Bubble Baths and Rollercoasters

  'I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.' - Maya Angelou I have arrived to Budapest 2 years, 7 months and 25 days ago. Today, I leave. (It doesn't really seem like such a long time - Trust me, it is.) My friends here have become my family, just like it happens so many times when you are living away from your own. And I couldn't have gotten luckier. They accepted me with all my faults and craziness. With my existencial crisis. My need for affection and hugs. My smiles and my sadness. My disappearances. My tuning in and out. My hashtags and 100happydays. They came with me for karaoke sessions time and again. They helped me every time I asked. And then again. And also even when I didn't ask. We sang together checking the lyrics on the screen. We had crazy nights when we thought we were just going out for a tea. We practiced guitar endless nights and tal...

Some of these were long overdue (Yes, I never ate Langós), and definitely all of them are for fun. Counting from today - We have precisely 48 days for all of these things! (Obviously - This does not include all of my favorites which I want to go back to, or the Turo Rudis I am still going to eat!) See the Time Wheel near Heroes’ Square  Visit Memento Park  Visit House of Terror  Go to the Labyrinth in the Buda Castle  Go to Szenchenyi Baths  Wander around with flashlights in the Sziklakórház - Hospital in the rock  Visit Europe’s biggest synagogue in Dohány street  Experience what life is like for the blind at the Invisible Exhibition  Buy old vinyls at the flea market at Pecsa  Drink some wine in the Liberty bridge at night Paint your own mug at Made by You  Visit Pinball Museum  Take the Communist free walking tour Try Beer Bike  Cook a Hungarian meal  Go to the legendary Piaf after 4a.m.  E...

Big changes in our lives don't "just happen", we don't feel like this is the time to do something, and then consciously take a giant leap of faith. We don't just one day decide to change our jobs, catch a lucky break, go to a different country, and then do it. It starts small. Very small. Just a fleeing thought, really. Almost too small to notice. A restlessness that wasn't there before. Maybe I could, maybe I should, maybe it's time. Then we look into it, we chase it. It gets a little bit bigger. We start thinking about it way too often. We check prices. We do lists. We let it go. We can't let it go. We talk about it. We think that we should make a decision. We do an excel file. We do more lists. We check more prices. We think about the should-nots, the why-nots, and the cannots. We get confused with the overload of information, open tabs and well-intentioned opinions. We don't really know what to do... And then - we just buy the d...

Apareceste assim. De corrida. Quase me passaste ao lado - mas depois dei por ti, sempre ali, constante. Apesar de não estar à procura, encontrei-te. És o meu melhor amigo, nunca ninguém me conheceu como tu. E agora, de partida, não me imagino sem a tua gargalhada, sem o teu apoio, sem o teu abraço apertado. Sem ti. Nunca te ia pedir para vires comigo. ....Mas se eu te pedisse, assim como quem não quer a coisa... Vinhas?

I realised I have only two months and a half left in Budapest. Mainly since on new year's eve people suddenly started staging drunk goodbyes and telling me how much they were going to miss me, before and after throwing up. So I started looking into those lists of things to do in Hungary, and before I make my very own "before I leave" list, these are (some of) the things I already did since I arrived to this gorgeous city: 1- Sneak into an old tenement house downtown and explore how beautiful it is inside Or, living in one. The Hungarian houses still amaze me after all this time. 2- Take a ride on the cog-wheel train or the Children’s Railway This one was great! We all decided to go to Normafa and we took the children's railway, obviously leaving on the wrong stop and in a very very foggy day, instead of the expected sunny one. Of course we had a couple of Hungarians telling us the next day "oh but the weather predictions said it was going to be like t...