Well, thankfully the holidays are finally over! Don´t get me wrong, they were amazing! Olivia and I spent the early hours of New Years Eve buying a few bottles of champagne and making toasts to the new year (egésszegedre - cheers) in style out of our cheap, multi-color plastic cups. We watched a few episodes of The Office (always a good time) before trying to gussy-up, as much as that is possible when neither of us really have any "going-out" clothes. Then we hit the street, as that is where most of Budapest seems to partaaay. It was spectacular! There were vendors set up all along Teréz Körüt (a main drag in the city near Oktogon metro station, and the street we live on) selling all kinds of holiday goodies; crazy colored wigs, sparklers, poppers, headbands with different animal ears on them, and noisemakers. Again, as I have said before, there are just fewer rules here - we saw one guy pick up one of the noise makers from the vending station, give it a little blow, and put it right back down! Yuck! As if we were even thinking about getting one of those, that really sealed the deal for us on not trusting the gypsy vendors. There was also a big stage set up in the middle of the square where there was going to be performances and a count-down to the new year. Bottles of liquor and champagne, sausages, baked sweet bread, mulled wine, and all kinds of other treats were on sale right on the street! This would neeeevvvveeer be allowed at home. It was a mighty welcomed change after Budapest transformed into the dead-zone for Christmas.

After walking around the streets and chatting with the people for a while, we headed over to a spot across the street just in time for the count-down. This is an intersting thing to be a part of when everyone around is speaking in Hungarian. Im not really sure I knew it was the count-down until the last three seconds, so a bit anti-climatic, but super-fun, nonetheless. The place is actually under an independent cinema just a block from our house. The interesting part began when we tried to leave the place about 20 minutes after we got there. It seems that it is a somewhat common thing in Budapest when you enter a place to recieve a "drinks card" which is basically a list of all the drinks they offer. When you enter, you pay a cover (ours was about 10 dollars) and a card. If you end up having 10 dollars worth of drinks, then your cover payment covers the drinks you had and you pay nothing extra. If you dont have that many drinks, you have essentially just paid a cover charge, and if you had more than the initial cover charge, you pay the difference. We didnt know this. Therefore, we didnt hold onto our cards, didnt drink 10 dollars worth, (as I said, we only stayed for a little while) and therefore had a difficult time leaving because we couldnt prove that we hadnt been drinking there all night long.

In the end, lesson learned, the guy at the door was nice enough to let us go (it turns out if you lose these cards you often have to pay a pretty hefty fee) thanks to some girl helping interpret our confusion. But a pretty amazing New Years Eve, and definately not a quickly forgotten one, nonetheless.

So thankfully the holidays are over and we can go back to job-hunting in full force (Olivia is on her way to an interview right now). We are hopeful for some teaching positions, and I have applied to a few hostels in the city. We will see. Wish us luck, and I wish you all the best new year too!