Beahms take over Budapest

Right now, my mom should be still fast asleep, fighting off jet lag. She just returned from visiting me in Hungary for a week. I loved having her here. It would have been very odd to have lived in a foreign country for half a year and have none of my close friends or family come visit. So, now I have someone at home who will know what I'm talking about when I mention Marxim, a great communist-styled pizza place, or tell stories of my landlord Istvan. Here are my half of the photos of her visit. I think she took better ones with her camera:

http://colorado.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2197477&l=6021e&id=10215414

We did all sorts of fun stuff during her visit. First, we went to a wine festival at the Budapest castle district, where we saw live music (including an acapella group that performed Michael Jackson songs in Hungarian - quite strange) and saw an opera. La Traviata was not the most exciting of shows, but gazing at the ornate frescoes of the opera house made it worth it. Plus, opera tickets are less than the cost of a movie, so no one should miss out on it. My mom and I also spent a night in Eger, which is the wine region of Hungary. It was a cute, smaller town, known for women who fought off the Turkish army. The wine area was really cute - it only took about 20 minutes to walk from our hotel to the "Valley of Nice Women," which is what the region is called. I've also heard it called the Valley of Beautiful Women. In this valley, there are over 200 wine cellars to go sample from and plenty of wine to buy. Their specialty is called Bulls Blood - a deep red wine, so we lugged a few bottles of that back to Budapest.
In Budapest, we saw the main sights and met up with my mom's friend Gena from Fort Collins who happened to be in Hungary as well. We grabbed traditional Hungarian food and went to this really fun music pub I recently discovered. I think I will become a regular. On our last day, we were very indulgent and went to Gellert Bath and spa - the most ornate of the baths in Budapest. There we both got Swedish massages and soaked in the thermal waters. We also played around in their wave pool too. I want to do that every day! The massages were funny, because they give them to you when you're in your swimming suit, and they'll have 3 or more people in a room giving different people massages, and the ladies just jabber away in Hungarian to each other - but it's still relaxing nonetheless.

Now, it's back to work for me and Mike. He's been ill today, so we've just been staying at home. Of course, he won't admit he's sick, but just that he's "not well." I don't think staying up until 5:30 a.m. this morning to watch Arkansas play Alabama helped his cause. I could only make it through the first quarter and then I crashed. I am just not as good of a sports fan. Coming from Colorado, I missed out on the Southern, die-hard football gene. Luckily, Mike has met people in Budapest who do possess it.