The day started with no hot water and a bit of a bad mood, and didn’t really get much better until it was almost over.
Once the hot water was fixed, we decided to go back to Budapest-Keleti to see if we could sort out the problem with our travel tickets. When we arrived yesterday, I bought two 72-hour travelcards in the First Class lounge – because, where else? – only to notice once we’d got to the Airbnb that while one of them was indeed valid for 72 hours, 14 of them were in the past.
The woman in the lounge denied that this was possible – even after studying the ticket closely – and declared, literally, that it was not her problem. This could’ve descended into even more grumpy had someone in the lounge not stepped in to help. She sent us to the customer services desk – something of a misnomer – where a woman who clearly hated life told our guardian angel more or less the same thing. I think; I don’t speak Hungarian, but understood she wasn’t the ray of light we’d been hoping for. Eventually, after much inertia, an extra 24-hour travelcard was issued, we thanked our guardian angel, and then set off to the supermarket to buy some water.
Back when I was planning this trip, Duolingo suggest I’d like to learn Esperanto, which I agreed to, for a laugh. I then discovered the PasportaServo – Couchsurfing for Esperantistoj, essentially – and thought I’d try to use the PS to find places to visit and people to stay with along our route. This didn’t come about, but today someone messaged me on Amikumu so we met up and did some mutual tourism. Some of it in Esperanto, some of it in French, and some of it in English.
We started by taking the number five bus from directly outside our Airbnb, over the Erzsébet híd bridge – which bounces quite unnervingly when traffic goes past – and then got off somewhere we thought was near the funicular. We had a walk past the Semmelweis Museum, past a WW1 exhibition and the bar next door which was – hopefully involuntarily – pumping out the Bee Gees’ Staying Alive at high volume, and then on to the queue for the funicular.
We got to the head of the queue for the funicular up to the castle, after I’d been stung 1,200 forints by a cashpoint for a conversion that never happened, only to be told our travelcards weren’t valid for the journey and that we’d need to pay another 1,200 to get up to the castle. We decided against this – muttering, because I’m sure our host had told us it was, and instead walked over the Széchenyi bridge – closed to traffic to accommodate the swarms of tourists armed with selfie-sticks and no self-awareness – where I was stung by a wasp.
Giving up on exploring any more of Budapest at this point, we walked around until we found a bar and consumed sufficient quantities of cocktails to make it suddenly go dark and time to go home. We fought our way through the hordes of pissed-up stag parties and shouty anglophones and eventually found ourselves back at the Airbnb after a quick burger facsimile in a 24-hour eatery-cum-pub which proudly advertised that we could “drink all night.”
I can’t help thinking I might’ve enjoyed Budapest more twenty years ago. The city is beautiful, but everything about it seems somehow to be constructed to cater for people who only go to spend money, probably while they’re getting horribly drunk. It’s much bigger than the other places; perhaps I should’ve studied more where to go.
