Greetings from Florence!
stuff here in Italy is going great: Venice was gorgeous, the statue of David is amazing, and we are off to Rome tomorrow!!!!
I will write a full update when I get back to Budapest! and post pictures of course!! :-)

hello again!

so life here in Budapest has been (and probably will continue to be) very busy lately! Last week was spent working on (or finding excuses not to be working on) my paper, followed by an awesome weekend in Prague, and then studying for today's midterm. And tomorrow we have a field trip, and will be doing reading for Thursday's class and finishing the planning for our October break trip.

This past weekend in Prague was amazing! I went with a group of four other people (the three girls I went to Croatia with plus one guy) though four other people from our group also went to Prague this weekend, we just stayed different lengths of time. We left on Friday night, and took an overnight bus ride over there. (sleeping was rather difficult: it must've been at least a million degrees on that bus!!) we arrived in Prague at about 6:00 am on Saturday morning. Once we navigated the subway and found our hostel, we found out that we weren't going to be able to check into our room until at least 12. So, we decided we would just take a really long time eating their all-you-can-eat breakfast! It didn't take us quite the necessary 3 1/2 hours, so we had some extra time to look at maps and pamphlets and try and figure out exactly what we wanted to do while we were there.

after putting our stuff in our room, we headed out to the main part of the city. we explored the old town center, followed a free tour for a while, and then saw some cool buildings on either side of the river. the afternoon and evening was spent napping, eating, and observing local nightlife. ;-)

sunday was when we did more exploring as we had recovered from our lack of sleep. the first thing we saw was the Prague caste, which was gorgeous! then we spent a long time just wandering around the city before having an early dinner. After dinner we went on a boat tour! It was clear out with a full moon, so it was beautiful! (i'm including some pictures from this...) after the tour and some dessert it was time to head to the bus station. we took another overnight bus (much easier to sleep on this one!!) and arrived in Budapest at about 6am on Monday! Overall an awesome weekend!!

well, that's all for now...and I probably won't update this for a couple weeks because I will be gone in Italy for October break!! :-)

here are some pictures from the weekend:

Prague castle:

from the boat tour:

Hi everyone!
I can't believe it's October already! Time flies when you're having fun, right? :-)
This week has been a very good one! This past week's field trips were a lot of fun! The murder trial was pretty interesting! It was hard to follow because it was all in Hungarian, but Ildiko (the Hungarian professor who leads the field trips) wrote notes throughout the trial explaining what was going on. It was the day that the judge gave the verdict, so we didn't see any witnesses being questioned, but it was still neat to see! After the court, and lunch, we had a tour of a nearby monastery, which was really cool! It was up on the hill (mountain?) side and so had a gorgeous view, and the inside was beautiful also!

The trip on Wednesday was really cool too! We had a tour of the police station after a brief presentation on how things work within the Hungarian police force. After the tour, we headed over to another building where they monitor security cameras that have been placed around the district. (I got to ride in a police car over there! fun!) It was really neat to see footage that they had from different cameras-footage from a recent riot, and the recording of a car backing into another one that they used to prove whose fault the accident was. Overall, a very good week of school! :-)

And this weekend has been very nice!! We've had two movie nights so far, one on Thursday and one last night. And I've gone running twice! (On Friday morning and this morning) I went with my friend Danielle over to Margaret Island where they have a running track that's about 5.2 k or something...not sure, but it feels nice to be running around outside. And the view is awesome! (I'll post some pictures...) And this weekend we have also made some plans for next weekend: we're going to go to Prague! It'll just be for two days/one night, but we figure that's enough to see things and that way we don't have to book hostels for two nights.

So I think that's about it! We have a paper due this Thursday (our first one of the semester!) and then midterms coming up...but we have plenty of time on the weekends to get things done! :-)

Hope you guys are doing well back home!!

view from Margaret Island: