Snapshots

A couple of weekends ago, Hannah, Philippe, and I went to the Kürtőskalács Festival. Kürtőskalács are chimney cakes, dough baked in a helix around a spit. The festival was held in City Park, so Hannah and I agreed to meet by the 1956 revolution monument at one side of the park. 

Evidently I'm really bad at picking meeting points because it happened to be the day of the Budapest Marathon, and the finish line was right in front of the monument. Oops.

The Chimney Cake Festival mostly consists of a lot of booths selling different varieties of chimney cakes. There's not much to do other than wait in line, get food, and eat, so the lines were very long. The chimney cakes were delicious and definitely worth it, though.

Hannah, Philippe, and I with our mini chimney cakes.

This was the regular (vanilla/sugar) one; I also got one with cinnamon. Note that this is about half the length of a normal chimney cake, and the diameter is smaller than normal, too.

Bratislava!

I spent this weekend in Bratislava, Slovakia! The center of Bratislava isn't very big, so it's a good city for a short weekend trip. On Friday evening after I arrived by train, I walked around the city a bit and went to St. Martin's Cathedral. On Saturday I did a walking tour of the city, went up to Bratislava Castle, and saw a ballet!

Exploring
Bratislava's Old Town and historical center is pretty small; most of it was destroyed under the communist government in the 60s and 70s. One of the things that was built where the rest of Old Town used to be was a highway with this bridge:

They call it the UFO bridge. Because, well... what else would you call it?

I walked around on my own on Friday, and the main place I went was St. Martin's Cathedral (Dom).

The back of St. Martin's Cathedral

The altar!