When I got to Budapest I was greeted by a very friendly and outgoing Romanian boy who took me to a hostel accross the street from the train station. The hostel was on a high floor of an apartment building and was outfitted with a bunch of bunk beds in coed rooms.  There were already a few other travelers hanging out there.  I liked Budapest and ended up living there for eleven days but it seemed like more than that.  I was hanging out with some dudes from San Fransisco for the first couple of days. I went to the baths with them. The budapest baths are a well known feature of the city where they use natural hot springs in large public pools. Some of the baths rooms are sexually segregated because they are nude.  One popular thing to do there was getting massages. I got one massage buy one guy, it was OK. 

The city is beautiful. There are a lot of hills on the western side, and a very wide river runs through it.  The buildings are old but classical and nice, and it is clean.  All and all I felt like I was in a first world country apart from the fact that everything was very cheap.  I heard that the kids who work at our hostel get paid about a dollar an hour, and I remember the pizzas that I bought on the street being very cheap. 

The most interesting thing about my experience in Budapest was the manaical interest in chess.  It seemed like in every public place there were chess boards built into large stone tables and chairs.  In a lot of these Chess places there were two men playing surrounded by like twenty people watching!  I think this practice must have come come from the days of Communism where the people didn't have the freedom to take part in things that were more interesting than group Chess.  However, it is definitely a testament to the intellectual prowess of the Eastern European stock.  I definitely don't think like that. 

I had a lot of fun with the other young travellers who stayed in the hostel there.  There was a hot and jolly Canadian girl who liked talking about her first job working in a bank, a young American guy who I actually did a play with that I wrote for the other travellers there! I can't remember what it was about. I already wrote my journal of Hungary, but for some reason it got lost so I am writing from memories on this day of 4-26-06, almost nine years later.  Wow how time flies.

There was another American dread locked guy from San Fransisco who liked to talk about how he makes pizzas in San Fransisco.  He was a character. The first time we saw him was when he first arrived in our room.  He walked in and without saying anything just bust into telling a joke about superman fucking the invisible man in the ass because he thought we was fucking Wonderwoman. 

One night I went to an underground bar with the guys from San Fransisco and had some beers with som Canadian soldiers who were on break from Bosnia.  One guy told me about his experiences as a soldier there.  He said the problems there were because of the Serbs and in his opinion every Serb should die. He said the Muslims weren't at fault and were just trying to protect themselves.  He told me about one of his friend who killed like 30 Serbs over the course of like twelve hours because he was left alone in a good sniper area taking pot shots at guys running into the open.  He said the Canadians are the best soldiers in the world and every time the various armies get together and have military games the Canadians always win. He wasn't a total gung ho crazy soldier though, just a normal guy who had joined the army.  He didn't like the attitute most people have towards soldiers.  He said, "People ask me what I do, and when I tell them I uphold the constitution they roll their eyes". He said people don't understand the necessity for the army, and that they don't understand that a whole lot of people hate America.  I specifically remember him telling me that the '93 WTC bombing almost collapsed the building, and that terrorists were going to try again and were going to be successfull.  One of the guys from San Fransisco overheard my conversation with the soldier and told me he thought the guy was full of shit but was afraid to tell him for fear of getting beaten up. 

I met some crazy soldier boys when I was there.  A couple of other Canadian soldiers who were on break from bosnia came over to our hostel, not to stay as they already had a military hostel but to party with other tourists.  One of them was a young nerdy looking guy who said he joined the army "to blow shit up". The other guy was totally nuts.  He was really buff and claimed to be the world champion under 200 pound arm wrestling champion, and we all believed him.  I challeged him to arm wrestling and he said, "are you serious". Then we arm wrestled and he just held it there like he was trying and I thought I was strong, then he effortlessly slammed my arm down.  We played a drinking game that involved memorizing what the people before you said and I lost badly and got totally hammered. Then we went out on the town and I remember seeing the crazy solder running on top of all the cars in the center trying to set of the alarms.  Then he climbed up a fire escape ladder to the top of a four story building and climbed down.  He was trying to pick up on the hot Canadian girl, but I heard her saying the next day that she didn't want to be the girl some stupid soldier picked up on, but that his stomach was like rock.  She said he told her the bad boys in the army are the buff ones because every time they get into trouble they have to do pushups. 

There was another crazy American kid staying there too.  He was young and very skinny but the couple times we went to the disco as a group he got in these show down with the Hungarian boys in there. I would be dancing and look over and see him staring someone down. He was doing it once with a couple guys and I had to phisically pull him away from them because he was ready to fight.  Other than that he was cool though, maybe it was the alcohol.  It was fun going to the disco because it was so easy to dance with the local girls and grab their waists.  At one point I remember dancing with these jolly drunk Russian guys.  It was the first time I met Russians. 

I went to the Opera one night with a couple girls from the hostel, it was OK. The building was very nice. 

I was there for 11 days because I got the Indian visa when I was there, although I never went to India.  The neighborhood the Embassy was in was nice. It was hilly and had a lot of treas and the buildings looked just like in western Europe.

That's about all I remember from Budapest.