island: Wien- die magische Stadt

The past week was fraught with attractions. Firstly I went to the long awaited Emiliana Torrini’s concert. She is an Icelandic singer , that had lived for many years in London, but recently she has come back to Iceland. Thus when I had been living in Iceland it was impossible to see her concert, as she was away. Then I came to Budapest last year in the summer and she was performing at Sziget Festival, but somehow outer circumstances thwarted my chance to experience it.

Eventually I did go to her concert and it was amazing. She is rather a diminutive woman, but very enchanting one. Actually at some point she embodies my life’s path. She is Icelandic – I used to live in her country. She is half Italian – and I lived for a little while in Italy and finally she loves Budapest, where I’m living right now. The concert turned out to be cosy and intimate due to its location – a club on a boat called A38, nevertheless the concert room was full of huddling people, as there was not so much space left. Simply enchanting.

She sings with a lot of passion, sincerity and joy – being in her element. In one moment I shouted out loud – Takk fyrir in Icelandic and she quickly responded Takk somuleidis. Extremely pleasant experience –that’s what it was.

When the week had finished, I along with my Hungarian friend, we set off to Vienna. I was extremely rad indeed to just go outside Budapest. 3 hours and we were there. I booked a hostel in the city centre and we came over to the reception to pick up the keys to our room and then all of the fun had started. The hostel was called #The labyrinth hostel, along with picking up the keys you would receive a paper with instruction on how to get to your building as the hostel’s buildings were just scattered around. Unluckily the key to the main door fitted to every door, and in result we got stuck in the wrong building , almost loosing hope, we would ever find it. We did – after one hour….Maybe we are not the smartest people in this world, but we had been walking around Vienna continuously for 9 hours. I love that city it has perfect size, it’s posh – I mean that’s true but it also has this hard-to –be-explained charm. It’s like being transferred to another époque. At this time of the year you can feel xmas atmosphere in Vienna, decorations everywhere, lights in different shapes and size being hang up in the air, all over the buildings. It was extremely crowded with tourists and hard to get to the line for hot wine. It was delicious and the fact that it was not served in plastic cups gave you an extreme pleasure to enjoy the pre-xmas spirit. Going back from Danube, we again lost the way to the hostel, a bit in despair we decided to have a dinner in an Italian restaurant we were passing by. Nevertheless if you want to have the best breakfast ever go to the place called Zanoni e Zanoni, it's an Italian gelateria run as the name says by Italian family, so if you ever feel tired after walking for 9 hours like us, just go there and grab a big breakfast that consists of rolls, croissants, juice, coffee, prosciutto and cheese. Yummy

On the way back to Budapest (and here again the funny part strikes in), there were two extremely weird women (actually one woman and one girl?) in our compartment. One after initiating a discussion with random men she had just met, claimed to be the most famous hairdresser in Hungary. Jesus she bragged about it continuously for 3 hours! Can you imagine? Well she also revealed some facts about her romance with a slightly younger guy, who as she said is extremely cute...Just for the record as she emphasized the kids don't have clue about the story. On the other hand the other woman, had two Iphones and was retouching her photos from whitening her eyes, correcting eyebrows to enlarging her breasts .....ALERT ALERT weirdos on the train. :)

Big breakfast at Zanoni e Zanoni

Grazie mille :)