to get off on the train, we did manage to find the stop, and were recruited by a cute old grandmother to stay at her home for our time there. Apparently the best and most popular way to see eger, or smaller towns in hungary for that matter, is to stay in private homes instead of hotels or hostels. We didnt quite know this at first, so didnt take the woman up on her offer right away, this led to her talking herself down in price, and even though this wasnt our orginal plan, it worked out pretty well for us. Cute place, lots of space, kitchen and everything.
After settling in, we wandered our way into the city through a lovely little park with a great fountain. We explored the churches, little square, and climbed our way up the mineret which looks out over the surrounding hills. A little scary for me, as the stairs to get up it are barely wide enough for one person, making things a litle claustrophobic. Theres also a castle/fortress that defended the city from the turks for an amazing 39 days…apparently because of the strength of the bulls blood wine, what the city is known for….more on that later.
Alex was also interested in seeing the university there, a small teachers college. Although I wasnt super excited about it, I tagged along, and we ended up finding the strangest of strange inventions, the camera obscura. They take you into this little dark room, and then the camera projects the images of the surrounding city onto a table. It works sort of like a perioscope. Its really weird to see however, as it looks like a normal picture, but then all the people and cars are moving, kind of like a newspaper in Harry Potter.
Back to the wine. Excellent. Alex and I definitely had our fair share, and had a great time doing it. The majority of people who come to Eger do so for the wine, and we intended to do exactly that. We spent one evening wandering through the tiny wine cellars in an area known as the Valley of the Beautiful Women. Although the weather was gross when we went, the surrounding hillsides were still really beautiful. The second night, we found ourselves at a little bodega in the town square. Sitting at a cute little table outside, the waitress brought us sample after sample until we had gotten through all ten varieties of the one of the local wineriers. Whites, Reds, and to my great surprise even the rose was fantastic.
Also while in Eger we took a daytrip to the Baracala (I think thats the name) Cave system close the Slovakian border. Quoting Alex, it was magnificent. Truly incredible to see, and anadventure to get to as no one we encountered spoke english and our hungarian was basically nonexistent. This led to us getting off at the wrong bus stop, having to hike back up the mountain road, but led us to a different cave entrance, which actually had a longer and better tour then the one reccomended in our book. The staglagtites and mites were just awesome, many looked like they had inspired gaudi in his sagrada familia. Many of the formations were given fantasy names to describe what they looked like, the yawning crocodile, the santa claus, leaning tower of pisa, etc. The tour finished in this huge gallery autotorium type room with an extremely cheezy light and music show set to the chariots of fire theme. We got a good laugh.
Our last stop in Hungary was the little town of Szentendre. We just stopped there for a night, its about 45 minutes outside of budapest. Again we stayed in a private home, and it was great. We spent the day wandering the cobblestone streets and sitting by the river while alex played guitar (he actually managed to acquire a small audience of hungarian kids, very cute) and just relaxed. Szetendre was a little odd in that it was REALLY touristy, strange in that we had seen barely any tourists in budapest and pretty much none in Eger. But it was a great place to relax for an afternoon, and we finally tried Langos, the super delicious fried bread covered in cheese in sour creme. Greasy as can be, but super tasty, probably for the better we found them at the end of our time in hungary.
Ok, much to long for now, but I hope you all are well!
PS. All the maps have been updated now, so you can see where we’ve been!
Administrator