Advent

Here we are at the beginning of December.  That means we have been here three months!  Monday was St. Andrew's day, and Tuesday was Unification Day for Romania.  These are national holidays, and schools, universities, and government offices were closed.  Because of the holiday and Sam's parents flying in, we took a trip to Budapest.  We flew into Budapest on our move here, but we were pretty tired, maybe a little too tired to enjoy ourselves, but we had a great time this weekend.  We stayed in a cabin at a resort a little bit away from downtown, but it was nice.  There was a restaurant, pool, and breakfast included.  We left for Budapest on Saturday morning.  We found out that morning that due to some regulation, we needed snow tires on the van, so Sam took care of that first.  Then we spent about an hour at the border to Hungary because many other Romanians had decided to go on holiday as well.  We finally made it into Hungary and drove to Debrecen, the nearest large city, and had lunch at McDonalds.  We had never been to Debrecen before and thought it best not to be too adventurous.  There was an indoor play area, too.  Then we were able to get on an actual highway to drive to Budapest.  As we approached, the rain turned to snow.  This caused some slower traffic, and the sun goes down at about 4 in Budapest.  We also did not have internet on our phones, so we had an interesting time finding our way to the resort in the dark with rain/snow.  We arrived at what seemed like midnight, but it was only 5.  We ate in the hotel restaurant, then went to bed.

The next day was sunny, but a little cool and windy.  We went to downtown Budapest and spent some time in a lively outdoor Chistmas market.  We enjoyed some of the food and hot drinks for sale there and bought a few trinkets.  Then we headed to the airport to pick up the family, and they had arrived early.  We took a little driving tour of the city, then drove towards our resort, but stopped at a restaurant for a late lunch on the way.  We returned to the resort as it was getting dark and some of us relaxed, some swam, and some played tennis.

When we woke up the next morning it seemed as if it had been raining overnight, but as we approached downtown Budapest the weather cleared up.  We parked on the Buda side then walked across the Chain Bridge to Pest.  We found another Christmas market, and toured St. Stephen Church.  We also went to the Central Market.  This building was full of food and souvenir vendors.  We had lunch there.  Sam and I had goulash in a bread bowl.  We walked back to Buda across another bridge and found our car.  We arrived at the resort as rain was falling and the sun was going down.

The next morning we walked down a nice avenue looking for a museum with a Solzhenitsyn exhibit.  We found the museum but the exhibit was gone.  We kept walking and found Heroes' Square.  We ate at Burger King and Subway to please the kids.  We also stopped at a lovely coffee shop with Christmas stickers on the cup!  That ended our trip to Budapest.  We drove back to Oradea after that.

Budapest is a great city to visit.  It was clean, inexpensive, and many people speak English.  We highly recommend that you consider a trip there if you have the opportunity to travel to Europe.

It is Advent, and I was impressed by the decoration and physical preparation that Budapest made for Advent.  We all need to prepare our hearts for Christ's coming, though.  We are spending some time in an Advent devotional by John Piper, Good News of Great Joy.  Sam and I have joined the University choir for the Christmas concert.  All of the songs are religious, one even presents the gospel.  We are planning fun things, too.  Tonight is the annual fundraiser at Emanuel University called Chocolate Season.  Donated chocolate from around the world will be sold tonight.  The boys have been looking forward to this!  That's all for now.  We will get some pictures up soon.