Saturday, June 14, 2008

Vacation!!!!!!

After almost 21 months of working in Moldova I am taking my last vacation. We are not allowed to travel in the last three months of our service and I had 18 days remaining so I decided to do one big trip and tour the Balkans. My trip started a week ago when I flew into Budapest, Hungary. It was a nice quick flight from Moldova, only an Hour and a half, on a small prop plane. My flight left Moldova a 5:45am. Since I had to be at the airport at 4am I had to stay in the capital the night before and wakeup at 3am to get ready and catch a taxi to the airport. Knowing I had to be up that early I couldn't seem to fall asleep the night before and got 0 hours of sleep before my flight. I arrived in Budapest at 6:15am and was completely exhausted. My plan was to meet up with a girl from couchsurfing.com and stay with her but I couldn't get in touch with her and spent my first hour in the city searching for internet and then a hostel. By the time I checked into the hostel it was around 9am. I found out the girl working there was from Romania and she was quite surprised I spoke Romanian. But by the time I put my bags down and crawled into a bunk to snooze I was so energized about being someplace new that I couldn't sleep and only ended up laying there for an hour until I finally got up and decided to tour the city. As someone going off no sleep I got around most of the city the first day. I did happen to find a huge park though that I laid down in for a rest in the sun. That night I was totally ready to sleep good and hard after being awake close to 38 hours. But guess what? Guess how good I slept? HORRIBLE! I think I was way too tired and too worried about actually getting sleep plus the walls of the hostel were paper thin and I could hear everybody that came and went. When I "woke" the next morning after very few hours of sleep I felt a little delirious and my eyes hurt so badly. So instead of walking the rest of the city I hadn't seen yet I decided to go chill out at the famous thermal baths. It was amazing!! There were huge pools indoor and outdoor full of natural warm water. I stayed there for hours just floating and relaxing, letting the jets massage my back and neck. That night I had planned on taking a night train to Bosnia but I found out that there is only a day train and I didn't want to waste a day traveling so I took a night train to Belgrade, Serbia instead, a city I originally planned to see but cut out at the last minute. So I was looking forward to anther night of bad sleep, especially because I didn't want to fork up the extra money for a sleeper car.

1 comment:

Jeremy Kelley said...

You're only three months off from COS? Wow, where does the time go? I'm doing my Mid-Service stuff right now. One year left....

Kelsey's coming in two weeks and I'm going to get my first real vacation in: Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Burkina!