Started today by heading to the National Museum of Hungary. It was pretty good though not everything was in English, so some of the info was lost on me. They also seem to downplay their role as an Axis Power and act as if Germany forced them into everything, which really isn't the case. I spent a few hours there before exploring Buda. For a little context, Buda and Pest used to be different cities on either side of the Danube, but eventually got too large to be independent and just merged into one city after a bridge was built. They uninventively combined the names together and here we are. So while neither of those cities exist anymore, the regions they once occupied still retain the names, and it's almost like the boroughs of NYC. Pest is today somewhat larger than Buda since Buda is hilly and not great for building - my hostel and most people are on the Pest side. Anyway, Buda's hilly nature means that it has a cool fortress and a palace built into its defensible terrain, and I hiked up the tallest peak there. The views were incredible. The Danube is absolutely beautiful (despite being fairly brown) as it slices the city in half, and I think I automatically like a city more if it has a good water feature. I walked over to the Palace from here. It's now a variety of museums, but since I'd spent all morning in a different museum I wasn't in any rush to pay for these ones. After that I crossed back into Pest to see the incredible Országház, the Hungarian Parliament building. I knew about this one since it's a wonder in Civ and in person it's easy to see why - it's enormous and extremely impressive. One of the coolest buildings I've seen on this trip for sure, even though I didn't pay to go in.

That evening the hostel had some sort of pancake event in the kitchen. I attended mostly to meet new people, though the pancakes were a nice bonus. I ended up going out with a large group, some of whom I found to be kind of annoying, but I liked a few of them a lot. We went out to something called a "ruin bar", a specialty of the Jewish Quarter where my hostel is. While the neighborhood is nice now, it certainly wasn't during the war since it had been turned into a ghetto for all the local Jews. As a result of having been a ghetto for years and then having lost most of its population to either emigration or execution, the postwar years were unkind on the area and much of it fell into even worse disrepair. Point is, at the end of the communist era the city was looking to revitalize the region and decided that it would be easier to rebrand the neglected buildings as bars or clubs rather than make them suitable for habitation again. Thus, the ruin bar, a multi-story bar complex that has a ton of different rooms and atmospheres on offer. The whole place is graffitied and vandalized aggressively, the walls and stairwells are visibly crumbling or missing altogether in some places (though never in any way that looks unsafe), the music is loud, and it actually reminds me a lot of the club I went to in Amsterdam. It's a really strange idea, but I think it works pretty well. The cast of characters was interesting, the most memorable of whom was probably this guy whose job is to respond to direct messages from men on behalf of Onlyfans models. I can't even fathom doing that for a living. I met this nice Kiwi and Italian who were very funny, and a Belgian PhD student with whom I've made plans to check out the thermal baths with tomorrow morning (it's their unique building in Civ so I figure it's a must see).Tomorrow's Halloween and I don't have a plan at all. No Jarjar this year so I might have to be creative, but I think I'll make something work. I loved the vibes last night so I'm looking forward to things on Halloween. I've also booked a train to Croatia for Friday, so that's going to mark the official start of my Balkan campaign.