And Friday.
I've been getting breakfast at the same pastry shop everyday because it's very tasty, convenient and cheap. Today I bought a cheese and tomato-ey thing (I really don't know any of the names), and the lady gave me a free, warm from the oven, cheese scone. I call it a scone because I think that's the translation, but it wasn't. It was more like a popover or a gougere, but it wasn't very airy, it was still fairly dense. It was incredibly tasty, better than the thing I wanted to buy, so I think I may have to try more of them.
For lunch, I went to the sandwich place that I had skipped on the day before. I got like 6 of the little devils, because they were small and cheap. I had one with sardines on it, one with caviar, one with camembert, one with salami, one with what I think was spiced cottage cheese (very interesting and pretty good, but not something I'll seek out), and one with a meat salad (kind of like a bologna salad). I more or less just pointed at random ones and said, I'll take that. It was delicious, and pretty cheap. On the way back, I stopped at a bakery near the language school and got a ... something. The dough was relatively dense and not particularly sweet, it was covered in chocolate on either end, had a light sprinkling of powdered sugar and had two hollowed out cores in it that were filled with bananas. It was very good, but I wish there had been more banana.
The Hungarian word I've gotten the most use out of so far is csapvíz (that i is the one character that I can't get while typing on the Hungarian keyboard setting for Windows, which means I have to copy it from somewhere else, making it the most annoying word to type so far). It means tapwater, and I've used it at every restaurant. I may say köszönöm and bocsánat more frequently (thank you and excuse me or sorry, respectively), but csapvíz has been the most useful. Ordering water in restaurants tends to result in them bringing you a bottle of water, and saying "tap water" in English isn't always understood. Csapvíz is, however, even if you mispronounce it slightly, making the most useful word I've learned.
After class, I returned to the post office for another attempt to buy the stamps that I need. This time I was successful, obtaining them without much problem. I also met an Australian woman who was traveling around Europe with some friends on vacation. They were going around a bunch of countries, to make it worth the trip, and had been in Budapest, left to go to Italy and then returned because they liked Budapest so much. She said Budapest had the best parties; she could go see the sights of Italy later in life, but the parties in Budapest are something she should experience now.
I then returned home, stopping along the way to buy groceries. I made dinner consisting of potatoes, leeks, mushrooms and eggs. I pan fried them all in some canola oil, adding balsamic vinegar and covering the pan after the leeks were added in order to steam them a little. It worked really well, much to my surprise. In the future, I probably won't wing it, but this time was a definite success. Then I headed out to ruin pubs. I met up with one group of people and we went to Szimpla, the oldest ruinpub in Budapest, which has its own garden that it shows movies in when the weather is warmer. I really need to take pictures of these places in order to explain them better, but Szimpla was huge and impressive. It's a very small, unassuming entrance, but when you walk in the place opens up. There are at least 5 separate bars in the pub, and many many separate rooms with various tables and chairs. The whole place is full of art work and artsy looking pieces, and the chairs and tables are very varied. We originally sat outside (the only place we could find an open table), where the table was pretty normal, but have the seats were taken from a train. The table next to us had a bathtub that had been cut open as a seat. It was all very strange, but really cool.
The people I was with decided to head in early, so I then met up with another group of friends in one of the most-incredibly located apartments, where we hung out for awhile before heading to yet another ruin pub, Fogas ház. This one was very different looking from Szimpla. It was smaller, with only one bar, one main room and two side rooms. The ceilings, however, were gigantic and it was in an old stone building, much more sparsely decorated than Szimpla. It wasn't quite as crowded, which was nice. While there, I met an American who works at a resort in Germany and talked to him for awhile about being in Europe and tourists, both being them and seeing them.
Anyways, then I made the long walk back to my apartment, the metro having closed a couple hours earlier. I really need to find out if a bus or tram runs to my apartment, because they run all night. Ah well.