I am currently writing this as we wait in one of many lines during our travels in India. (As dad says.) We have just flown from Budapest to Mumbai but I forgot to write up a blog post concluding our travels in Europe. For the past week we have been enjoying ourselves in Budapest with friends. From Monday to Friday, our friends Jackie, Jonny and their baby son Aspen (aka Buckshot). As we were staying in the center of downtown it was super easy to walk out the door and see anything we wanted within 2 km. On Friday night they departed on a train headed towards Paris, where they will continue their travels through Europe. Later that evening, Timo, his brother Kai, and his father Andreas arrived. They drove nine hours to come visit us and it was super nice to finally meet the family of one of my good friends. If you don't know about Timo, he was an exchange student in Calgary earlier this spring and we became great friends during the three months he was there. We have stayed in great contact since then, and spent Saturday walking around town once again. We explored some parts of the city we hadn't yet walked in. Andreas invited us to dinner so we went to a restaurant that Timo and I found on a street. We ended up having some really good Hungarian dishes and it was nice to go out to eat as well. Timo and I then went out to enjoy the one night we had in Budapest. We walked around for a while and admired the gorgeous lights all along the Danube River. Our destination was the top of a hill where there was an amazing view of the city. The picture for this blog post was taken then. Although we left the restaurant around 8:30pm, we didn't get to the top until around 11 pm because we spent a lot of time walking around a Christmas market located in the center of an outside walking mall. I brought a speaker with us so we would have some music to listen to while we explored Budapest by night. They left the next morning and drove back to Stuttgart. The rest of our day was spent packing up our bags and bikes for the flight. Today has been a very long day of travel as we woke up at 2:30am and it is now 1:00pm local time. There is a three-hour time difference from Budapest so we aren't too jetlagged. I guess we'll see tomorrow... we plan on building the bikes and then biking 28km through Mumbai to another air B&B that we will stay at for two nights to figure things out and settle into India a little bit. As for now, we are waiting for a shuttle to our apartment but I will end up posting this once I get to the apartment. First impression of India: PEOPLE. LOTS AND LOTS OF PEOPLE.
