Joe is Real!

The rental van had a TV, so everyone was happy

After spending the morning at the Hampton in we took a shuttle over to the airport. While checking in the attendants informed us that we would not be able to board the plane without visa’s. Because we are flying into and departing from Budapest, we would not be able to stay over 90 days without one. After some phone calls and discussions with the powers that be, it was determined that there is a 180 day grace period and we were just fine. Don’t worry; this little hiccup did not cause much delay. We were still at the gate 4 hours early.

Our bags for the next 4 months!

Leftovers for brunch! It's Olive Garden
though, so we aren't complaining.

Our first flight was 7 hours to Paris. Fortunately our plane had individual TV’s in each seat. So while we could have caught a little sleep, all of the Friend children spent the entire time watching movies. In Paris we had a four hour layover. I found a nice spot on the floor and slept like a bum the entire time.

Delta gave us dinner and breakfast!

A short two hour flight got us the rest of the way to Budapest! Now we were to find Joe in the "lobby" holding a sign that said “Friend” when we found what we thought looked like the right place, there was no Joe. Being the transportation executive of the trip, this made me a little uneasy seeing as I actually had no idea how public transportation worked here. We began throwing out ideas. Maybe the sign said Friend in Hungarian? Who knows. After about 5 minutes of casual panic, Joe found us and took us to his airport cab. We got our first look at Budapest during the ride and got to know Joe, who spoke English very well. We are kind of hoping that everyone in Europe has this skill…

Joe's Airport Transportation

Our next instruction was to stand outside of building 6 and wait for Alessandro to let us in. This is who we are renting the apartment from and he told us all about what to do in Budapest and what to avoid. We are staying a block from Oktogon which pretty centrally located, so we should be able to walk everywhere (and not cut into my transportation budget)

Milk or creamer? (Don't worry, it was milk)

As soon as we got to the apartment...

At this point it was 4:30 pm local time and 10 am back home. Some people decided it was bed time and the rest of us went exploring/grocery shopping. Shopping was an unexpected challenge. We might have bought spaghetti sauce, or maybe it was salsa… On top of that it’s hard to conceptualize the value of the Forint seeing as 1 dollar is 225 Ft. Mostly it just seems like monopoly money. Now we are watching the Olympics and trying to stay awake long enough to go to sleep at a normal hour.