Advent Markets and Snow at the Kartause!

The weekend after Budapest was a three-day weekend in which Advent Markets all around Europe were going on. Many people stayed back and took day trips around Austria using our special Austrian transportation discount cards (vorteils cards), since most people’s Eurail passes are expired.

Thursday was our first day of snowfall! That night was Thanksgiving dinner in the Mensa for all of us students! The mensa workers brought out a turkey with sparklers and everyone stood up singing the Star Spangled Banner (an age old tradition in the Austrian program). Everyone was dressed in their traditional Austrian dress, even the Kartause kids and families!

After dinner was the Thanksgiving ball – an instructor taught us traditional dance (similar to square dancing). We also saw Austrian folk dancers who performed a few schuhplattling dances which consist of patterned slapping of the body and shoes. If you look it up on YouTube you should be able to find a demonstration of it ;) It was SUCH a fun night!

Friday morning I slept in till 11:40… which is like the third time in my whole life that I’ve slept in that late. Didn’t really do anything the whole day. I procrastinated and ate leftover ice cream from Andrea’s birthday party and like four friends came to our room and we played Catch Phrase till dinner, and just hung out the rest of the night – looked at train schedules to Vienna for a day trip in the morning :)

Saturday morning, Andrea, Lydia and I woke up at 6 in order to start walking to the train station by 7 to catch an 8 o’clock train. We heard trains out of Gaming were still having troubles though, so we ate breakfast and just caught a bus right by the Kartause at 8:10 to Pochlarn and took a train from there to Vienna. The bus ride was absolutely gorgeous, there was maybe 5 inches or more of snow on the ground. Here's what we saw in the morning and during our walk to the bus stop:

The three of us just hung out in Vienna for the day and saw the Advent Market there :)

I've fallen in love with Bratwurst (the German name for the hot dogs in the above picture) since coming here! They are SO yummy with I think Dijon mustard... mm mm :)

We also saw some of the coolest street performers EVER! I tried uploading a video but it didn't work :/

And here we are riding back to the Kartause on the train :)

Sunday mass was at 10 at the Kartause like usual. At brunch after mass, we found out a group of students was going to Vienna to see a soccer game. We find out at 11:40 that they’re leaving at noon. We make a rush decision, and we rush to get ready to go.
Here we are walking to the train station:

Ohh trains. We've spent a looot of time on trains this semester :)

There was 10 of us going and we were supposed to get off at the Vienna station at 3:30 but we got delayed an hour, so we didn’t get in till 4:30 (and the game started at 4). Well turns out the game was an away game, so it wasn’t at the stadium we were supposed to be going to. Instead it was a good 30 minute subway ride away. If our train hadn’t been delayed we might have gotten there in time but we would have been an hour late if we had tried going then. So instead we went to the Advent Market (the second time for Andrea and I). It was snowing pretty hard and it was cold but we got to see the market at night with all the lights and this time I got a little treat so it was a little different than the day before :)

We caught the train back and had a snowball fight… in the train… we scooped snow from outside the window when the train was stopped… luckily there was no one else in the train, and it didn’t last long :P

It was snowing SO hard when we got back. We were able to hitch a ride back though which was such a blessing!

This whole week has been SO much fun! Tuesday was my last class of the semester and some of us walked around the Advent Market which has been AMAZING the whole week that it’s been going on. The Kartause has been bustling with people and half of the place is filled with shops and food stands which are lining our classrooms, hallways, and the courtyard outside and I’ve seen some of the cutest things for sale all semester!

We have about 11 or so LCI students from all over Europe who are studying here with us too and learning English. (LCI stands for Language and Catechetical Institute). They have been so fun to have with us and all of them are so sweet! They put on a play of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in English for us and it was so cute!

Wednesday night at 9pm our staff, professors, sisters and friars served us a hot American breakfast to celebrate the end of classes and to kick off “reading day” (a free day on Wednesday for studying before finals).

Tomorrow is my last final, and most of us leave at 3am on Thursday for home! We'll be having a bonfire at 9 and midnight mass at 12... in other words, we'll be up all night so hopefully we'll sleep on the plane and get over jet lag sooner.

Thanks for reading and hopefully you were able to experience a little of this amazing semester that I've been able to experience. I can't thank my family enough for such a beautiful opportunity to live and travel in Europe. If it wasn't for them and the God who created us, I wouldn't be the person I am today :) I owe it all to them! See you back in the States!

Hungary for Budapest

The plan for this two-day weekend was to visit Andrea’s family in Hungary – we left Friday afternoon and arrived late on Friday night, and were back to Gaming by Sunday night.

This was the first trouble we had with the Gaming train. We waited at the station for a while, but it just didn’t show up. Luckily we were able to catch the bus which ends up being a little faster anyway to Pochlarn, then we caught the train from Pochlarn to Vienna and then Vienna to Budapest. Right when we arrived in Budapest, Andrea’s aunt Szilvia (pronounced Sylvia) was there to meet us. We took a taxi from the train station to Szilvia’s “flat” (a small apartment she was renting). We definitely felt like little ducklings the whole weekend since everything was planned for us. Szilvia was SO sweet and she really did an amazing job planning the weekend for us! The apartment was super small but it worked :) It had a tiny kitchen, one reasonably sized room and one bathroom, so basically a three-room apartment. And we all slept in one room together. We arrived in Budapest about 10:40 so by the time we were in bed it was about 12:15 since we were chatting and getting to know each other :) Saturday morning we got up and ate breakfast and were out the door by 9:30. Budapest is divided into two “sides”, one conveniently called “Buda” and the other “Pest” ;) they are divided by the Danube River. Szilvia bought transportation tickets ahead of time for us so we would have them to use right away in the morning. Szilvia lives on the Pest side so we took the tram to the Chain Bridge and walked across to the Buda side. The Chain Bridge is famous for being only the second permanent bridge to be constructed over the entire length of the Danube.

Pest side:

Buda side:

It was an absolutely beautiful day to be exploring Budapest! Here are a few pictures while we were walking up the hill:

After crossing the bridge, we walked to the “Castle District” and climbed the hill to the Buda Castle at the top to see a gorgeous view of the Pest side. We walked down the other side of the castle overlooking Buda and went to the “Hospital in the Rock” Museum for a 1-hour tour. This hospital was constructed out of the rock: caves became rooms, and passages became corridors. It was opened during World War II first as an air-raid shelter for bombing and later into an emergency surgical hospital for air-raid defense and medical treatment. It was used during World War II, the Hungarian Revolution and the Cold War. Today it is a museum opened to the public but within two days time and preparation, it could become a fully functioning hospital once again if needed.

After the tour, we visited St. Matthias Church located in Fisherman’s Bastion courtyard.
Here’s the courtyard:

St. Matthias Church was the coronation church of Hungarian kings since King Matthias. It has been consistently enlarged and rebuilt over the centuries, was transformed into a mosque when the Turks conquered Buda, and after the reconquest of the city belonged to the Franciscans and later to the Jesuits. Between the years 1874 and 1896 is was completely reconstructed into a neo-gothic style. The designs in this church were absolutely beautiful, some of my favorite architecture of all the churches throughout Europe!

Then we took the tram back to the Pest side and tried to get a tour of the Parliament Building but tickets were sold out :(
Here it is:

We then headed to the city center were the Advent Market of Budapest was going on. It was so fun! It was filled with vendors, tables and food, and a dancing stage where we watched traditional dance for a bit. We stopped for coffee at the Gerbeaud Confectionary in the square which is one of the largest, most traditional and famous café-confectionaries in Europe. It was so cute inside and it was nice to have a little rest, and a caffeine boost :)

Afterward, we met Szilvia’s brother, wife and new baby who were out walking :) We went to mass at St. Stephen’s Basilica at 6 for Sunday obligation – St. Stephen’s is a neo-Renaissance-Classicist style church and the largest church in Budapest. It holds the mummified right hand of Hungary’s first Christian ruler, St. King Stephen. We walked back through the market after mass and Sarah bought some Hot Wine. It felt SO much like Christmas! Then we took the tram to Menza Restaurant for some traditional Hungarian food for dinner. We had to wait a little while to be seated, but while we waited we listened to some musicians and singers playing on the stage outside in the strip with lots of other restaurants and bars. I ordered Goulash which is traditional Hungarian soup :)

After dinner we saw some of “Budapest by night” as Szilvia called it. Before going to bed we watched a slideshow of pictures of Budapest from the bag of gifts Szilvia got for Andrea :)

The next day we were out the door by 9:30 again and walked a little ways up the hill to the Church in the Cave

We kept walking till we got to the top of another hill called Gellert Hill where we saw another spectacular view of Budapest, and the Citadel which is a white-stoned fortress from the 19th century crowned by the Liberation Monument of a huge woman holding a palm leaf of victory

We needed to get up early to stop at these last important places because Andrea’s uncle was going to be picking us up at 10:30 at her apartment to take us to the countryside to visit more family! Well, we were at the top of the hill still when he called Szilvia, so we hurried down and back to the apartment. Her uncle was SUCH a nice guy! He was totally thrilled to see Andrea, and Szilvia was wonderful the whole time because she translated as much as she could since he couldn’t speak English. It took about an hour and a half to two hours to get to her great uncle’s house.

The family had lunch all ready for us! Szilvia continued to translate since she was still the only one there who could speak both Hungarian and English. We were so spoiled that entire day. I can’t even describe how kind they were to us. We couldn’t even communicate with them but that didn’t matter, they were thrilled to be serving us! It felt wonderful to be having a home-cooked meal for the first time the entire semester too :)