Bernhard - CS #13 | Arrival Mishaps

We slept in til 11, just because we could. Travel days are usually also catch-up-on-sleep days. The only thing on our agenda was, naturally, more food.

We had heard from multiple people about a restaurant called Deewan (D1) which was an all you can eat Pakistani restaurant. The catch is that the restaurant was a "Pay as you wish" place. It was customary to pay only 3 or 4 euros for an entire meal there! Laura and I couldn't wait. We arrived around lunchtime, so it was moderately busy. Nobody talked to us, nothing was in English, so we just watched and followed. I think the restaurant makes a lot of different things, but only serves 6 main dishes per day in mass quantities. Today they had 1) rice, 2) a chicken dish, 3) beans, 4) a potato dish, 5) something gross, and 6) something unknown but OK. Before we knew it, we had simply picked up plates, loaded them with variations of the 6 entrees, and sat down. Free tap water is notoriously hard to get in Europe. But, on a tray next to the kitchen were glasses of tap water, neatly arranged. We watched, and soon we had just taken a glass of tap water for ourselves. Still, nobody has talked to us. We had no clue if we were doing anything here right, but assumed we must be if we weren't in trouble yet. We both went back for seconds, I also got salad and some custardy dessert thing, and we both got more glasses of water. It was delightful. The only time anybody really paid us any attention was when we finished our meals. Somehow, within 5 seconds of putting our fork from our last bite down, somebody would come and whisk away our plates! It was amazing! Then we were really confused how people paid. I went and spied and found out where the cash register even was, and Laura saw that people were just handing some coins to the guy by the cash register and walking out - before he even had a chance to count them. So it was literally "Pay as you wish" - there were no prices. Crazy!! Laura and I left around 5 euros each, which still felt like we were stealing food. Oh yeah, and this restaurant's slogan is "Good Food, Good Mood" - which I have lovingly adopted as one of my own life mottoes. It is so true :)

Then it was ice cream time. We had also heard from a couple people (a recommendation from one local makes it a good recommendation, a second, unrelated recommendation from another local makes it a Must-Do) about an ice cream place called Zanoni & Zanoni. We knew exactly where it was because we'd passed it many times just walking around. We acted like pros on the public transportation system, zipped into Zanoni's, got some Amazing ice cream, sat at their cafe for about 4 minutes, and then decided that we didn't really have time to sit there any longer. We hadn't packed yet and our train left in about 2 hours and we were currently in the city center, half an hour away from Veronika's flat!

Somehow, we ended up doing our fastest packing job yet and were on our way to "Meidling Station" a little over an hour before our train was supposed to leave. One problem: we didn't know where Meidling Station was, but we decided it couldn't be that hard to find because it was a freaking international train station! We found a map of the metro system and found a Meidling Station stop. Thrilled, we arrived with half an hour to spare! Except that...looking around, it just seemed too quiet and too slow-paced to be a train station, even for a random Tuesday afternoon. As we climbed the stairs to the ground level, we didn't see any signs to trains. Ut oh....So we asked some police officers, "Where are the trains please? We are scheduled to leave for Budapest in half an hour." They didn't' quite have good enough English, but one police officer took us to a BIGGER map of the metro system, one that we had never seen before in our WEEK in Vienna, and pointed out ANOTHER Meidling station that was also called some other name and was farther away, and partially back the way we just came. Exasperated, we thanked him and flew down the stairs. When the metro came, we got on, but still couldn't see this Meidling Station on a map - because on this map it was called its second name. WHY Vienna has two stations named the SAME thing and why the international train station has TWO names and WHY the name is written on the map is NOT the same one that comes up when you search for the station on a computer is all quite beyond me.

So - we arrived with 15 minutes to spare - which is still really good for us considering some of our mad dashes through train stations. We even had time to get our European East Eurail validated. This is good because now all of our passes have been validated and we don't need to worry about that anymore. Once we were on the train, it was a very easy ride and soon we were in Budapest.

So Budapest is probably the most exciting place we've been so far, just because it is the most challenging so far. It throws me back to my SAS days of being utterly confused. As soon as we got off the train, people were hounding us to come get in their taxis or stay at their hotels. The languages there are Hungarian and a little bit of German, which means that English is actually on quite a few signs because not that many people around the world know Hungarian and German. (In other places where they had multiple romance languages, less stuff was in English it seemed like). And this sounds terrible, but we didn't even know what their currency was (it's the Forint) or what the conversion rate was (it's 200 FT = $1). This reminded me a lot of Viet Nam or Thailand, where you are spending hundreds or thousands of "units" but really it's only a few dollars. So much getting used to was in order, in the world away from romance languages and euros :) This is what gets my traveling adrenaline going! I love it.

We had a tough time nailing down really specific details with our host - he said he might be at the train station to meet us if he could get off work in time, but if he wasn't, to make our way to his place, and to call him on his cell phone if anything went wrong. Except that he didn't leave his cell phone number and all of his CS pictures were far away shots so we couldn't even really tell what he looked like! OH YEAH, when we looked up our train it said we were stopping at the "Deli Pu" station at 18:45, on the Buda side of Budapest, and that's where he was planning on meeting us. Except that our train stopped once at 18:41 and again at 18:49 - and did NOT go to the Deli Pu station at all. It spit us out at the "Keleti Pu" station, which is on the Pest side of Budapest, where there was little to no chance of our host actually being there. Great. so now what?

We struggled through 3 visits to the information office, who couldn't really tell us anything useful because of language barriers. We found a tourist office that was closing, but a kind man there gave us a map and told us which bus to take to get to our host's general area. But we didn't have any money. The tourist shop man said we could buy tickets from the newspaper stand. We went to the newspaper stand and asked where an ATM was in the train station. The lady said there WASN'T one. How could there NOT be an ATM in an international train station? So I figured she just must not have known where it was or must not have understood us, because come on, there had to be a freaking ATM, so we could buy a freaking bus ticket, so we could freaking find out host.

And at this point, nice tourist shop man had left and we'd already been to the information office 3 times.

Here, you just have to laugh, take a deep breath, and think, "OK, what next?"

Next: we FOUND the ATM, but the slot where you put your card in was pushed really creepily far back into the machine. It looked like it was going to eat it and never give it back. We found that very strange and did not put our cards in. I hung around and watched somebody else attempt to use the machine and he also thought that was weird, which confirmed that it probably was not normal.

So, next: I thought - screw it. Let's just take the bus. Our host for sure isn't here, we know where the bus is, and which direction to take it, and where to get off, so let's just get on and hope that we don't get caught. Which is what we did. We just stole a little bit of public transportation, got off 4 stops later, and quickly found our hosts' flat. PHEW. Still no money - but at least we had arrived.

When we walked into his flat, we were greeted by our host, Bernhard, and three other CouchSurfers. Two were Canadian girls named Sherilee and Mandy, and one was a Japanese guy named Hiro. Between the 5 of us I felt like Bernhard was running a youth hostel! It was crazy. And all five of us were sleeping in the same room. There was no floor space, just backpacks, everywhere.

Bernhard is a consultant not much older than us who was born in Hungary but has citizenship in Germany as well. He spent 4 months volunteering in Peru, has one brother, and hosts quite a lot - other than that I don't know too much about him. I think he was a little overwhelmed with so many CSers invading his house, so he was pretty quiet while we were all jabbering away.

We sat around chatting and getting to know each other, and soon Bernhard led our group to dinner. We went to a mediocre Italian place and nothing very exciting happened at dinner.

When we got back, I read the Budapest section of the European travel guide book that the Canadians brought, which was helpful since I didn't really know anything about Budapest. (Laura and I split up countries to research and Hungary was one of her countries).

After a long day, I was ready for bed. It was so funny, that room just stuffed full of 20-somethings from around the world...


Quotes:
Group: "So, are you going back to Japan soon?" (To Hiro, who hasn't been back much over the last 4 years)
Hiro: "Yes. I need to make baby."
Everybody burst out laughing...
Group: "Well, first do you need to make girlfriend?"
Hiro: "Yes yes, first I need to make girlfriend, then I need to make baby."

Accomplishments:
Found our host.

Travel Tip:
It would be good to know the currency and conversion rate before you arrive in a country. Also, trying to arrive during working hours so that things like tourist offices will still be open is smart.
Stay calm, stay optimistic, stay clear-headed. It will work out.

Nice People Alert:
Tourist Shop Man - for giving us a map and actually telling us something useful and helpful!