Just got done visiting the House of Terror in Budapest, the first real touristy, structured thing I’ve done so far on this trip. The past few days have felt very quotidian–I’ve been hanging out with my friend from high school, Cayley, and he’s been having to work on her thesis, so I’ve had some down time by myself, which I’m never good at doing anything very useful with. Budapest is interesting…beautiful city and from what I know, interesting to learn the history. The most striking thing, though, of going through the House of Terror, is how these things that happened in the 50s and 40s are still being perpetuated by Americans to our own enemies, which is extremely disturbing. And I don’t feel like I have a lot of control over it, even though it is my country, which is so frustrating. It does sort of inspire me to try to do more, because it is such a shameful part of a lot of countries’ histories, and now, we’re committing atrocities on human rights that in our future, I feel sure we will look back on with equal shame.

In terms of visiting, hardly anyone here speaks English, and neither Cayley nor I speak Hungarian, so that’s interesting. We are able to get by, but certainly we can’t really go places “real” residents go to. Which makes the experience a little different. But I’ve also gotten to sit in on some of the lectures at her university and we’ve discussed a lot of politics/empowerment stuff, which has been super interesting (since that’s like 90% of what she’s been thinking about over the past 2 years). The weather here has been pretty incredible–perfect spring warmth, which is totally welcome.

Tomorrow, I travel again to Munich. Cannot WAIT to see my 3 friends, none of whom I’ve seen in the past 4 years. That’ll be awesome :-).