Most of this day was spent on a seven hour train from Prague to Budapest. It sounds kind of painful, but it wasn't so bad. We had to wake up around 6:30 to get our stuff together and take the tram over to the train station. We waited a while in the train station trying to figure out what platform we'd be on. Mia and I tried to get our next batch of tickets. We ran into a problem when we were told that the train that we wanted to get from Sofia to Brasov did not exist. Instead of dealing with the nicer person at the train ticket office, I figured I'd save it for Budapest.
Anyway, like I said, the train wasn't too bad. I think Umma was delirious for a while because she kept on laughing at everything and was making weird faces at James. I watched some Dr. Who and slept for a while. We were in one of those 6-person compartments, so we had one seat empty. There was a period where Mia was sprawled across both her own seat and the empty one next to her in order to sleep. Got some reading in and some blogging. We went through Bratislava, which delighted Mia as parts of the city that we did see from the train really did look like the Bratislava you see in the movie Eurotrip. We also saw some goats along the road, which also made Mia incredibly happy. Umma also made us pack up all of our stuff and wait around 20 minutes before we got to Budapest. One of the people working on the train laughed at us. Good times.
We arrived in Budapest around 4:45, but we had to exchange money and deal with the whole train issue. We grabbed our tickets for the international train ticket line and Umma went off in search of a way to ATM. While we were waiting, we were approached by a homeless man who was digging through the trash and eating off of scraps of chicken. He started talking to Halmony, so we all pretended we only spoke Korean and ran away. We later felt bad and gave him some bread and leftover salami that he had. That made him pretty happy.
Meanwhile, we should have been foreworn that waiting at the Budapest Keleti train station was hellish as many, many people had written something to the extent of "I hate this place" on the walls. We wait like 30 minutes to get our number called and when we finally did, we ended up with this devil woman who barked different things at us the entire time. When we asked to book trains, she yelled at us and told us to go back to the Information booth to ask about the times. When we told her that we had the times we wanted, she glared at us, checked our computer and then told us the train from Sofia to Brasov through Bucharest didn't exist. She clearly did not want to answer any of our other questions or help us in anyway, so we eventually took our Information ticket and sat back down. The woman at information confirmed that the only train that we could take from Bucharest was an overnight train. This threw off the carefully planned hostel reserrvations that we had made, but seeing as we're eventually flying to Milan from Bucharest, we didn't really have any other option. So, we took another train ticket number and waited another 30 minutes. This time, the woman we were working for was significantly nicer and we managed to gett from Sofia to Bucharest. She claims that we don't need reservations for any of the other trains we're taking in Romania, but I don't think that's true. I'll double check at another train station. I don't want to deal with the Budapest train station ticketing offices anymore.
Anyway, by the time that hellish process was over, it was 6 and we still had to lug our stuff to the hostel. I made sure to check directions from the Budapest train station to our hotel in Prague, which made life significantly easier for us. Cut down at least some of the random circling that we usually end up doing. Other than the problems we had finding the Metro stop, the trip to the hotel was relatively smooth. The area was significantly nicer than the place in Prague and the room is huge and has a normal shower. It actually kind of reminds us all of a smaller and more European version of the place we stayed in Korea. The Internet's also very fast and we have a flat screen. It's awsome, I know.
We decided to go back out again at almost nine-ish. We were hungry and I thought that if there was any sight that I thought everyone had to see to shed the image of Budapest's kind of shady train station, it'd be a walk along the Danube River at night. There's definitely something magical about that walk, and you can't capture the view of the river on film.
We took the Metro to the Parliament building and walked along the Danube from there. We looked at the Buda Palace and the Fisherman's Bastion across the way and I showed everyone the pretty moving monument of shoes along the river. It's a Holocaust Monument of 50 bronze shoes. It memorializes the Hungarian Jews who were killed by the Nazi's puppet government. They were shot along the river bank, but were forced to remove their shoes so that they could sell them.
We walked further along the Danube and passed the Chain Bridge and decided that it was probably about time that we ate something. We thought about trying out one of the boat restaurants along the way, but at 10:30 at night, there apparently are pretty limited dining options. We ended up at this Thai restaurant. It was pretty good, better than what I expected at least.
By the time that we got out of the restaurant, it was almost 11:30, which was a problem because, according to my guidebook at least, the Metro and other forms of public transportation stop running around. This posed quite a problem, although we did see some random buses running along the street, so maybe the times changed or something (?). In any case, we just decided to walk. The walk from the Parliament building to where we were (around the LIberty Bridge) actually took us about halfway back to the hotel anyway, so it wouldn't be too bad. It actually wasn't. And the streets of Budapest, even at midnight, definitely felt a little safer than the streets we walked around in Prague.
We made it back and I think all of us got to bed fairly late.
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