Sunday was a simple day. I got much sleep and relaxed in the morning, making myself a simple lunch of eggs, mushrooms, and small piece of bacon.
In the afternoon, I met up with several people at the Szechenyi baths. The baths are a very popular thing here, so I decided to give them a try. It was awesome. Possibly the most expensive thing I've done since I got here, about 3500 forints for a ticket, but very fun. The baths are a huge complex, in a neat old building (that I forgot to take a picture of) in city park. I found a bus that went most of the way to the city park, so that was exciting. The stop was in Hero's square, the entrance to the northern part of city park.
It's a beautiful square. Anyways, after some wandering I eventually found the baths. After paying, I had to go around to the other side of the baths, as the lockers were full at the main entrance. After much confused wandering and fiddling with lockers, accompanied by discovering a good deal of other Americans at the baths, we finally figured everything out. Unfortunately, we had also split our party and so had to go wander through the baths to try and find the person we had lost. We spent about 20 minutes wandering through the inside of the complex, finding no sign. Eventually, we stepped outside briefly, to look at the pools, which were much larger, foggier, and hard to see. And, lo and behold, we found our missing person. Quite a stroke of luck. About 10 minutes later we managed to run into the final member of our party, who had showed up a little later. How we all managed to find each other I'm not quite sure, since the place was huge and, with all the steam, difficult to see around.
The baths were a lot of fun, but it's a strange experience to swim when it's so cold at. The pool we spent the most time in was heated to 37-38 C, around 100F, which was rather nice when contrasted with the snow-covered ground and below freezing temperatures out of the water. It made traveling between pools a terrifying experience though.
After floating around and talking for awhile, we left and, unable to find the bus stop for the return trip, walked back to my apartment, turning the 10 minute trip into a 25 minute one. This was unfortunate, but after we returned to apartment, several other people joined us and we made a bunch of fried rice. A bunch is an understatement. We made an absurd amount of rice. There were about 9 people, all told, eating rice. We made four large batches of rice. Each was about three or four large portions. One of the batches featured bacon, two featured ground pork (the fat in those three batches was bacon fat), and one featuring vegetables. Carrots, peas, turnip, vinegar-steamed leeks and broccoli, eggs, onions, garlic, and ginger were all used in various combinations throughout the dishes. It turned out fantastically, with more than enough food to feed everyone, and much rice left over.
And that was about the extent of my Sunday, as classes started the next day, so people needed to get some rest.
Oh, but we did get another noise complaint. Just as everyone was leaving, our neighbor who speaks no English came to yell at us. At around 10, so I suppose it was justified, but still. Ah well, so it goes.

No comments:
Post a Comment