Going "home" and relax

We are at our "headquarters" in Budapest and it's very good to be back. But pretty strange to arrive here by car and after all the distances we drove feel home again. It's been a while since I wrote, so I will start with our visit to Sopron and the Esterházy palace on Tuesday.

We left Bozsok in the morning (and I saw the owner Gábor who has a braid in his white beard!). After the meal of the night before we really didn't need breakfast...nor much else that day actually. We said goodbye to the lovely cat and in an hour or so we arrived in Sopron. It's a town with a beautiful medieval inner center, cobbled streets and lots of Celtic and Roman remains. We loved the really nice atmosphere here and wandered around for a while, just admiring the nice pastel coloured houses and churches (also from a high firewatchtower). We visited the Fabricius house, which was built on Roman foundations where we could visit the (super cold!) basement wich used to be a bathhouse and saw lots of found pottery, weapons, jewellery and even enormous statues from ancient times. But the real highlight here was the Storno house; owned by the Storno family which originally was well known for being chimney sweepers. One of them liked drawing more and became a famous restorer of Romanesque and Gothic monuments and he made his home look like a monument itself! What a great house with really cool and special furnitures, with lots of dark wood, leather, amazing leaded windows, frescoes and lots of paintings. Really beautiful and original looking. Unfortunately we couldn't take pictures again. Just like the super beautiful 18th century old pharmacy in Kőszeg, which I forgot to write about, cause I don't have pictures of it. But well, time to go on to the Esterházy palace half an hour away from Sopron and in the direction of Budapest. It was owned by the Esterházy family, there is still a 80+ inherent living there actually, but you can get a guided tour through it. Or well...we could for half of the normal tour actually, cause they are renovating it and from this weekend on it would even be closed completely for months. So we were lucky to see at least the ground floor (or would they tell this to any visitor?!). And it was great! The horseshoe-shaped building with huge french gardens behind it and in baroque and rococo style was really impressive. I loved the huge halls and rooms which were decorated with nice pastel coloured flowers, big chandeliers and lots of tall glass doors opening to the garden. This palace has some grandeur! Again there was barely anyone there...just three others from Slovakia. One lady constantly talked through the Hungarian guide to translate the German text she had to the others..super annoying! After a nice walk through the gardens we decided it was time to go to Budapest. And we were quite hungry too, since we just ate 2 pogácsa's (cheesy breads) that day. We had a late night dinner in one of the restaurants close by Bogdán's apartment, not the breadcrumb place we hoped for though (that was full). But maybe it wasn't that bad, since Bogdán had some extreme allergy attacks that evening (actually the moment since we crossed the border from Austria to Hungary) and couldn't enjoy dinner that well. He also forgot his pin code since we crossed that border...strange...(or it is because of bumping his head at all the small doors and entries in the castles). But really annoying... Luckily it still works with paypass (contactloos betalen).

Wednesday we started the warm and sunny day with a run around Margit Sziget and it went great. We didn't feel like stopping in the meanwhile (I guess the run in Bozsok made this feel like nothing), so we did 5k in one go...finally. At the 11th of June I have to run the 7,5k ladies run and I better be ready for that. But since there are many other people running here on the same track...you can also pass others and that is so motivating!! As soon as you see someone moving slower or having difficulties it gives some extra stimulation to keep on going or even to speed up. It wasn't busy though, so the "score" is just 4. After that, it was time to finally see Bogdán's family again and have some feast meal (yaay): at his parents we had a big family lunch and homemade cake (by his dad). We already had some preview of the goods we were gonna have actually, cause in our apartment his parents left some nice breakfast and lunch for us (so sweet!) and two big packages full of cookies and cakes (zserbó) made by his grandma...and they are delicious!! We started with handing over some gifts and Bogdán receiving a lot of birthday presents (and an anniversary present for us!). But soon after it was time to have a great lunch of meatloaf filled paprikas and potato with fresh parsley! Yumyum!! And after that the big spongecake with sweet strawberries! All really great and tasty!! And to top it off the cookies and zserbó. We didn' t have to have dinner that evening. We just went out to sit on the terrace and have some beer and limonade (and ok, some little snacks) and relax. We deserved it!

Hopefully I will have some time tomorrow to write about our yesterday's trip (including Slovakia!) and our relaxing day today (with some shopping!!). Have a nice weekend everybody!