Stupid octopus!

So our Hungarian hostel is awesome! It's a great group of people here. I want to stay in more hostels like this.

Yesterday we started with the Great Synagogue--the second largest synagogue in the world next to Temple Emanu-El in New York. It was really beautiful, and the history was so interesting. Our tour guide was a Hungarian woman, who has lived near the synagogue her whole life. Her grandfather was Catholic, and saved a huge number of Jews during the holocaust, including her grandmother and her mother. It was really cool that the history was so personal for her.

We also snuck into the museum at the synagogue. There was a pretty awesome collection of judaica, a room about the holocaust, and a special exhibition about "Jews and Carpets."

After the museum, we started walking towards the castle, but we stopped for a cold drink. (It's way too hot here!) We started seeing funny dressed people and hearing drums. Then we found the Hare Krishna mothership, and a whole hive of them. It was super random!

Then we actually did go to the castle. Or at least near it. It was cool. We took lots of photos. We didn't go up there though. We bought a big pretzel, and some Asian tourists thought it was the funniest thing ever and took pictures with us.

From the castle, we started walking down this street that is supposed to be just like the Avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris, but somehow better. Whatever. It was beastly hot. We took a tram most of the way down the street to the big park. The park is awesome! It has playgrounds and a trampoline and a zoo and a circus and an amusement park and the best place ever--the bath house! The bath house has a bunch of different types of baths and massage and doctors and saunas and solariums and 3 big outdoor pools (one hot one, one fun one, and one huge lap pool). I want to live there! We swam and soaked and sauna-ed. By the pool there are tons of guys playing chess. Chess is apparently a big deal in Hungary. Also a Hungarian dude invented the rubiks cube. Just FYI.

When we got back from the baths, we got ready to go out with a bunch of people from the hostel to watch the world cup final. We went to an awesome spot and it was really fun... until the end. Now I am sad and resentful towards cephalopods and the spanish. Also that stupid ref.

This morning, we went searching for an optician who could make me some glasses in a couple hours. Everyone said they had to special order my lenses and couldn't do it before tomorrow, so we gave up and went to the big awesome market. The market had all sorts of exciting food things on the first floor, and all sorts of tchotchkes on the second floor. Good times. We got yummy things.

We were planning to get back from the market around noonish, load up the car, and take off for Vienna. But we decided to try one last little glasses shop right on our street, which had been closed in the morning. They said I could have glasses by 4. So now I'm sitting in the hostel, killing time by blogging and uploading photos. Tonight we're going to a Mozart concert in Vienna, which I will be able to see!