Bratislava (?)

Well, I’m currently in Vienna, but I haven’t yet had a chance to update about Budapest or our trip there for that matter. We left Prague on Wednesday morning and caught an 11:35 train that should have gotten us to Budapest by about 6:30pm. We knew that our Eurail passes were not valid in the Czech Republic and so we had paid the required fair to get to the Czech border where we believed our passes would once again be valid. Unfortunately, we were unaware that the train would be taking us through Slovakia in order to get to Budapest, and therefore when the ticket taker came around and looked at our tickets as we were approaching Bratislava, we obviously did not have the right ones. Because of this, and because we also didn’t have enough money to pay the fare right on the train, we were forced to disembark our train at the next stop, which fortunately enough happened to be Bratislava and not some little random town in the middle of Slovakia. Since we had no Slovakian currency with us, we couldn’t buy anything at the station once we had paid for our tickets to the Slovakian border. We took a short walk away from the station just to say that we had been to Bratislava. Unfortunately we had to wait about 4 hours until the next train to Budapest came through, so we spent the time reading and playing Scrabble in this sketchy waiting room at the train station.

When we finally did get in to Budapest it was about 11pm and although we had directions to our hostel, we were having a lot of trouble figuring them out. This really sketchy guy with a beard and long hair, who was wearing a big black coat kept coming over to us and offering us a hostel. At first we kept turning him down, but he was extremely persistent and he showed us a flyer and eventually convinced us to go with him to see this hostel. I think we were both pretty terrified seeing as it was 11pm and we had just gotten to Budapest… But he ended up bringing us to a really nice little hostel that was right near the train station. When we got there we were still pretty sketched out because the entranceway had a big metal gate and we were also the only people staying at the hostel that night.

Everything turned out to be fine though and we ended up staying at this place all three nights we were in Budapest, and you’ll be hearing all about those nights in the next entry. I know these have been really behind, but I haven’t been able to get any wireless for a while, hopefully that will change soon.