Some Brief Backstory

It has been 10 days in our new country and it feels like much, much longer! We began our trip with a flight from St. Louis to New York.

It was a small plane.

We landed in New York and had enough time to see :

          this and this:

Then, back on the plane for 8 hours.

I watched Unstoppable for a few hours.  It was in Hungarian for a good portion til I realized I could push a button and hear it in English.  Melissa slept.

Along the way, we think we saw Ireland and maybe the Danube -- but we're not really sure.

maybe ireland?

maybe danube?

We finally landed at 9:30 am on Friday--

-- found our luggage (actually, found our way to where we could find our luggage).  We just followed the crowd and were glad they all had stuff to pick up as well!

We changed some money over to forints -- or flutons/photons/etc as my dad likes to call them.

Once that was done, Melissa learned her first really important word:

-- but I think the pictures would have worked just fine.

At that point we realized how screwed we might be as our contact guy, Andras, was a bit late.  I suppose we could have figured out how to get to our hostel with no phone and no language skills, but he showed up to get us and our luggage to the hostel. 

Very happy we didn't have to find our hostel by ourselves!
 
And that's arrival, not the most exciting -- but Meliss takes pictures like it's prom everyday so we have to use them somehow.  We had 4 days after this of exploring (and by exploring, I mean walking aimlessly) around, through, and above Budapest.