So, we've made it to Belgrade and have survived one day here thus far. Yesterday was a pretty long day because everyone left us with 8 hours to kill in Budapest. It was interesting.
We got up pretty late compared to the last few weeks of traveling and we sorted out the laundry that arrived (yay clean clothes). We then had our massive rush to get things together before the check out time and managed to check out our stuff right at 11. Good timing. They let us store our bags in the hotel while we ran around the city to do last-minute sightseeing too, which was convenient.
We stopped by the nearby mall to get some breakfast-ish food for everyone. More like a lunch, really. It was all food court food. Mia, James and I got kebobs and Halmony and Umma split stuff from some Asian restaurant. The mall was actually pretty nice (and air conditioned). We wandered around the H&M for a while too.
Our major sightseeing trip for the day was Memento Park. In retrospect, it might have been better to do that stop the day before, but there are no complaints because everything worked out fine. When Hungary got rid of its communist regime, they got rid of all of the propaganda statues that were scattered around Budapest. Many of them ended up in Memento Park, which is this small park on the outskirts of Budapest. The trip out there was pretty far. It took us a good hour to take various buses out to the park. It was long and there were times that we were concerned that we would not make it back to the hotel by 3 so Umma Halmony and James could get their airport taxi. The park wasn't as big as I thought it would be, but it was still pretty impressive. The statues are enormous and cover a wide range of topics. You have the statues of the major communist dictators (except for Stalin because most of those were apparently destroyed in the 1956 revolt). There are statues of other major communist heroes and then there are statues that represent communist ideals. My major regret is that when we came here on our backpacking trip several years ago, that we didn't take Gianni or Andrew to it. I think they would have enjoyed it a lot.
By the time we made our way back to the hotel area, it was almost three, so our timing was quite perfect. We helped everyone get their stuff up from the storage room and then saw Halmony, James, and Umma off as they were laughing and waving with their taxi driver.
Because our overnight train was at 11:30, we had a long time to kill and were not quite sure where we could use that time. Sure there were plenty of other sights to see, but I handed over my Rick Steves book and felt empty sightseeing Budapest without it. Also, it was incredibly hot, so we didn't really want to stumble around more in the heat. So, we did what we would have done on any obscenely hot day in the states, we went to the movies.
The movie theater near the hotel dubbed the movies, which made things quite inconvenient for us, but we ended up finding a well-timed showing of Green Lantern to go see. It was fun to watch in Hungarian, even if we didn't understand anything. Paralax's voice was also a lot creepier in Hungarian. The theater in general was pretty cool. They had WiFi in the theater, the popcorn was cheaper, and they had assigned seats.
After the movie was over, we went back to the Vaci Utca area and ended up eating at Raday Utca, which is what Rick Steves referred to Budapest's restaurant row. We even found a restaurant that he recommended and finally got our Hungarian goulash. It was so good, but the service was slow. We also tried a pretty interesting pastry dish while we were there.
By the time we were done with our dinner, it was 7:50 and our 24 hour pass ended at 7:56. This left us with not much time to get back to the hotel. Somehow, I dumbly went the wrong way and we blew our last few minutes of our 24 hr pass on a wrong turn and had to buy new single ride passes. It was depressing, but whatever. We picked up our bags and then made our way over to the train station. First, though, we stopped at the convenience store near the hotel to get some snacks for the train. We didn't end up with as much as we thought because we had to spend some of our snack money on extra Metro tickets :(
The wait for the train was a long one, but we stood close enough to the ticket-only area that there weren't too many shady people around us. Eventually, it was littered with other backpackers on their way to Belgrade anyway. The train was a little late, too, so we left around midnight rather than 11:30.
The overnight train was an interesting experience. We splurged and got the sleeping coach, which normally will sleep up to 3 people. It was only the two of us in there, so it worked out well. The train conductor took our ticket and Eurail pass at the beginning of the ride, which put me into quite a panic because that had never happened before. Had it not been for the fact that I later saw the conductor hanging out in the conductor's room, I would have spent the whole night thinking that we had fallen for some elaborate Eastern European train scam. For the record, we got our ticket back.
The train was pretty rickety and the Canadian couple next to us were loud the entire night. Also, we had to clear customs at 2 am and 3 am. That was fun. I think somehow, we managed to get some sleep in though.
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