I seem to have done a very good job of failing to give a concluding post. This has been due in large part to that fact that there is far too much that I should say but that I have figured out very little of what comprises said large amount. A full semester later I am still trying to sort out just how my semester abroad has affected me, but I am convinced that going abroad was definitely an amazing opportunity. It seems that I uploaded pictures in a previous attempt at writing a post to conclude my experience abroad, so despite the fact that I currently have no means of getting pictures off of my camera (and no access to the large number of pictures that I had previously extracted to my laptop) you still get pictures. :-)
Vienna was extremely cold - we found a thermometer in the park that informed us that it was -2 degrees Centigrade (and that was not taking into account the fact that it was somewhat windy). As we were looking at the thermometer a relatively old Austrian man came up to look at it and made some comment that was clearly about how cold it was. Without thinking we replied "igen!" (rather than "yes!") and then had to try to explain that no, we weren't actually Hungarian, we were actually American. This was made more difficult that Christina and I both momentarily seemed to have forgotten the word "yes"... Eventually we managed to explain that we were American and he though that it was "Wunderbar!" that Christina was from California. When we decided that we needed to get out of the cold for a bit we visited the Belvedere - a Baroque palace turned art museum that was amazingly gorgeous and contained really cool art. It made me glad that I had taken that art history class back the summer after my freshman year of high school so that I could recognize some of the artists...
Once the sun had set (so it was even colder) we went back out to see the lights and visit the Christmas markets. I thought Budapest had gone all out with the lights...I was wrong.
One of the stands at the Christmas market had chocolate covered just about everything for sale. We shared one of the skewers of chocolate covered strawberries. They were delicious :-)
And we will finish with a picture of Budapest that I took from the castle the morning I left...
