Train travel, the untold storySep 12, 2010
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A cool little display from the unforgettable 2Night hostel.
The only landmark that allowed me to get back to the hostel...
A day in the pest
| Buda Buda Buda Buda Buda Buda-pest! At 1:30am, Dan and I stumbled out of a cab and out onto the streets of Budapest, Hungary. The streets were deserted but it was clear that they had been bumping only a few hours earlier. Good location – check. With our somewhat irritated driver, we searched for the hostel entrance with little success and were ultimately forced to call Jimmy. Jimmy ran the 2Night hostel and looked as much like a pothead as anyone I’d ever seen before. He showed us to our room (1 of 2 rooms in the entire hostel) and gave us all the details we needed about the place. The beds were heavenly and after a shower, I fell into a sleep that made me whole again. Not until 10am did I stir from my slumber and even then I curled back up for another 40 minutes. Heavy footed I clambered down the stairs to the breakfast area where I ate a Kaiser roll housing some strange pepperoni like circles and two slices of Austrian cheese. I went back upstairs and though I brushed my teeth, I decided to forgo a shower for the simple reason that my entire afternoon would be dedicated to the art of bathing. Our destination? One of Budapest’s premier bathhouses. Get your bath on. When Dan and I entered at the ornate yellow building we noticed one thing right away. It smelled like a fart in some of the rooms. To our surprise many of the couples in attendance seemed to be caught up in some sort of sulfur induced romance, and the odor served almost as an aphrodisiac to their rampant making out. I chalked it up to me not fully understanding the European culture and then started a personal pilgrimage through the world of bath. In total, I sampled 17 separate baths of varying temperatures and about 6 saunas, one of which had the thermostat set at a blistering 90 degrees Celsuis. Four hours later I felt like a piece of Jello that had just been given a shiatsu massage and then popped in the oven. It was good. Afterwards, Dan and I decided that there was no better follow up to the excursion than to sit down at a nice Hungarian restaurant to sample some pig’s blood. It was one of the many ingredients in the sausage plate we ordered and believe me when I say, the portions were healthy. Dan made a dynamite Communist hat purchased and then we raced to the train station to catch our overnight transport to Praha (Prague). The station itself was a model of inefficiency and we were forced to use every minute of the 45 that we arrived early in order to catch our train. In our panic, we first jumped on a train to Warsaw and it looked as though Dan’s prophecy of “You’ve never seen a white boy run when it’s crunch time and all I can tell you is that I am getting on train. It might not even be the right train, but I’ll be on something.” At 19:57 we made it onto the correct car. Sixty seconds later, we were moving. The train car was less that appealing. Six people in a fish bowl led to a swirl of smells that could only be described as what it might smell like if one were to find Oprah’s thong at the bottom of an open grave filled with fish bones and rotten grapefruits that had been sprayed with skunk juices and housed in a county fair port-a-let. All we had to do was make it for the next 7 hours and 22 minutes. Things were going along “smoothly” until a band of soccer hooligans joined the massive metal cars, cramming themselves into the aisles and singing soccer anthems at the top of their lungs. A couple of times they attempted to enter our cabin. I, for one, was having none of that. On one occasion I gave a solid shove to one of the intruders, propelling him backwards into the side of the car where he impacted with enough force that for a moment he seemed to sober up. We had no more incidents after that from wither him or his band of flunkies. The trip was productive in the sense that I finished the audio book I had been listening to and watched a great movie by the name of the Messenger. The main negative points were that we were dehydrated, starving, and trapped in a glass box of emotions and odor. Somehow someway, we arrived at the Prague station and caught a safe AAA cab to my buddy Adam’s apartment who had graciously agreed to let us stay for the week free of charge. After a key procurement fiasco where I almost jumped over a hotel lobby desk and Dan almost got twice arrested by the Hungarian police for hanging out in the streets at 4:30am with 4 large suitcases, we made it inside and passed the F out. It was, as Adam had put, a welcome home. |
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