In which I go to Budapest and spend an inordinate amount of time underground

View of the parliament from a bridge.

View from our hostel window

The inner courtyard of the building our hostel was located in.

Ellen in the labyrinths under Buda Castle. These were incredibly cheesy, "restored" labyrinths running below ground on the hill where Buda Castle is situated. There was an amazing section called "Labyrinth of the Future" where they had examples of fossiles from "homo consumus," a race of humans they claimed to have discovered. Of course, "homo consumus" is us, and our fossils are things like a nike footprint, print of a computer, and a giant coca-cola bottle imprint. Yup. I kid you not. I didn't get it for like the first 3 or 4 "fossils," and thought they actually wanted us to believe this stuff, but then I hit the big Coke bottle and realized what was going on...

A huge flea market we went to. I really wanted to buy this old passport from 1930s Germany to send to Larke, but it was ridiculously expensive. They also had a lot of Russian stuff - old medals, pins, tins etc, as well as clothing, cheap electronics, and bootlegged CDs/DVDs. Very interesting, a good wander, and located in a lovely park.