Venice, Budapest, and aaall the bits in between, PART II

Memento Park with my niece, Taylor.

Timeeeee for part II! I am currently writing this whilst sitting in my bedroom in Groningen (the city in the Netherlands where I am doing my exchange) and I have already been here a week, but never to fear I shall recap that week in the NEXT blog post. Sigh. It all banks up so quickly.

Anyway!

After the Top Deck tour finished, I had a few days back in London again where I hung out with one of my favourite big sisters, Kerri (who isn’t really my sister, she just stayed with us as a homestay for a few years when we were both at high school; however judging by the amount we argued you would have thought we were sisters). Awesome to see her again after not seeing her for over a year, lunch was a bit of a shock though as going back into pounds again you have to double what you spend to convert it back to New Zealand dollars, as opposed to halving it and adding that to the original price which is what I did with euros (i.e. 4 euro becomes approximately 6 NZ dollars, 10 euro becomes 15 NZ dollars etc). If that all makes sense. Anyway, unfortunately I didn’t make it early enough over to the Tate Modern in the afternoon to see the Damien Hirst exhibition, but I did have my flight over to Kosovo the next day to see my friend Brilant to look forward to!

For those that don’t know Brilant, he is a friend I met at school but now lives back in his home city, Pristina, which is the capital of Kosovo. It was really great seeing him again since he left NZ earlier this year so we had lots to catch up on; Pristina was also a refreshing contrast to a lot of the other travelling I had done, as there were hardly any tourists in sight. Everything was ridiculously cheap as well, like at most restaurants you could get a meal and drink for 6-8 euro, and a twenty minute taxi was only a few euro (he grumbled at the thought of paying a whopping 4 euro to get home one night so we walked instead).

I was also coincidentally in the country for the end of the Muslim holiday Ramadan, so on the Sunday we ventured out of the city into the countryside of Kosovo (in a taxi for 50c) to visit Brilant’s family on his mothers side. I think I should mention the contrast in greeting/ meeting culture between New Zealand and generally most places in Europe: New Zealand is very awkward, avoid-contact-at-all-costs-ill-shake-your-hand-if-I-have-to sorta thing, whereas many places in Europe (e.g. Kosovo) are quite the opposite – there is definitely no shortage of kisses and hugs. So I was almost quite overwhelmed at this wee family gathering, as Brilant’s mother had no less than 9 siblings, many of whom were all there and also had their own families with them!… In the end it was quite comforting though, just how welcoming and accommodating his family was. When we were sitting on the deck looking out at the front yard it actually really reminded me of the many Christmas’ up at my Aunt’s place in Warkworth with all of my own family from New Zealand.

After Kosovo I headed over to Istanbul for a half-day tour of the city during my stopover (where I was almost peer pressured by a sales person to buy a 200 USD rug… he even gave me an apple juice, I pulled the poor student card though and I managed to get away). In the afternoon I headed BACK over to Budapest (apparently going via Turkey was the cheapest flight?!) to visit my half-sister, Kirsten, her Hungarian husband, Attila and their beautiful 8-year-old daughter, Taylor.Their apartment was in the old Jewish Quarter of the city, so just around the corner there was one of the popular ‘ruin bars’, which are basically bars in Hungary that have been converted from abandoned lots and apartments during the war period.There were also lots of interesting shops in the area, such as Massolit books and cafe (who in fact serve rather delicious flat whites), Siberia (a design-your-own shoe shop) and also an awesome print and design shop called Printa (who ALSO serve flat whites!).

Outside of our area though there were plenty more great things to see, such as the ‘What is Hungarian?’ exhibition at the contemporary art gallery (with a far-right wing demonstration happening in the square out front when we went… scary), the House of Terror and also Memento Park, which had a lot of fascinating/ kinda intimidating sculptures from the Communist period (see pics below). We also took a visit to the pools on Margaret Island (the island in the middle of the Danube between Buda and Pest) on a day where it was disgustingly hot and humid with absolutely no wind, so we took a well deserved cool off in the pools for a few hours. Spotted here were a few “pregnant men”, according to my niece, which I thought was a pretty hilarious/ brutally straight-up observation. Also here was the “big kids slide”, which in retrospect was not a good decision as it resulted in an excessive amount of water in my ear drums. Love that.

Anyway WordPress tells me that I’m almost at a thousand words so I think thats all for now. Oh actually if you want to check out the creative genius works of both my friend Brilant and my sister Kirsten then click right here for Brilant (and here for his music) and here for Kirsten. Aren’t I lucky to have such talented hosts. Anyway, photos below! Enjoy!