Backpacking (Central/Eastern) Europe

Sunday, August 24th, 2008- 5:10pm:

Taken from an excerpt in my journal:

"We are leaving Budapest! The 10 minutes prior to us getting off here, a girl solicited us for a hostel on the Buda side (the older part of the city) to pay for a hostel we've never even laid eyes on. We heard of stuff like this going on, how people try to sell you something that isn't what it seems.

As we made our way to our intended hostel, we took a good look around at the people, the graffiti, the dirty city, and just had a bad feeling about the place. Granted, we weren't there long enough to truly give it a chance, but after having such great experiences in Germany and Austria, Hungary just seemed like the uglier stepsister of the ugly stepbrother. Not to mention that upon arriving to our intended lodging, there was no longer a THERE. Not even when we walked a full circle in case there was a typo in our guidebook AND on the map.

Shortly after, I used the 'toalette', and offered to buy a soda to be nice, but the lady didn't want to take my Euro coins, accepting "paper Euro only" and would give me Hungarian Florints as change. I had to say forget it and walk out because at this point, the thought crossed our mind that we would probably reroute and change our destination. We walked to the bridge over the Danube, and saw the Parliament building, the Castle and the Cathedral, took a picture, and since we still couldn't locate a hostel, all signs pointed to 'get the hell outta here!' When we looked at our timetable and saw that a train would be leaving back to Wien (Vienna), to connect to Koln (Cologne) we made a mad dash for it. On the way back to the subway, we didn't realize that the metro ticket expired in 60 minutes, and lo and behold, a "metro-maid" was standing at the exit, waiting to give us a fine. 5,000 florints poorer (30 euros, $44 USD), all we could do was laugh it off, chalk it to experience, and catch our train back to Germany. "

Just our luck... the metro-maid!

We took the metro back to the train station in Hungary on time, and got in line to book reservations for the train to Cologne-- except there were no train reservations left! All reservations stop 30 mins prior to the train leaving for its destination. We then got in line at the information booth and they told us to go to the train platform and speak to the conductor to see if there were any available seats left. If lucky, we'd be able to squeeze in.

On top of all the mess, this was the last day we had left on our Eurail pass, so if we couldn't get on this train to Germany, we'd be stuck in Hungary for the next 4 days!

After speaking with the conductor, he charged us each a small fee for the seating fee, and we squeezed into an almost empty compartment.

Whew!

Another passenger soon joined us, and he and I got to chatting about interesting things while Adam napped.

We talked for some time until I found out he was a high school student, and he, that I was a high school teacher! It was insta-weirdness from that point forward.

Back to Germany we go!