Elso nap - Day 1

Vacation diary per Rob:

Well, we finally made it -- and the first thing I managed to do when we got to the room was kick the leg of the bed with my bare foot and now half of my toe is purple. That should be fun walking the rest of the week!! Enough complaining - the weather is pretty good here so far - hot, but not very humid. It gets up to about 85-90 F every day but not too humid - so it is tolerable. The A/C systems here aren't very powerful - if there is one at all. Luckily the nights here get pretty cool, so we can open the doors of our room and get nice cool air at night.

The hotel is pretty nice - it was an old apartment building so all of the rooms are like small apartments. We have a kitchen, dining table, living area and separate bedroom and bathroom. The view from our room is of the little landscaped courtyard of the hotel. Some of the other rooms look on to the main street but we would much rather look at green than cars - we see enough cars at home. The neighborhood around the hotel is more of a residential area for daily workers - Anna's mom lives about two blocks from the hotel so we are heading over there this morning for a typical Hungarian breakfast - no sweet stuff - it is mostly deli / cold cut type meats, bread and sausages similar to hot dogs. Not your typical American breakfast but I'll give it a shot.

Our plane ride over was pretty un-eventful except for a little shaking here and there. Swiss airlines is pretty nice - each seat has its own video screen and a little remote control that you could select from a bunch of movies, games, music, etc - and it was all free!!! The food is where they faltered a bit - what I got was not too good and made me a little sick - or maybe it was also a combination of the screwed up hours and eating at odd times. We got to Zurich about 8 am local time (2 am) Saturday morning. The pilot was pretty good - on our way from New York he said the weather in Zurich was, and I quote "a little hazy". We didn't see the runway until we were about 20 feet above it - it was not "haze" - it was heavy, dense fog!!! It was like we landed in the middle of a cloud - we could not see anything.

Since we had four hours to kill and were operating on an hour of sleep we found a couple of open seats and played homeless people - sleeping on the seats in the airport. Anna takes great pride in her photos she took of me while I was sleeping in the airport...

We then a had a 1 1/2 hour flight to Budapest on a much smaller plane with no "extras". We were given a buttered pretzel (i guess that's typical for the alpine region) and one, almost shot sized glass of water to drink. We didn't really care - at that point we were so tired and just wanted to get off the plane. When we got off the plane our luggage was the first group out so it was pretty quick getting out of the airport. They didn't even make us go through customs!!! Just walked right out and met Anna's mom and sister who came to get us. We got to the hotel, showered, and walked over to her mom's house to eat some light food and I got to meet Viktor, Anna's brother-in-law who is the Architect.

Anita (her sister) and Viktor are very nice and we are supposed to have lunch with them later today. I think today we are off to see Buda castle and then to lunch with Anita & Victor and then who knows what for the rest of the day.