Living the dream

Been all over the place during the past few days, left Greece behind and spent a fun day in Cyprus and then flew a thousand miles away to Budapest, Hungary.  Cyprus was fun, there were some excellent archaeological sites and gorgeous sea views.  We were in Paphos, which was basically a British resort town.  Definitely a fun atmosphere though and the locals were extremely friendly.  Biggest surprise for me was that Cypriots drive on the wrong side of the road!  They also use the UK outlet adapter, so we were kind of thrown for a loop on that.  Budapest though is the real story, been here for about a day and a half now and this city is just blowing away my expectations.  The architecture here and just the overall look and feel of the city is mesmerizing.  I've never seen a city that really compares to this, it almost feels like it should be back in the 1940s during WWII but at the same time its modern and fun.  The area around the Danube river is where we've spent most of our time.  The Budacastle and Parliament alone are worth hours of exploring.  I have over 200 pictures just from today and could have taken more!  I had a really special hot chocolate today, they brought me a glass of burning hot milk that was whipped and a separate plate with a big dark chocolate chunk on it attached to a wooden spoon.  So basically I got to melt this big pure dark chocolate mass right into the milk and it was great!  Never done anything quite like that.  After hours of exploring we went to a famous Hungarian bath that had 10 or 15 different pools or baths with different minerals and vitamins to heal and relax the body.  All of the pools were at different temperatures too and set inside an old palace like building (a few bigger baths were actually outside in the courtyard!).  It was amazingly relaxing and kind of expensive but definitely worth it.  This hostel here is already one of my favorites of this trip...meeting awesome people of course and one of them even cooked us some of her own Polish soup last night which was excellent!
One more full day here coming up tomorrow, including going to an opera at the famous Budapest Opera House at night!  So excited to experience it and keep living like a European while I can :)  Friday I'm off to Croatia for a day's visit at Plitvice Lakes National Park on Saturday where I'll be hiking for 7 hours through what many people call Heaven on earth.  Going to be a longer train ride, but you won't hear me complain one bit about it.  Peace!