oh what fun, riding on a train...

today's already been a long day.

5:30am, wake up in prague... last freezing cold shower of the trip (yay)

6:30am, say goodbye to 4 of my 6 REUers in the hotel lobby, take a tayi with 2 of them to the train station

7:30am, board my train for budapest... my 2 REUers who were going to vienna take the same train... our compartment is just us and an older hungarian man who tried to spend a third of the time talking to me in hungarian... we covered that i'm good for greetings, numbers, and food words, but not complicated sentences

11:30am, my REUers get off to switch trains, the compartment fills up with older czech ladies

12:30pm, my old hungarian man and all the czechs get off in bratislava, slovakia... (no more hungarian language quiz for me...) instead i get 3 french students backpacking through eastern europe and a 30 something crazy american dude from florida

2pm, after an hour and a half of silence, florida dude starts chatting with me about budapest for 40 minutes

2:45pm, in budapest!... unfortunately the red metro is still under reconstruction, but at least it's a different part than last year?... i'm set up in my place (same apartment i rented last year), and the guy i'm renting it from introduced me to the lady who runs the internet cafe two blocks away that i didn't know about last year... equipped with some forints, a metro pass, and a phone card, i'm good to go and have some fun!

coming up? dinner with shalom at 6... i can't wait.

hungary says hello (actually it probably says jó napot instead). be parties one and all!