Yesterday we slept in… we’ve been doing that a lot on this trip, oddly enough. I think yesterday I was tired because a horde of angry mosquitoes woke me up at 3AM. Well, the mosquitoes didn’t wake me up so much as the violent itching.
Have I mentioned that I don’t think I’ve seen a single window screen the entire time I’ve been here? Yeah. Just open windows.
And as it’s been hot in Pécs (mid-to-high 90s yesterday) and these dorms aren’t air-conditioned, we’ve had no choice but to sleep with the window open. Amusingly enough, the town’s name of Pécs (pronounced PAY-ch) is of Serbian origin and means “furnace”. No kidding. Although I suppose it beats Sacramento at this time of year.
I’d prepared myself. Despite the heat, I was sleeping in long pajama pants, socks, a long-sleeved shirt, and I pulled the comforter over my head. But the darn mosquitoes took advantage of anything they could find, which was my hands (which gripped the comforter) and my ankles, where there was the gap between my pajama pants and my socks. UGH.
I really, REALLY hate putting mosquito repellent on to sleep, but anything’s better than waking up itching like I did. I have hydrocortisone cream, but that didn’t help. I ended up in the fridge’s tiny freezer compartment, trying to dig out slivers of ice with my fingernails to ice the bites (which were incredibly swollen and almost painful.) After about an hour, the itching subsided enough that I could sleep, so I took the comforter out of the comforter cover and crawled inside the cover, pulling it over my head like a sleeping bag. Don’t laugh, it worked. I only got one more bite the rest of the night — on the tip of my nose. Lovely.
Here's our dorm. We're on the second floor on the one end, on the backside of the building.
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We finally got out of the dorm around 11 and headed downtown, first stopping by the store to pick up bread and cheese for lunch. We ended up in a park in a square near the town’s cathedral, and we found a nice bench in the shade where we could make our sandwiches. It was so nice that I ended up taking a nap there, while John just relaxed and waited for me to wake up.
Before we went to the cathedral, we first went to check out the town’s UNESCO World Heritage site, the early Christian necropolis, a cemetery that dates back to the 3rd and 4th centuries BC. I took pictures with my big camera, but none with the phone, so I don’t have any to post yet, but it really was beautiful, and amazing to look at some of the tombs that still have original frescoes in them. Neat! (And bonus–as they’re underground, they’re NICE AND COOL. Yaay for natural air-conditioning!)
(As an aside, there’s something I’ve learned this trip. John and I, being the geeks that we are, and especially being the museum geeks we are, can spend almost as long inside a museum when none of the exhibit info is in English as we can when all of the exhibit info is in English. Go figure.)
After that, we headed to the cathedral, which was GORGEOUS, inside and out. After staring for at least 15 minutes in amazement, John dubbed it the most beautiful church he’s seen (and I’ve dragged him to some pretty nice churches in London, Amsterdam, and Rome, not to mention on this trip.) I don’t think it makes my top favorites list, but it was nice. Don’t get me wrong — I’m a sucker for good architecture anywhere, but I tend to prefer churches that haven’t been obviously, visibly renovated to the hilt, and I also tend to prefer Romanesque and Gothic. If I had to pick, I think my favorite churches have been St. Mark’s in Venice, the Duomo in Milan, Westminster Abbey in London, and Mattyas Church in Budapest. No particular order for those, though — I can’t pick.
Pecs Cathedral.
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Inside the cathedral.
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Have I mentioned how much I love my new lens? The wide-angle? These pics were taken with my phone, of course, but just wait until I post the other ones… Wow. SO AWESOME. (Why am I not posting them now? Because it takes enough time out of my day just to write these blog posts… no time to go through my camera pics and do post-processing and post them online. I will though!)
Archway in the cathedral.
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Staircase to the choir loft. Amusingly enough, there was a bicycle parked at the bottom (out of the picture, though.) Talk about out of place!
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Crypt under the church. This was my favorite part, for some reason. Don't get me wrong -- I liked the cathedral, but there was just something about the spare, simple interior of the crypt that I preferred.
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I took another one of this crypt… well, actually it was the original of the above shot. I tinkered with the saturation and contrast for the above picture to try to get a more interesting effect, but if you’re curious, click here to check out the original.
After the cathedral, we headed in search of ice cream, since even though it was creeping toward late afternoon, it was still hot and miserable, and we’ve been eating a fair amount of ice cream on this trip. (Despite that, both John and I have lost weight… not that he needed to lose any, unfortunately. I just hope he doesn’t disappear by the end of the trip. Fortunately, Hungarians seem to subscribe to the philosophy of cooking good food, and then smothering it with sour cream, since sour cream makes everything better. I’m hoping he can put back on some of that weight… and hoping I don’t, since I’m already enjoying Hungarian food!)
Anyone know what flavor "Smurf" is?
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Seen on the way to ice cream. Someone please get this guy some fashion sense. OMG.
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Also seen on the way to ice cream. Underneath this sign, the guy actually has a small cooking area to cook you your sandwich on the go. Awesome.
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After ice cream, the next order of business was to find somewhere that sold prepaid SIM cards for our phone, so we could contact someone for our evening plans. We’ve picked up SIM cards in a couple of other countries (Croatia and Bosnia) and it’s a matter of going to the nearest newsstand and trying to make yourself understood as to what you want. Apparently Hungary doesn’t roll that way though. We found out we had to go to the T-Mobile store, and received incomprehensible directions, which resulted in us taking refuge in McDonald’s to use their free wifi. We made it to T-Mobile a few minutes after they ostensibly had closed, although the doors were still open and they were still serving customers. This was no in-and-out thing like I’d planned — it took almost 20 minutes of waiting for the sales guy to enter information into the computer and signing papers. WTH?? This wasn’t even for a phone contract, just a prepaid SIM. When we left, they gave us such a large stack of papers that they gave us a plastic T-Mobile shopping bag in which to put them. It’s great. Oh, and the papers I had to sign were in Hungarian. Even better. It IS prepaid, though.
The nice thing about T-Mobile, though, is that we can top it up anywhere (a lot of ATMs even do T-Mobile top-ups) or online, and we can still top it up when we’re in other countries. The problem we had with the ones from Bosnia and Croatia is that they were for local cell providers, so to top them up, you had to buy top-up cards locally. So once we were in Bosnia, for example, we couldn’t buy a top-up card for the Croatian phone company (which almost became a problem when we ran out of credit trying to communicate with our host for where we were staying in Sarajevo. Whoops.)
So I now have a Hungarian phone number. Whee.
After that, we headed back up to the cathedral to meet up with some people. I’m signed up with CouchSurfing.com, which is a network of people who want to host travellers to stay overnight, or just meet up with them and hang out while the travellers are in their city. I’ve been hosting off and on since I moved to Sacramento, and we couchsurfed when we were in Amsterdam last summer and will in a couple of days when we’re in Budapest. It’s a fun way to meet people from all over when I host them in Sacramento, and also to meet local people while traveling. And hey, if we can get a free place to stay, that’s nice too… but that’s not the point.
So anyway, each city has a Couchsurfing “ambassador” (this is an official position) who helps keep the local CSing network together and oversees things. When you log onto the CS website, it collects your location based on your IP address, and gives you a listing of couchsurfers near you. Yesterday morning I received an email from the Pecs ambassador. She was hosting a Slovenian CSer, and was planning on going out to drinks with him and some friends of hers last night, and invited us to come along. We thought it sounded like fun, so we arranged to meet up. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures, but we had a TOTAL blast. Besides the Pecs ambassador and her CSer, it was another couple of her friends, and an American guy from Missouri who just arrived from teaching English in South Korea and is now looking for a job teaching English here. Drinks turned into dinner, where conversation and eating continued at such a leisurely pace that we got up to leave thinking we’d already paid… WHOOPS! :-D (Not just John and I — all of us! Heheheh…) Some of us are going out again tonight — it was totally fun. :-)
Oh, and the dinner? John and I had WAAAY too much food. I ordered a main dish (pork chops with rosemary potatoes, covered in a mustard and sour cream sauce), and then a “half” side of chili, mostly because I wanted to try the lavosh (fried bread) that came with it. The “half” turned out to be a small saucepan’s worth, and the pork chops and potatoes were also a huge plate’s worth. Fortunately, they had take-out containers, so John and I now have lunch and dinner for today. :-)
One more day in Pecs, and then it’s off to Budapest. While I’m enjoying Pecs, I can’t wait — I’m SOOOO looking forward to going back to Budapest!
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Where we are now:
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