day 56, budapest

Before catching our train me, sam, john and katy went to another traditional restaurant and had probably the best meal yet. Katy’s dad is Hungarian so she knows more about the food then me and for the last 2 days I’ve just been ordering what she has been, so went for the cabbage leafs stuff with mince and rice, with polenta and this cabbage/onion thing with paprika. The portion was massive and it was bloody tasty, it was amazing, and it cost less then 4 euro. As john would say “it was sensational”, probably between alternating sips of limonada and frappes, however his limonada was not up to scratch purely because it wasn’t served in a jug! After that behemoth of a meal we caught a cab to the train station and got on our train. Unfortunately it was not like the one I took from Belgrade to Bucharest, with the gangway in the middle like a normal train with 4 normal seats around a table either side of it, instead of the gangway next to the side of the train and separate cabins of 6 which you could make into a bed or just lie down on. The train had none of the old charm, it did not choo-choo and rattle around like it were from a black and white movie, it was a very standard modern train and quite boring, I loved being able to yank down with all my weight to shift the window and stick my head out and watch the world go by. I was sat with sam which was cool, part from his snoring habit. I got stuck into my book and rinsed through 300 pages in 3 hours before trying to get me head down. After trying every position you can with 2 small seats and a rucksack as a pillow I didn’t get a great sleep, partly due to the lights remaining on, sam’s snoring, being so damn uncomfortable and the slightly dodgy people near us, a family of traditional gypsies who seemed to relish trying to look as shifty as possible (and got kicked off the train at the Hungarian boarder by customs), this dick who was on his phone for 10 hours, having a phone call every 10 mins and chatting for 20mins at a time, however he knew he was getting a phone call as he got a text, but still let his phone ring with the shittest mono ringtone in the world and two twenty something blokes who played backgammon for the whole 12 hours (those fucking dice…). Anyway part from that everything went smoothly, got up at 6 by the sun rising and others rousing and polished off my book, which I loved bar the last 50 pages which just couldn’t live up to what was building but had to have the ending. The Budapest train station is pretty cool, and caught the metro 6 stops to my hostel, which is a boarding school where they let the dorms out in summer and is cheapest in town. I met 2 English blokes called eliot and Michael who are both good guys, and we went round Budapest for the day, the first hour in pissing rain before heading into a pub for lunch (amazing goulash soup) then heading back out once it had cleared up. Tonight going out for dinner and getting a good nights sleep as I bloody need it. In the morning heading for some Turkish baths before having to make the decision to catch the train to Bratislava, or Vienna or staying for another night. Budapest is very cool and prob warrants coming back here for a longer stay, however I need to start picking up my pace a bit and planning my days with travelling a bit better if I am to do all that I hope to do. I really want to hit up both munich and hamburg, so will go through to munich somehow, then onto prague and Poland, before northen germany, Holland and Belgium for my train home. Also I’m quite staggered how different hungary feels compared to romania, it is a lot more westernised, tons more people speak English here and for some reason I feel a lot safer here then I did in romania, even though I never felt unsafe in romania, particularly not brasov which was bloody lovely.