Síelés Utazás és Kiskutya

I haven't made a blog post in forever and I really don't have an excuse, but here's one now!

On Friday (Jan 27) we left at three in the morning by bus from Udvarhely.  We drove through Hungary, Slovenia, and Italy and about 37 hours later we made it to Le 2 Alpes in France.  There were about 30 of us who all came out together, I'm not sure if everyone was from Udvarhely but they at least all spoke Hungarian.  We stayed in a hotel in the small town at the base of the ski mountain(s).

Here's basically where we went, though you can't quite see Udvarhely on here.

Here are some pictures from the little town.  

This is what the ski mountain looked like from the bottom.

And this is what is looked like from the top.  (And the middle and basically everywhere else.)

Look, I managed to get one people picture.  There's Zenkő, Erika, and György and I at the very top.  In order to get there we had to take two gondolas, and a really snazzy really long rope tow.

We arrived Saturday afternoon and we left again at 3am on the following Saturday so we had a full six days of skiing.  That's almost as much skiing as we do in an entire year at home.  It was great, but also very tiring.  Everyone was very good skiers, and Zenkő skies about the same as I do so that worked out great.

Erika's mom, so my host grandma, came with us.  I think she sort of organized the whole thing but I'm not sure.  She didn't come skiing, but we all ate a big homemade lunch together after we were done skiing every day.  The family staying in the room next to us usually joined us as well, and we skied with them a lot too.  They had a girl about Zenkő's age and a boy in university who was a really good skier and tried to give us lessons.

I'm used to being 'the American' in Udvarhely so it was kind of interesting to go to France and have everyone assume I was just another Hungarian/Romanian person.  All in all we had a great time.  The trails were fantastic, it snowed a bit during the week so they weren't too icy or anything.  The weather was really great most of the time.  It got a bit windy and foggy at the top on occasion but the whole week was very warm so we really lucked out.

On a completely different note... we got a puppy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I knew that Zenkő had been asking for one and that we'd get it eventually, but I had no idea it was coming so soon.  Tádé (Tah-day) is a three-ish month old terrier thing.  I'm not really sure, but he is absolutely adorable.  He has a little pen in the backyard right below my window.

Bécs, Prága, Budapest

So this took forever, mostly to get the pictures off my stupid phone, but Merry Christmas!

Ashlee's host dad drove her and me to Alba Iulia, which is a larger city about two hours away.  December 1 is  Romania's national holiday, like the Fourth of July.  It celebrates when Transylvania and other territories unified with Romania, forming modern day Romania.  Or something to that effect at least.  There were seven of us exchange students there, one girl couldn't make it.  We went around with the local Interact kids, which is kind of like a high school club version of Rotary but I'm not sure.  My town doesn't have Interact.  

There's a really old citadel in the middle of the city.  I'm not sure what it used to be exactly, but it was really big and built down into a hill sort of.  All the walls were lined with bricks and there were tunnels in places.  That's where the main festival was held.  There were all sorts of vendors and decorations.

We stayed in Alba Iulia for a couple of nights, we were hosted by Interact students.  Milena and I stayed together with a very nice girl name Mara who has two adorable black lab dogs.

This is part of the citadel and an old church above it.  Most of the banners say 'La Mulți Ani România' which is Happy Birthday Romania.

We sat in a cafe for a while because it was cold outside and the cafe had a good view of the military parade.   Yurina brought origami paper and playing cards everywhere so we got some paper crane making lessons.   

They really really like sausage here.  There were tons of people cooking it and selling it.  There's a special Romanian sausage called Mici which is very good.

Not the best picture, but this is basically a tube of sour dough bread cooked in tube shape over a fire then covered in cinnamon and sugar.  Its called kürtős kalács and I think its a typical Transylvanian thing, I've seen it at every little fair in my town too.  It tastes really good.

Here's a bit better picture of the citadel, taken from a bridge over it.

Me, Milena (Brazil), Yurina (Japan), Shirley (Taiwan)

Yurina, Shirley, Me, Milena, Danielle (Brazil), Ashlee (US, Chava (Mexico)

On the night of December 1 there were lots of fireworks, which we watched from one of the Interact boy's house.  It actually had a really good view.

The complete nonsense that results from trying to play scrabble in english, romanian, chinese, and japanese all at the same time.

After that, the six of us going on the trip left by bus to go to Oradea, a town near the Hungarian border.  We spent one night there and got to look around the Christmas fair in their city center.  Alba Iulia was the first time I met Shirley because she had had visa problems and didn't get to Romania until October.  But she is super nice and she, Yurina, and I shared hotel rooms the whole trip.  Thankfully, Yurina is a lot better at English and Romanian now so communicating wasn't quite so hard as last time.  We spoke Romanian whenever we could so I actually got a bit better at it by the end of the trip.  It definitely comes to me much easier than Hungarian.

We left the next morning for a five hour drive to Vienna.  Other than the six of us, there was one rotary member and a driver who came with us.  We went everywhere in a big van.  We got to Vienna late at night so we didn't go very far.  We found a very good Italian restaurant near the hotel and ate there.  The next morning we went to the center city.

All the little stall are where the christmas fair will be in the evening, they're closed in the mornings.

We took lots of pictures with the flags and then the others wore them as capes.  It was really funny, but also useful.  Yurina was able to find a couple Japanese tourists to talk to.

We got to go inside this magnificent church.  All the buildings here are stunning.

Lots of the buildings and streets were decorated with lights, but you couldn't really see much during the day.

This is a famous opera house I think.

The stalls in the christmas fairs were really really cool.  Most everything looked hand made.  There was lots of traditional food, ornaments, clothes.

Here's a picture of one of the stalls.  This one's selling wooden things, mostly ornaments.

We stumbled across an ice skating rink of sorts.  It was more like a raised boardwalk covered in ice going around trees in a park.  Ashlee, Chava, Milena, and I decided to give it a try.  Ashlee and I already knew how to skate and Milena picked it really fast, but poor Chava was struggling.

We also stumbled across a bunch of Brazilians also there to ice skate and Milena was very happy.

There was a Japanese restaurant right next to our hotel which Yurina and Shirley had been begging to go to.  

After Vienna we drove about another five hours to Prague, which is definitely my favorite city ever.  It is such a beautiful city and the buildings were surprisingly different from in Vienna.

They had little stalls of donkeys and sheep.  I was quite pleased.

Prague also won the prize for best Christmas market festival thing.  It had a ginormous tree that did a light show on the hours.

We came back to the same area the next morning to get a better look at all the buildings and stuff.

I already told Matt that I've found a new summer job for him and August.

Walked up to a palace or parliament building of some sort on top of a hill and it had an amazing view of the city.  

Our last stop was Budapest, another five hour drive back from Prague.  We went to a look out over the city that would have had a great view except for all the fog.  We could still see a famous bridge pretty well though.  I only got to practice a my Hungarian a little because we weren't in Budapest as long as the other city, but after having been in a german speaking city and a czech speaking city for the past few days it was really nice to be back somewhere where I could at least read some signs again.  

This is a statue of the revolutionary Kossuth, which I thought was great because one of the main roads in my town is named after him and I know we've mentioned him in school before.

After Budapest, we went Sighetul Marmatiei in Romania.  Its in the north up towards the Ukrainian border.  We had a bit of a hassle getting back into Romania because one of the kids forgot their visa, but it worked out in the end.  The Romanian border is pretty much just like the US/Canada border.  You drive through a toll booth looking thing and they check your passports.  All the other borders we didn't even have to stop at because they're part of a special group of countries that doesn't need passports.

In Sighet we attended a christmas dinner and dance of some sort and stayed at a hotel owned by Milena's host parents.  Astrid and Danielle, the two girls who couldn't go on the trip, met us there because this was our second official inbound meeting.  In the morning we went to a traditional something.  Its customary in Romania to kill and eat a pig before christmas which is what we did.  Though the pig was already dead when we got there thankfully.   

There were some kids and adults dressed in traditional clothes who did some singing and dancing.  A few times we joined in the dancing too.

Back in Udvarhely, our city's got its Christmas decorations up now too.  They've closed down the road in between the center green and the town hall and set up vendor stalls down it.  Its open all the time so I've gone and looked around after school a couple times.  There's a little stage too which has a lot of singers at night.  There's christmas music playing over the speaker all the time too.  It's really cute.  

We had lots of tests in school this past week.  On Thursday though we made little clay flowers during computer class.  Except I think it was some sort of edible dough, not clay.  I asked if we were supposed to eat them and half the kids told me yes the other half said no.  Mine's currently sitting outside my window so it doesn't melt, which it started to do.  Friday was a weird day, because we didn't have to come in until 10.  Then we had a half hour long math class and were allowed to go home already.  The school here is a bit weird in that if the teacher of the first or last class of the day won't be there the entire class can either come late or leave early.  They lock the doors during the day though, so if you have to leave you have to go out the front door and have a note.  We did secret santas in school on Wednesday during their equivalent of advising period.  I had a boy and I had no idea what to get so I went with lots of chocolate.  My santa got me a really nice scarf.  Everyone had lots of fun with it.