Ukraine / Germany Trip, Day #1

Travels: Grande Prairie, Canada to Budapest, Hungary

Today I’m heading out on a trip that I’ve wanted to take for a long time. I’ll be traveling with my family in Ukraine and eastern Germany. All of my grandparents were born in Mennonite colonies in Ukraine, and it’s been a dream of mine to visit the country. This time we’ll be visiting the cities of Kiev and Lviv, then heading over to Germany and basing ourselves out of the city of Dresden. Most of the family has already been traveling in Europe for the last week, so my brother and I will be meeting them in Budapest before heading out to Kiev. We flew from Grande Prairie to Edmonton to Montreal to London (Heathrow) to Budapest. We had several hours to kill in London, so the two of us found an English pub-style restaurant in the airport and had a “Full Monty” English breakfast, complete with potatoes, sausages, fried mushrooms, scrambled eggs, and of course, tea. We finally landed in Budapest in the early evening, and the rest of the family was there to meet us. We dropped our suitcases off at our hotel first, then took the subway to the old part of the city to visit the Christmas market. We were all pretty hungry at that point, so the first order of business was to find some good food. One of the stalls was selling fresh hot Hungarian food. I bought cabbage rolls, soup, brown bread, and some kind of stew, and it was awesome. Afterwards we browsed the market for a bit before heading back to our hotel. We were surprised to find that the subway had shut for construction, but thankfully there was a bus that took us where we needed to go. Along the way I learned the Hungarian word “állomás” which means “station” :).