Budapest

On the long weekend we took the night train once again, but this time through Vienna and into Budapest. My first trip into Eastern Europe. It was a long weekend in my canton and also a national holiday in Hungary. We started our day by first checking into the hostel (actually, turns out we had rented a studio apartment) and then headed into town to see the market.

The building was old and full of tourists and food and markety stuff.

One of the biggest buildings in the city centre of Pest (Budapest is two sides of the river, Buda and Pest) is the Cathedral, there were crowds all around and the inside was pretty typical European Cathedral.

You couldn't enter very far into the cathedral.

 We paid to go to the top of the Cathedral, taking the long stairs inside.

Inside the top we could see the top of the dome from inside the church, slightly less pretty on this side.

We had great views of the city from walking around at the top of the Cathedral. We saw a few buildings that had this style of decorated roof.

There were several tourists walking around but it wasn't packed with people.

After the tour of the Cathedral we went to the Opera house. It was a lovely old building (actually, most of Budapest was lovely old buildings) and we bought last minute tickets to the ballet in the evening, Anna Karenina.

Even in Budapest there was still George Clooney selling Nespresso. The man is everywhere in Europe. I wonder when the system will come to Canada. The problem is you have to buy the patented caps, and you can't even buy them in the grocery store, you have to order them online or spend a long time waiting in line in their speciality stores.

In the Opera we had box seats near the top. We weren't dressed up as well as everyone else with our tourist travelling clothes... However, we had good a good view of the stage and Orchestra pit. The ballet itself was very good, it had traditional pointe work combined with some more modern parts during dreams etc.

We got back to the apartment, it was a nice room with very good windows that blocked the noise on the street. The street itself was a bit rough but not too bad and there was a peep show across the street.

Similar to many apartment buildings in Budapest it had an open courtyard inside, some buildings had larger ones with some trees and gardens in the middle.

The man who organized the rooms told us we would be fine as long as we locked both doors - the cage door with a special key and the inner door.

The next day we went to the Hero Square to check out the huge monument. The dude at the top, at least, I think it is a dude, was carrying a crown and cross.

The men on horses at the base were fantastic, check out the antlers on this one.

There were tons of people in the square and many cars driving around the circle. Buses were dropping off people and crowds were walking into the park behind and we followed. There were two small castles and huge crowds. In one of the castles they had a display about prehistoric settlements in Budapest. This was interesting to me since Budapest is one of the sites from the book series Clan of the Cave Bear (actually, from Plains of Passage).

This was a statue honouring anonymous, the face looked rather creepy.

After we left Hero Square we took the metro - apparently the second oldest one in the world. It was in very good shape and had people checking tickets at the entrance.

We walked towards Buda and across the Danube, this is the "Great Mother River" from the Clan of the Cave Bear books and the first time I had seen it. I had been close in Vienna, a city which it also goes through.

Many of the buildings in Budapest were beautiful and majestic, but also falling apart. The town itself was crawling with tourists and the few restaurants we ate at had only English speaking guests. All the people that I met in Budapest spoke excellent English (except for the grannie at the ballet), I was told it was because the tv shows were only subtitled which is also where the Dutch get excellent English.

One the other side of the river we walked to the top of the hill and checked out the large castle. There was a great fountain built right against the wall which looked fantastic.

And people had knocked out the teeth of this lion giving him a funny looking laughing face.

I liked the clouds on the pillar of this statue.

We never got close to the parliament buildings but they looked very impressive on the banks of the river.

And as we crossed the bridge a second time we could see the storm rolling in along the river.

In the evening we caught a metro and tram out to a mall and watched a movie, all in English, no subtitles (Men in Black III).

Worm Composting

I don't generate a lot of garbage, but in most of Switzerland (and apparently not in Lausanne) you have to pay for your garbage bags individually. I like the idea in theory, but I just don't generate enough garbage so the bag stinks long before it's full even though I buy the smallest one (17L). So given the garbage situation, and my desire to experiment I started a worm compost bin.

I started with about 10 worms dug out of a garden compost pile, followed instructions online and started my bin. I'm sure it will be months before they will build up to a large enough population but I'm curious to see that happen (without buying the worms online). Anyway, they've been multiplying and I can find their eggs inside the bin. They are the little yellow lemons in the picture.

I found one of the tiny babies on the side and it was really cool to see their entire gut because they were still clear.

Anyway, the entire system sits in my kitchen cupboard (for now), I'm using a box from Ikea and a tray (but so far no liquid has been leaking out). I'm putting only small amounts of food in it and the box smells like wet newspaper and earth. The garbage still stinks though.

Lyon

On the long weekend here in Switzerland we spent one day in Lyon. You could tell it was France because of all the dogshit on the sidewalks. Apparently not just in Paris.

An important feature of the city in the more modern section is the tallest tower known as the pencil. This was our signpost guiding us back to the train station.

The old section of the town was really nice, but with larger streets compared to Switzerland (though not as big as the huge boulevards of Paris). We had a snack in one of the large squares and hoped it wouldn't start raining on us!

Off in the distance on top of one of the hills sat the large church and what looked like the Eiffel tower! The guide book suggested taking the subway up the hill but of course later we would walk up...

Around lunch time we stopped off at what was a very old church but it was closed so we could only look at the outside. Instead we went to the textile museum, apparently Lyon was historically a very large centre of silk and textile manufacturing. They had only a few pieces of clothing but they did have some very large garments from the catholic church.

Next we made our way up the hill through the twisting streets and into the church. The front of the church with all the tourists being dropped off in buses was packed, but at the rear of the church we walked up through not very busy gardens. Inside it was pretty packed.

They had a pretty good lion painting inside.

Then we walked down the hill, across one of the rivers and up another hill to see the roman theatres. In the theatre it was surprising to see windows built into the cliffs which I assume were part of the neighbouring museum. I said it was yet another feature I wanted in my future giant dream house which now must apparently be built on a cliff.

There were many people crawling around the theatres (there were two stages right next to each other). They were both huge, even the smaller one, and very steep seating.

Having checked out the theatres, the rain started and we attempted to find the amphitheatre located on the map. We must have walked almost all the way around it before I wandered across the street to find it hidden below! It was large and closed to the public, apparently it used to be very very large but they haven't excavated it and most hides beneath neighbouring buildings.

The lightning and rain was now in earnest and we looked back at the church on the hill.

Then it was back to the pencil and the mall that was below it for a snack and to get out of the rain. Apparently we missed the best part of Lyon, the French food. However, with a train to catch and restaurants opening up later we never managed. We didn't stop for much of a break and we must have walked at least 20km! I slept on the train ride home.

Back in Lausanne the weather was better and we built boxes for growing tomatoes with watering from underneath. Let's see how the summer experiment goes.