Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

10/11: Traveling to Budapest this weekend! Julie and I decided to go to Budapest and visit the sites of a Soviet country. Our plane was at 8:15 out of Rome so we decided to take the 3:40pm train out of Perugia to Rome (a 2:30 train ride), but we had to transfer twice to get to the Rome Airport: Foligno and Roma Termini. When we arrived at the Rome Fiumciano airport, we had about an hour before the plane boarded. Luckily, Julie spotted the Malev Airlines ticket counter. It was a tiny ticket counter in the middle of the huge checking-in area. So we walked over to where this youngish guy was checking in another lady to a plane. When it was our turn the guy took his sweet time checking us in, answered at least two phone calls from his mother, tried to get us to talk about ourselves in Italian, and then finally gave us the tickets. He did, though, allow us to carry-on two bags instead of just one. We thanked him and ran to the security line. It was very long, but we got our stuff all ready and waited our turn. Going through security was fine; the guy in front of me left his belt so I handed it to him as his luggage was getting looked at at a separate counter. He thanked me as I walked back to the security belt to wait for Julie to get through and to get the rest of my stuff. One of the airport security guards came up behind me; “Do you speak English?” “Yes, I do.” “Did you have the liquids?” WHAT? I did bring some liquids, but they were all in my little 3-1-1 bag, and I had taken it out of my bag and put it in one of the bins. He waited for Julie to grab her stuff and then motioned for us to follow him to another counter so he could look through our stuff. He asks to see our liquid bags which we hand to him. “Do you have any more liquids?” At which we replied no; we really didn’t have any more liquids. He gave us a strange look, stared at us; we stared back. But we really did not have time for this since our plane was boarding then. So we tried to hurry things along with him. He finally asked to look at our plane tickets, saw we were late for the plane, and allowed us to go. We ran to passport control and waited impatiently for the line to go. Some people behind us tried to tell us that their plane was leaving soon and wanted to cut in front of us to catch their plane. After we told them that our plane was boarding NOW, they apologized and went back to their spots in line. We got through passport control and ran down the airport to our gate. But instead of a gate, we had to wait for a shuttle to take us to another terminal. We jumped in front of the shuttle door, hopped on, and got our ways to the front of the shuttle – right in front of the exit doors. The door opened we sprinted up the escalators, not really noticing the lady at the top of the escalators who called out to us which gate we were suppose to go to. Thinking that she knew where we were going was quite strange we just thanked her as we rushed by. Julie was in front of me when she ran past the gate, so the lady at the top of the escalator yelled at us that we were passing our gate. I slid to a stop and turned back to the gate. The two gate agents quickly stood up. Before we were even at the gate, they told us to get out our documents. We handed them over quickly, and they started talking in rapid Italian. One started to get on the phone, but the lady at the top of the escalators had run after us and told the other lady she had just called whoever the other one was trying to call. The man gate agent got us checked in and on the plane. We were so relieved that we made the plane that it took a couple of seconds to realize we made the plane because they had held it for us. That has never happened to me before. They never hold planes or call out your name if you haven’t boarded. But they did this time. It was amazing. We could not stop talking about it the entire plane ride. Unfortunately with all the stressing and running we had sweat through our clothes and just shed most of them on the plane. We were also a little worried that Malev airlines was going to be very sketchy, but that plane was very nice. Not sketchy in the least bit. The plane ride went smoothly; we arrived in Hungary, and grabbed a taxi to my friend Dan’s apartment where we were staying for the weekend. Julie and I felt so gross and tired that we just fell asleep as soon as we got there.

10/12: I woke up very early Friday morning. I started turning a little bit which woke up Julie (since we’re sharing a bed this weekend). Julie was hungry so I went downstairs and awoke Dan from his comfortable couch-bed so he could make us eggs for breakfast. We ate and then started the adventure that is Budapest. Our first stop was St. Stephan’s Basilica. Part of the church was closed (but closed I mean you could not go down the center aisle) because there was a funeral for an old Olympic athlete occurring. But we went to the roof of the church. We walked up and up. Finally we came to about a half-way point with an elevator, tried to get on, but a church employee yelled at us not to get on it so we found the stairs and continued up. But the view was worth it. Plus, it was very cool to walk around on some sort of permanent scaffolding in the innards of the famous church. We started back down, but the only way down was by elevator. That was definitely fine with all of us. The first elevator took us back to that middle point, and that’s when we realized that the reason the lady yelled at us about the elevator was because it was the wrong elevator, and she was yelling at us to get on the other elevator. Oh well, we got our workout. After St. Stephan’s, we walked to an ice cream place (different than our gelato but still good), figured out how to get stamps at the post office, and then walked across the river to Buda, since the entire time we had been in Pest. In Buda we walked up this massive hill to Buda Castle and Fisherman’s Bastion. We all got so hungry walking around so we found a restaurant close by where the waiter confused Julie’s “We want to eat” with “Black teats.” No idea how that one happened, but we ordered some goulash for lunch which was very tasty. The restaurant, though, was playing some of the most interesting music. It was mostly big American hits from the 80s and 90s, but the singing was replaced by a recorder, like the instrument you learned how to play in the 4^th grade. Lunch was followed by a quick stop at Dan’s apartment to get bathing suits, and then we headed for the Turkish baths. It really wasn’t a “Turkish bath” because it wasn’t built by the Turks, but that was about the only dissimilarity. It was a very surreal experience. We had bundled up to get there since it was freezing cold outside. Julie and I have on sweatshirts and our North Face jackets, and I put on my ski cap. We got to the bath house (huge and yellow and very ornate) which looked like an old Russian palace. Julie and I were left on our own to figure out the women’s locker room and met Dan outside. The air was so chilly, but we hopped in one of the pools as soon as possible, and the water was so warm. And the pools were packed. We kept laughing at how this very macho man was getting a back massage from one of the fountains in the pool. We switched it up with the pools every once and a while, but it was miserable every time we got out of the water since the air temperature was so cold. After about an hour and a half we decided it was time to head back to the apartment to shower and make some dinner. We went to get our refund for the baths (we were suppose to get 400 forints back, but the lady checking us out knew we were foreigners and never gave us our receipt for the refund. We realized she was taking advantage of us like 30 seconds after it happened, but the way the system worked, we tried a couple times to explain what happened to other people, but they kept pointing us to other people. There was no way we were going to get our money back so we just gave up. With wet heads we decided to take the metro back (the first metro in the world!) back to the apartment, stopping at the grocery store for some chicken (turned out to be some sort of mystery meat) to cook for dinner. During dinner some of Dan’s friends came over to talk and pick up stuff they had left in the apartment a couple days ago. Right after they left, Dan’s roommate Claire came back with like 4 friends. We hung up for a little bit, went up to their apartment’s roof which has a very neat view of the city, and then decided to head out to some sort of very laid-back club. We walked a fair bit to this place to find out it was closed. After walking to another place that this guy, Mike, was leading us to for about 45 minutes, I finally asked him exactly how much further it was because it was 2am and we had been walking for such a long time. He never gave us a straight answer back, so Dan, Julie, and I hailed a cab back to the apartment since we would have had to walk about an hour back. Very tired because we had walked about a total of twelve miles that day, we headed to bed as soon as we got back.

10/13: Today we slept in so much and didn’t get out of bed until about 11:30 which was glorious. Julie made us eggs for breakfast. We planned a course for the day: House of Terror followed by a little bit of shopping and a nice dinner. The House of Terror was amazing. It’s a museum dedicated to the atrocities committed by the Nazis and Soviets in Hungary during their occupations of the country, but the museum itself is in one of the old interrogation/execution buildings. Each room was set to music – starting with some music similar to Black Hawk Down when they were explaining the Soviet and Nazi occupations and take-overs. And in the basement of the building are the old prison cells as well as some solitary confinement cells and some torture rooms. One towards the end of the tour had a video where some of the women who were placed in one of the prisons confronted their guard – in the present day. Somehow the producers or whoever got all these elderly women together, back in the prison room with their guard, and they were explaining to her how much pain and suffering the lady put them through. It was very strange, but sort of neat how they were able to confront this lady many years later and explain to her how terribly she acted. After the museum we came back to the apartment and re-headed out to McDonalds because Julie and Dan were both hungry, and we all wanted to visit the first McDonalds built behind the Iron Curtain. It was definitely an experience. The food is still terrible, but we decided it was okay since it could be a tourist stop. The McDonalds is in the middle of a very large shopping street so we window shopped for a little bit, got very cold, and went to a café for some caffe latte and hot chocolates. We were going to go out for dinner, but it’s so cold outside and we are still so sore from walking everywhere yesterday that we’re ordering in Pizza Hut and watching a movie tonight – mainly because we’re getting picked up by a cab tomorrow morning at 5:30am. Julie justified McDonalds and Pizza Hut today by saying that we needed an “American” day, and we haven’t had one yet. So this is it. Calling Pizza Hut was a bit of a disaster since after finally getting the number and finally calling them and telling them the address and order they said there were technical difficulties and we had to call back in a half hour. So did and got the pizza and it was delicious! I can't believe we ate McDonalds and Pizza Hut, but we did and it was....well McDonalds and Pizza Hut. We also decided to watch a movie, Amelie, since Julie had never seen it; we took a break in the middle of it because someone was shooting off fireworks which we watched from the apartment roof. We tried to go to bed early since we had a cab picking us up at 5:30am but Julie and I didn't get to bed until about 1-2am. That girl is a tickling monster!

10/14: Julie and I woke up at 5am. I am not a morning person to begin with so waking up really early is not my thing, and its worse after only like 3-4 hours of sleep. So we got all our stuff, said our goodbyes, and jumped in the cab - it was still pitch-black when we got to the airport. At the airport we got our tickets and hopped in the passport check line. When we were very close to the front this elderly woman comes over to us and starts speaking to us in Hungarian. Looking at her blankly and then telling her we spoke English, she got really excited and told us she spoke English too. She had picked us out to start talking to because we had the same looking passports (She was most definately holding a US passport too. Why she thought we spoke Hungarian while holding a US passport is beyond me. I've been thinking about it for about 7 hours now). After asking us where the line was and pointing her to the back, I think she pretended not to hear and continued to talk to Julie and cut tons of people behind her. But she graciously let us go first at the passport check since we were there before her (If you can't tell, I am incredibly grumpy in the morning and did not want to make small talk with this old lady). Unfortunately, both Julie and I did not feel well so we were sitting and trying to drink some water, but it wasn't really working. So we both just slept on the plane ride back which made some of the sick feelings go away. From the plane we took a train from the airport to the main train station. We got off the train, tried to buy tickets from some broken ticket machines, helped a German family figure out the ticket machine in German (I was quite impressed with that). We were walking down to the restrooms when I realized I didn't have one of my bags and had left it on the train. I sprinted back to the train, forced myself on, but unfortunately the train started to move with me on it. So I got 2 free rides to and from the airport today. Got back to Roma Termini with about 5 minutes before our real connection to Perugia. The train was packed, but we got some seat together. Unfortunately for us today (and wonderful for the rest of the week) since EuroChocolate is happening right now in Perugia so its mad packed. Julie and I were mean and just pushed through the crowd. But we made it back to the apartment!