HOwyd! I'm in a very small town surrounded by beautiful mountains -they are the Carpathian Mountains. wow it reminds me a lot of Colorado with the trees and amazing afternoon weather. The weather in Slavakia is a lot cooler than Hungary, although it might be because we got here in the afternoon but it was really hot in Budapest today. (83 degrees)
We got to tour more of Budapest today and a group of girls and I went to 3 places that were really amazing! We went to the Opera house, which was closed so we got lots of pictures outside, and in the gift shop. the gift shop was on the side of the building and sort of connected, there were these stairs that led up to the main hall and I jumped over the roap and went up into the main hall, wow! The stairs led to a circular hall and it was really dark and there were scary noises, it really reminded me of phantom of the opera-really freaky, so I decided to go back down to the official tourist areas :-)
Next, we went to the House of Terror, where the Nazi regime had their head quarters during WWII, during which they called it the House of Loyalty. This is where thousands went in and never came out. They have since turned it into a hallocast museum and it was pretty moving, though it was all in Hungarian so i didnt really understand a lot of it. The most moving part was the basement where they executed thousands. They also had papers in english that explained it all, but we were short on time so I'm going to read about it later :-)
After that, we went to St. Stephen's Basilica which was HUGE! wow i'll put pictures up later, but it was amazing and lots of guilded candelaberas and tall domes.
I did a lot in the 3 hours that we had to see the city! Then we headed to Slovakia and then had the evening free to traverse the city. Its a mining city so its near a creek and hilly.
Tomorrow i plan on going to the "New Castle", (that was built to defend against the Turks) the mining museum and the Old Castle.
hopefully i'll be able to load my pictures later.
Jen
Here are more pictures from our stay in Trebic, The last picture is of the place where we sang, on the left the basilica, and the right the castle, the second to last picture is of our concert, we sang to a packed house! literally standing room only, it was amazing! We also got to hear a choir group from the local community who learned a song in english. We were very surprised and excited to hear english in a czech accent sung to us and they were very good. After the concert we had dinner with them and they baked us the goods in the second picture... actually that's not the sweets, lol that's our meal at the resteraunt, but i'll add the sweet picture later... but the first picture there is of the choir directer and his son with the Texas flag that we gave them. They waved it as we drove away in our tour bus :-)
