My holiday (part 1)

Gratitude 25

I am thankful for having the privilege of being in Europe and experiencing such magnificent places. :)

Thursday morning bright and early I left with the sun for my holiday...actually before the sun! 6:47 am train to Budapest...ugh! I was running behind and nearly killed myself trying to sprint to the train station on the other side of town. I made it, though. I was a little hesitant to leave Kecskemét...I felt I should have stayed and spent the holiday studying and practicing. However, "play" is just as important as work. This traveling thing, though...piece of cake! I'm becoming a pro! :) It is amazing the things you can do after you do it once and/or just dive in. From Nyugati station in Budapest, I got metro tickets...asking in Hungarian!...and hopped on and off the underground lines to get to Keleti station. It was the first time i'd been there since my Vienna experiences. I was laughing at how scared/nervous I was! haha! Now, it's just like, "Okay. Traveling on a train. Get a ticket. La-di-da. Switch stations. La-di-da." haha! I like traveling on trains. It's fun. 

I got to Bratislava a little too smoothly and knew some curve was just waiting to come my way. It came when I tried to figure out the Slovakian money and get tram tickets. However, I conquered it. 

The hostel was great. Very nice choice I made. Much more of a hotel feel really. The staff was very nice. (In general, though, people in Slovakia weren't very nice to me because I couldn't speak Slovakian. It was frustrating.) I met a bunch of British fellows from Cambridge when I checked in. They were very nice. Weird but nice. 

So...Bratislava...kind of boring actually. I think I saw pretty much everything in about two hours or less. I mean the old town was charming but not much to it. Apparently, the Queen of England was there that day, too. Interesting. The real reason I stopped there was to see Rusalka, and I also wanted to break up the trek to Prague. The opera was lovely. The soprano who played Rusalka was one of Slovakia's leading sopranos and sounded gorgeous. I was not impressed with all of the other singers, though. There was one that can't be much older than me and certainly wasn't ready to be singing full opera like that. Also, many of the women were so thin! It was sickly. I don't know how they can have big "operatic" voices like that when they don't have anything to anchor their sound. The strangest thing was that it was concert-style; it wasn't staged. I think my favorite part was watching the conductor. Very vivacious, and the energy just bounded from him. He was like a musical Harry Potter (hehe!)...everything just sprang through him and his little "stick." And the orchestra responded with everything. It was brilliantly musical; he really understood the music. :)

I met two nice Canadians, Terry and Valerie at the opera. They were on their way to Budapest, so I was giving them lots of tips. Afterwards, they invited me out with them and bought me dessert and wine. How lovely of them!

Back at the hostel, I ran into the British blokes when I was checking my email. They were lots of fun to talk to, but I stayed up far too late and needed to be up early to catch my 8:15 am train to Prague.