Budapest

                                             Praise the Lord for the Year of Mercy!
                                        Happy Feast of the Presentation of Our Lady!
     As we come close to the "one-month-till-Christmas" mark we are getting very excited for our December visitors! Madeleine is coming on the 21st, and Michael the 26th. We're hoping to take a trip to Budapest and Italy while they're here, but we have yet to iron out the details.

Ready to trick-or-treat!
Tink, Peter, Mrs. Darling, Wendy....
and three lost boys. :)
(None of us are dressed as our characters for the play)

     We've been pretty busy with school here, the younger girls persevering in their homeschooling each day, and Rosie and I trying to stay on top of our work. Rosie has been diligently working on her papers that are due soon, as well as working with the director of Peter Pan to try to get as much of the play logistics as possible figured out before our long Christmas break. We've had a few rehearsals, and they mostly consist of the actors trying to work slowly through the scene, every so often coming across some odd stage direction which is then interpreted by many little boys at once who know exactly how it should be done. Most of them haven't been in a show before, and sometimes they interrupt the scene to object that there "IS no door into the house..." "That's ok, we'll have props for the play," "REALLY? Do we get costumes too??? CAN WE KEEP OUR COSTUMES???" etc. Needless to say, it usually turns out to be a hectic, semi-productive, loud gathering of mostly eight to twelve year olds, and is quite a refreshing contrast to the rest of the week. I think we may fit in a little better with the "little kids"--today, while a little slap happy on our way through Baden (to buy some cake and coffee after exploring a ruined castle), Rachel remarked that Rosie was about seven years old, and told me that I was the "toddler who's four." Rosie objected that four year olds are not toddlers, and Rachel said, "Whatever. Toddler as in not one and not eighty." I'm not sure what that makes me exactly... And it doesn't help that I'm supposed to play Peter Pan in our play, a boy who is eight years old but also forty because of the timelessness of fairy-land...

Fun in Budapest!

     We ordered another guitar recently, and Mom and Rachel have been practicing it quite a bit. So with my violin, Claire's ukelele and Rosie, Rachel and Mom learning the guitar, now we've just got to figure out how people put it all together! This evening Mom and I had some success playing a hymn together on the penny-whistle and guitar after we had a dance party of sorts in our living room with old mime songs.
     A few weeks ago we successfully received our visas! Quite a relief, we didn't have them by the date we needed them, but somehow it all worked out and so we're legal and still here. The day we all went in to pick them up we were also supposed to get X-rays to make sure we didn't have tuberculosis or something, but the lady who was in charge was apparently rather overwhelmed that day and sent us away rather angrily for coming in on a Monday morning when she was all alone.... So once we figured out what she was saying, we happily left with no intention of coming back for X-rays since we didn't think the lady would miss us and they'd already given us our visas. (Aren't we tricky.)

It was a fun visit!

     Our ten day fall break was a few weeks ago, and Mom's friends from Germany, the Ellermeiers, came for the first few days. We had a relaxing, fun time with the Ellermeiers, involving a day in Vienna, plenty of time to be here and show them the Schloss, and lots of smiling and nodding at the three little boys who didn't know English but liked to talk to us anyway. They were here for Halloween, and so we had fun dressing up as characters from Peter Pan and trick-or-treating at the three rooms at the ITI that decided to participate. Dad also turned on quite a few German Dinosaur videos, and the boys also got to go watch Aladdin with Jacinta and Irene and some of the other children here (most of whom speak German, which was nice for the Ellermeier boys.)

Budapest!

     After they left, Dad, Rosie, Rachel, Claire, Jacinta and I went to Budapest for two nights. (Irene heard someone say, "We'll walk around the city..." and said, "What? We're gonna walk? I'm not coming.") The trip was a wonderful success, it's only about 2 1/2 hours from here and our airbnb was lovely. We arrived in the afternoon and as usual had a little difficulty finding it because our navigation lady in Dad's phone kept trying to convince us to drive up stairways.

St. Matthias

Eventually we found it, and our host gave us a map and some tips and then left us in a beautiful two story bnb, with a winding staircase, cozy rooms and a nice balcony looking out

Looking over the river from
Fishermen's Bastion

In front of the
National Archive building.

Buying lunch at the grocery store near St. Matthias

over the housetops. We discovered that the building our apartment was in was right next to the German embassy, and was on what's called "Castle Hill." It was on the Buda side of Budapest, and it's a hill above the rest of the city, with the National Archives, the History Museum, and an old tower of a knocked down church--all right on our street--and then a few minutes walk away was the glorious St. Matthias Church, Fisherman's Bastion and a bunch of neat cafes and shops. If we go back it would be neat to go into the history museum, it seemed to have lots of info about the revolution in 1956, and there was a big tank outside. Fishermen's Bastion was built in the 1800's in honor of the fishermen who had defended the hill from invaders coming across the Danube toward Buda in the 800's I think. A nice walk through colorful streets took us to the other end with the Palace/Castle and the National Gallery (which we got to go in and explore). There are also apparently a bunch of passageways underground that you can explore, and we think that right near our bnb is where legend has it King Matthias (first king of Budapest) imprisoned Count Dracula. Unfortunately we didn't have time to look into that...
     When we arrived and had settled in a bit, we went out to explore. We crossed the famous chain bridge (that had been all but destroyed in WWII as the Nazi's fled the city, but rebuilt after the war) from which we had a great view of both sides of the city. On the other side of the Danube, Pest, we headed for the city center and got to stop in a huge, beautiful church on the way. We enjoyed walking down the old, brightly lit streets with plenty of Hungarian shops. There was an escalator that took us down under the street to a big souvenir market with lots of friendly vendors who enjoyed speculating about where we were from. We picked up dinner at a little multi-leveled grocery store there on the main street, walked to a bus stop, and took a ride back over the bridge to our airbnb.

Fishermen's Bastion

That evening we looked up some Budapest history, and Rachel and I ended up with the great treat of a few hours WWII/world history lesson from Dad. We had a couple sessions of that over those few days, something that made the entire trip 10000 times more interesting.

     Next morning we hoped to get a tour of the National Archives (second largest collection in Europe I think), so we walked to see the Palace and Fishermen's Bastion, and then hurried back to the Archives for our tour which turned out not to be happening. So instead we got to spend more time outside on Castle Hill. It was beautiful, chilly fall weather, really bright and fresh which made the views really wonderful. From the Palace and Fishermen's Bastion we could look all the way across the river and over Pest, and we even managed to keep all hats and scarves and people from falling over the wall down the cliff. We spent a few hours in the National Gallery, and then headed down to the bridge. We made it back to the church we had visited the day before in Pest, hoping to get to Mass. At first we couldn't find the place they were celebrating (the church is huge, and I think it's bigger on the inside....), but eventually Dad just decided to jump the chains that block the tourists and look into random doors and so we found the "little" chapel and got to go to Mass in Hungarian.

After that we went looking for a place to eat.  Dad was determined not to try any weird Hungarian food, though, because so far every time he had tried "genuine--fill in the black--cuisine it had been very boring/not very yummy/not very much. Eventually we thought we'd give it a try, but then ended up in the middle of a narrow street between two different restaurants and the owners outside each explaining to us why their restaurant was where we wanted to go. In the end we were nearly dragged (I exaggerate a bit) down the stairs under the level of the street, and put at a fancy table with some musicians playing violin and guitar for the table next to us. We had a good time, not too terribly impressed with the food but our waiters were very attentive and friendly and one looked exactly like the bat accomplice from "The Great Mouse Detective", which added to the interest and uniqueness of the situation. They all said goodbye in a grand fashion as they saw us out. One of them said, in his strong Hungarian accent, "goodbye beautiful" and blew me a kiss as we were leaving and then I promptly nearly fell on my face (for the fifth time that day) trying to climb the stairs back to the street. After that we started making our way back to the bridge,

On Fishermen's Bastion.

stopping in at a few shops for Christmas gifts. We crossed the bridge again, enjoyed seeing the city on both sides lit up in the dark, and then walked along the water on the Buda side in order to look at the Parliament building. The Parliament building is right on the water in Pest, and it is completely lit up and magnificent at night. Rachel had a particular desire to see it from across the river, since from the bridge you can only see it at an angle. We walked a ways along the water, carefully comparing the various towers on the building until they were exactly symmetrical, and we could tell we were straight across from it. After that we climbed a whole bunch of stairs up Castle Hill trying to find our airbnb, got only a little lost, and then found Fishermen's Bastion again and made our way back.

Mission accomplished.

     Next morning we packed up and went home, telling the phone to avoid highways, which meant we had a long, beautiful ride through the Hungarian countryside and a bunch of little towns.

This is by the Palace and National Gallery. Across the
river, in the far right of this photo, you
can see the church that we went to Mass in later
that night. I think it was St. Steven's, but the
Hungarian name was hard to decipher. :)