Morning Beers on a Train

This past weekend I made a visit to Budapest, Hungary. After 12 hours on an overnight train, and being scared awake three times by Border Patrol, we arrived in a city where you can’t guess your way around. In case you didn’t know, Hungarian is nothing like the Romance languages.

The metro took us straight to our hostel, which turned out to be a single room next door to the owners’ apartment, definitely a steal for about $20 a night. This trip was my first experience, other than the euro, trying to convert dollars. I am a Finance major, however, I do not claim good mental math skills. My bankcard kept being declined at the ATM, so of course I assumed it was the bank’s fault because I am always right… WRONG… I called Wachovia and the nice customer service representative told me that I was trying to withdraw $756 when I was really only trying to take out $200, whoops. One word of advice, double-check your math prior to withdrawals to prevent draining your bank account in a low value currency.

After getting everything settled, and the appropriate amounts of money, we were off to see the city. Our first stop was the Central Market and shopping street, clearly my favorite part. The market was packed with vendors selling Hungary’s finest lace, hand painted wood, paprika and porcelain. After a long night of travel, Jourdan and I quickly moved to the food where we had Langos, special Hungarian fried dough with various toppings, delicious! After our exceptionally healthy lunch we went to the Szchenyi bathhouse for a soak in the natural hotspring pool, with a great atmosphere of Eastern European architecture and old men in much too tight Speedos; I’m pretty sure in America they would be arrested for indecent exposure. When I left Italy I thought I was escaping the massive amounts of “PDA,” wrong again, the warm pool is quite the couples retreat. Despite the awkward lovers and wrinkly old men, the bathhouse was really neat and a great experience.

That night we had planned to go on a pub-crawl in hopes of meeting other people and having a few good drinks. We got to the meeting spot and our pub-crawl group turned out to be a team of three, Jourdan, the guide, and myself… Go Team! Our guide showed us several bars that we would have otherwise never found, where we had some great Hungarian beer, and excessively strong liquor.

The next day was a race to see as much of Budapest as we could before our train at 5:00. We went to some impressive places: St. Matthia’s church, St. Stephen’s basilica, Parliament, and the Dohany St. Synagogue. The architecture and elaborate designs of these buildings is amazing! St. Stephen’s basilica is the home of a relic, the hand of St. Stephen. The synagogue is a place of pride for Budapest’s Jewish community and their perseverance through Nazi occupation. There they have a garden that houses the mass grave of 2,300 Jews killed during the Holocaust.

 Our time flew by and we were off to the station to catch our train back to Trieste. I slept an hour here and an hour there. A Slovenian man told me his life story, how he used to do drugs but now does Yoga. Border Patrol questioned me about where I was going and why. Then the cherry on top, we met three Croatians who bought us beers at 5 o’clock in the morning, only in Europe can you drink on a train 24 hours a day. You never know who you’ll meet on a train. These stories are by far my favorite souvenirs.