Said goodbye to Adina with a big hug and not without a little sadness. She fixed me up with the leftover sausage from last night and several apple cakes and slices of cozonac, and I caught an Uber to the airport. From there, to Budapest!
Arrived in Budapest–total deja vu. I caught the airport shuttle just as I had before, walked to the hostel. Nothing had changed! Mollie was not there that day, and Jordan had left, but Tai was there.
I decided to go on a free walking tour. That was a lot of fun. I met some people from the hostel there and hung out with them. We learned a bit of interesting history. Most of the walk covered territory I’d already covered on my last visit, but that was ok. Afterwards I got lunch with my hostel buddies at this cool sandwich place I picked out–they were skeptical but they ended up enjoying it. The soup there was amazing. I had a bizarre dessert there which was cream and cottage cheese in a cup with chocolate chips and raspberry panna cotta. It was pretty weird tbh.
By then I was getting tired of socializing, so I left my friends at the hostel. Not sure what I did next :P
In the evening there was a goofy trivia game which was pretty entertaining. There was a “Hostel Lover” category where one designated yokel at the table had to kiss another yokel as quickly as possible (on the cheek or hand or whatever would suffice). I managed to get kissed a couple of times :P After that, there was supposed to be the same pub crawl I remembered so fondly from November when I went to take the Putnam! But alas, there were not enough people. I ended up going to the ruined bars with a few of the people who wanted to go on the pub crawl. We had some decent fun introducing ourselves to a big group of guys, and I hung out with one of the gals for a while. But we got back to the hostel before too late. I resolved to go on the boat party the next day.`