La granadina It's the spring semester of my junior year, so I am celebrating with un gran viaje filled with classes (unfortunately) and crazy foreign fun.

So it turns out Budapest is actually a two-in-one deal: Buda on one side of the Danube and Pest on the other! The train station where we got off, unfortunately, turned out to be the wrong one, leaving us with a long hike and our first great adventure! Great is perhaps not the operative word, as my bag got awfully heavy and my umbrella awfully inside-out in the rainy wind weather, but an adventure still the same, and lucky for us, the hostels both turned out to be conveniently-located places of comfort! Our hostel lady, though, unfortunately lived elsewhere, there was a mix-up of meeting times, and we didn’t get our key til the next day. This didn’t prove problematic til after dinner, when everyone else was out and we wanted in. So technically, technically, we broke in through the window. But it happens. The other travelers at this hostel were all really interesting, too, so it would seem Pest is where the cool people go! Obviously. Thursday was hilly and my aforementioned cold was much worse, but both Buda and Pest turned out to be one great city! Rumor spoke of an underground labyrinth, so this was obviously a necessary venture. Two monster hills, many souvenir stands, and one playground later we found it quite lived up to expectation. Lunch was homemade cake and ice cream, snack was street vendor sweets, and all in all, it was a very healthy day! Somehow we lost Hil and Lianne (they were at a different hostel), so Friday was sadly incomplete and, also sadly, the end of Slovakia Fest. So while Budapest remains slightly unexplored (turns out a lot of things close for Good Friday), the stories live on, and returning home to southern Spain is hardly a hardship. The journey back was basically just a series of naps on different forms of transportation, and not gonna lie, it was kinda nice to be in familiar territory once again. But Slovakia Fest 2007 was beyond-belief a crazy-awesome time of five stars and two big thumbs up. Phew!