Ember Travels

Good morning/good afternoon/buen dia where ever you are in the world! It is a lovely Tuesday morning in Sevilla, Spain and this marks the two month aniversary of my journey! I want to thank all of you, who I know and don`t know for your comments, messages and endless enthusasium for my travels. Your support has been amazing and it´s always nice to hear from a familiar face! A little bit about my travels...I am excited to be in a country where I  finally  speak the language! I arrived in Spain yesterday and plan to spend a few days in Sevilla, then head to Grenada where I can hopefully find a place to settle down for a month or so to practice my Spanish and meet some locals. Keep your fingers crossed, I´m not sure how the whole, "I want to rent a room for just a month" thing will go, but things always seem to work out, so I´m not too worried. A friend recently commented on my luck saying that I may actually be the center of the universe, so I´ll just bank on that :) Either way...

One of the most interesting and devastating parts of my visit to Budapest was the Museum of Terror. I was debating whether to blog about it or not, but I think it will be good to document my experience and hopefully teach you something about Hungarian history. The House of Terror is a gorgeous ansturbingly eerie building on Budapest's famous Andrassy Street. It was the headquarters of the secret police during Soviet rule in Hungary. It has since been turned into a museum documenting Hungary's decade of communism.  The museum takes you chronologically through Hungarian history during the 20th century. Hungary had a very high standard of living and a thriving economy until the wars hit. After WWI, Hungary was left with only one third of its original land. This breakup had tremendous economic, political and social effects, so when WWII rolled around, the Soviets promised the Hungarians the return of their land if they agreed to side with them. This led to an 11 year span of a...

I have been having a field day in Budapest! Everything here is very cheap, so I've been eating my way through the city. The dollar slice pizza and falafel sandwiches are my favorites, not to mention the bakeries with pastries and cake slices for 80 cents and one of the highlights of my visit, 70 cent glasses of delicious Hungarian wine. I couldn't be happier. On Tuesday I went for a walking tour on the Buda side of Budapest. I met an Australian named Andy who has been traveling Europe for four months now. We started talking and really hit it off. Wine tasting in Hungary was something we both really wanted to do, so we asked the guide about some places to check out. She drew a map and informed us that anything with "borozo" in the name was a local wine cellar where we could find some authentic Hungarian wine. Finding a borozo was a bit of a scavenger hunt, but we finally spotted "borozo" gleaming off of a hanging sign on a side street. Talk about authentic Hu...

I met an American the other day and we were pondering the abstract and totally mature topic of being hungry in Hungary.  We started making jokes, and he commented, "In Hungary there are no all you can eat buffets, you would have to leave Hungary" and we carried on with the Hungary jokes for quite awhile, our Hungarian friend staring on, completely unamused. Apparently they're not as in to the hungry jokes as we are. I must say, as a child my dream was to visit Hungary, Turkey and Greece...just because they had such funny names! Coincidence or not that I've seen all those countries in the past several weeks? Some dreams you never let go... Enough of my ranting, I have found a temporary home in Budapest!  Coming in, I had no idea what to expect and the city is quite larger than I would have imagined, but for some reason it feels really comfortable. I can't put it into words, but I feel at home here and like I really fit in, despite my inability to speak Hungarian.  ...

I haven't been on top of the time situation, so I hope you're not disappointed by my lack of countdown.  I will be boarding the plane for Istanbul in a few short hours, and I am lucky enough to have my mom joining me on my journey for the first two weeks!  The past month has been full of browsing online travel forums (Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree Forum has saved my life many times), getting travel vaccines, memorizing airport codes and vigorously studying world geography.  The last one wasn’t so hard since my shower curtain is a map of the world.  Needless to say my obsession with maps paired with said shower curtain was probably not conducive to saving water.  Now, I have everything necessary to live stuffed into my little backpack and I am ready to embark on my new career as a nomad. When I tell people that I'm traveling the world, I get one of two responses. 1: wow, that's awesome, I've always wanted to do that, I'm jealous! Or (the critical) 2: Is that saf...