Eger

So yesterday we took a 2 hour train ride northeast of Budapest to the town of Eger. It is known as their wine region. Their regional specialty is a wine called "bulls blood" mainly because of the color.

When we arrived our first challenge was to find the guest house that we had booked. We had no map to speak of, just a rough sketch from the internet. We found the town center and the tourist information office, where they gave us a map that helped us find our accomodation. We had to go up hill, but behind, no less, a castle. It was a tiring and sweaty (at least for me) walk up hill, but we made it. I think this will be the nicest place we'll be staying in all of Europe. It's an equivalent of a bed and breakfast at home. Just a room in someone's house with our own bathroom!!! Much better than the dorms we have and will continue to stay in.

After a brief rest we were able to walk around the town and enjoy the sites. Once again, everything is very, very old and ornate, though the buildings here are a bit more quaint. Our first stop along the cobblestoned streets was lunch. There we had a yummy leek soup and paparika chicken on an olive salad. It was so nice to get some veggies in us, not just bread, cheese and meat.

From there we walked just a tad bit further and stopped at a wine shop/ bar. There we got a sampler of 6 different wines and some cheese. None of the wines were all that thrilling but it was nice to just sit out on the street and watch the world go by while sipping on wine. They even had blankets if you were a bit chilly...which I was.

We continued through the rest of the day like that...strolling along and taking a break, strolling along and taking a break. It's my favorite part about Europe so far. We found a little place to have a decent pasta dinner and headed home.

Today was our big wine tasting day. The valley is just a short 15 minute walk from the city center. Once you go up and over a hill and decend into the valley, you start to notice vent pipes coming out of the ground on the hills. Then you realize that you are actually standing on top of wine cellars that were built into the hill sides in the 1700's. Such a trip. It is here they make, store and sell the wines. Once you get into the more developed area this is where the cellars are open to the public for tastings. Their system is a bit different then ours. You can ask for tasting, for free or order glasses by the decaliter. They also have varieties that are straight from the barrel...or more of thier table wines...or bottled wine which costs more. Then if you want to purchase straight from the barrel you can buy it in amounts of 2, 2.2 or 5 litters. You can bring your own bottle or purchase a bottle there...and they are plastic bottles. Not much different than a soda 2 liter bottle. Needless to say we will now be carrying around 4 liters of wine. I think we can finish that in the next 25 days. 2 liters cost us just over $6 and it tastes better than the equivalent wine at home. It was just incredible sipping wine in these hundreds of year old caves and watching the locals come in, on their lunch break, and get 15 liters of wine at a time. They bring in their empty plastic containers and lug out brimming to the top containers. It is a holiday tomorrow. How fun would it be if we could buy wine that way at home? Gotta love it. It might go against everything the California wine community (or wine snobs) stand for. Wine in plastic jugs..hmphf. Like I said, if you have to, you can buy the nicer wine in bottles. And like I said, it's much better wine then the kind you buy in the box or jug at home.

We eventually had to call it quits. They don't really have spit buckets here. I think they might be offended if you spit our their wine here...now that I think about it. We still needed to be able to make it back to town with out falling down the hill. Fun times.

So tomorrow we head back to Budapest for one night...the only place we could find afordable accomodations because of the holiday. So much for trying to wing it. And we get to share a bed in a bunkbed. I feel sorry for our bunkmate. It's just for one night. After that we head for a short jaunt into Romania....I think. Stay posted to find out.