cherries are soooo good and soooo cheap

i'm now in szombathely (pronounced som-but-hey), renata's home city, on my last day with her before i get on the train to visit aniko in pécs (pronounced paitch) tomorrow in the early morning. i can't believe how quickly this week has flown by. renata hs taken me all around western and northern hungary...we spent a beautiful although extremely busy day and a half in budapest, which is one of the most beautiful cities i've ever seen and which i'll have to return to some day. when we were there, we stayed in renata's wealthy friend's empty apartment (that she's going to be moving into in a few weeks), which was totally gorgeous. then we took the train a couple of hours (everything in hungary is a couple of hours away by train) to balatonfüred on the edge of lake balaton, and lay in the sun and swam in the warm, clean, strangely milky-looking lake and ate gelato. in balatonfüred we stayed in a room in the home of a very kind elderly lady who has children in vancouver - she showed us all her photos - and the room was absolutely gorgeous and came with the use of the full kitchen and bathroom. she had a very large and full cherry tree in the yard which she hadn't taken any cherries from, and she told us to take as many as we could before they went bad. i've never eaten so many cherries in my life, or such delicious ones. here in szombathely, i also bought a half kg of cherries as a gift for aniko, very delicious and fresh ones, and they cost only about 60 or 75 cents. holy crap! the only thing that gets in the way of the time in hungary is the intense heat - it's already 30 degrees by 10am every day - and teh extremely strong sun, which has been giving us some headaches. and in my case, i seem to have developed my father's sun sensitivity, where i'm getting a bit of an allergic reaction to the sun - which is keeping me uncomfortably in long sleeves today. i should get going because renata's waiting beside me, but i'll be home veeeeeery soon. i'm now thinking about foregoing a summer job and looking into doing the GRE's the next time the're held, and focussing on studying for those, researching grad schools etc., learning to drive and yoga. haven't decided yet, though. first things first, i'm going to give myself a mad pedicure to get rid of these blisters.