budapest / snowday / travels.

sipping coffee this afternoon and looking through my calendar. thinking and planning. i very easily filled all of my vacation days for this year with plans already. a week in greece in the summertime to camp on top of a wild mountain. a few extended weekends in the hungarian hills. to spain in may to revisit my old spanish stomping grounds: granada, malaga, karma guen. spain will never leave my heart alone. in the fall i plan to spend more time in vienna, more time in austria. a weekend in romania. i love just roaming around to visit friends and inevitably make strangers into friends along the way too. there is no time to go to canada this year. no money either. 

i told my family to come here instead. send my things in boxes i want to stay here. making life work here.

this is what i came up with when my coffee cup was finally empty and i was thinking about budapest and hungarian life:

hungary is in a perfect location. it sits on the line between east and west.. central europe they call it. austria and germany are within hitchhike distance away and from here the east is very near. 2 hours to romania. 2 hours to vienna. even this city, budapest, is a strange romantic city. its a little mysterious. graffiti tags everywhere, some good but most are really bad. its a strange composition with the stone lions and bridges that reach across the danube, castles and old palaces and forgotten synagogues really give this city a peculiar character. 


i read recently in an english event guide someone describe budapest as an italian roast coffee: it is bold, has a great aroma, tastes good but still leaves a sting in your mouth afterwards with its bitter aftertaste. 


apart from its history, this city is still one of the undiscovered treasures on the infamous eurotrip and im kind of glad. budapest is ours still. i like this a lot. its not long though, its still cheap to visit but you can feel the prices rising and the pressure to take the euro on instead of the forint. 

some even feel the need to spray-paint snowmen with their tag..

this snowman lives in front of our house
the joys of living on a pedestrian street

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etsy update and a night around town.

last night i finally got my act together and listed three red heart brooches on etsy. i really need to spend more time crafting and sewing but it always gets pushed away since there is always something else to do around here.. you know that feeling? but i should really set some time in the evenings to sew around a little bit.

last night some friends and i went around kiraly utca (king street) to hang up posters for a valentines buddhist lecture  going on in a couple of weeks and just popping our heads into so many bars and cafes to see if they had an events board. i discovered so many cool places last night just around the corner from my house here! i am always impressed at the grungy underground scene in budapest. there is a really great creative feel to this neighbourhood and in the day time you would never guess there are bars around, all gated up with the iron shutters down but in the night, lights and beats pour out in the street with eccentric artist-type kids hanging around outside. we found a few really cool places to go back to, at some we couldnt resist hanging around for a beer to warm up before continuing the postering and flyering.

excuse the camera-phone quality of the photographs, but i think the grainyness is suitable to the ambiance of the bar, mumus (boogey man in english)...

a very old bicycle in our stairwell

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thursday already / not yet!

i have a hard time coming to terms with the passing of time. sometimes it is just too quick and sometimes it is unbearably slow. i guiltlessly await friday from the start of monday morning. and then i panic when the end of the week comes along and i cant think of 4 productive things that ive done with myself. i realize that i need to discover the beauty on monday mornings.. but next week. because now i am basking in the loveliness of thursday, my favourite day of the week. not yet the weekend but still past mid-week. it is the perfect middle day to have one last chance to do something unique and memory-worth with this week. i just need to change my view. pick out what i find abhorring about mondays and turn it around. next week i will find something excellent and inspiring about monday morning, waking up early after a weekend of sleep-ins and pancake breakfasts (without maple syrup).

i finally put myself down on the sofa to sew some heart brooches which will be up in etsy tonight. promise promise. this time i tucked a little clove inside to give it that hint of spice which i love. there are three and i hope they can arrive in time for sweethearts day next month.

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muffins for breakfast.

slowly i am buying things for our kitchen here. we survived with one pot for two months and finally we acquired another one from granny so that we can make tea and soup at the same time. its really revolutionized our cooking. so now i picked up a muffin tin yesterday night and i am hyped to make the first batch tonight for breakfast tomorrow.

any favourite muffin recipes? i found a simple oat and date one that looks promising but i have a freezer ( albeit a very small one) full of frozen cherries that id like the make a dent in.

i havent had any time to sit down and write or sew since being away for the weekend put me waaaaay out of my usual loop and i finally have a chance to catch up now. its incredible how quick time goes when you keep yourself busy.. it is already wednesday tomorrow. is it possible i have slept the last two days through my office work? it just seems like a blur of word documents, spreadsheets and some html codes i didnt understand.

i love this photograph from unruly things , i am excited for valentine's day already. just the thought of chocolates and cooking a special dinner makes me excited. and little holidays like this always sneak up way too quick on me that i never have time to plan anything special. but this year i will be prepared!

UPDATE: here are the tasty muffins...

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weekend trip: vienna

the calm morning after

last night a friend offered two free spaces in her car to vienna for the weekend. i couldnt possibly think of a reason not to go. so here we go, off to vienna for two nights and a little break from the sometimes dreary, salty, and muddy wintery budapest. i dont doubt that vienna is the same in wintertime but we are looking forward to practicing our german with hopeless austrian accents, meeting some new friends and visiting the ludwig museum. its been almost two years since i was last in vienna, so i think there is some major art i need to catch up on. i have a hunch there will be an etsy update early next week. here are some photographs from the last time i found myself in this city

matisse - man with many pipes

old shoes in a mirror's reflection

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starting to sew a little this and a little that.

i drew up these little instructions for a felt heart brooch for valentine's day that i came up with while watching a darling little film/documentary on love. if you haven't seen paper heart i definitely recommend it. i am certain you will laugh and learn a thing or two about love.

last night after work i took the metro down to the yarn shop i often visit just before it closed to pick up some nice felt and some brooch clips. i got talking with the owner there, who speaks very good english which is why i like to go there now, and he told me that they offer quilting classes upstairs. i though, cool! sign me up! he told me quite quickly that there is a 6-month waiting list to get into one of their classes. either quilting is excessively popular in budapest or their class space is too small. i put my name on the list anyway and we'll see if what happens in half year from now.

so i sewed up the first version of this little felt brooch. and this is what i came up with. i cringed as i really cut up a doily i brought from canada, just in case a cool project came up. it seems a little sacrilegious to cut doilies or lace but i only spent 50 cents on it at a christian benefit shop so i didnt feel so terribly bad.

for the sake of valentine's day!

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stamping.

putting these new rubber stamps through their first round.

stamp // stamp

the owl is so cool. i wish there were owls around here. maybe in the zoo.

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