We both slept a lot! After going to bed early we got about 12 hours of sleep. Clearly my body needed rest, and looking back on the trip now I think this was the turning point to my quick recovery.
All the same, we wanted to be well-supplied for the long train ride to Budapest, so we went out for some shopping. On Sunday (yesterday) pretty much every shop was closed – they take a Sunday day of rest pretty seriously in the city. So today was the shopping day.
First we bought some snacks from the big EuroSpar next to our hotel. They had lots of interesting stuff there, and it was fun to pick an assortment and hope for the best. I also went in to the drug store to resupply my aspirin. The pharmacist working the counter was unlike any pharmacist I’ve seen in Japan – she was wearing a lab coat, sure, but the cleavage she was pushing out the top was like some kind of Halloween “sexy pharmacist” costume. We managed to find some aspirin/vitamin C combo tablets, and I tried to keep my eyes on her face and not elsewhere while making the transaction.
Back to the hotel to do some final packing, and I asked Kuniko if I could see the reservation ticket to check our seats. She reached into her wallet and… it was gone. She couldn’t find it in her bag, in the room – nowhere. She vaguely remembered throwing away some receipts and papers from her wallet the day before, but the hotel room trash was already taken out. Oh no!
We didn’t want to stand for the five hour trip to Budapest – so we headed to the station to see if we could make another reservation. As we arrived at the station it was clear something was going on. There were a lot of people checking the boards and it seemed like trains were delayed all over the place. The line to the ticket office was really, really long, but we had no choice but to get in line and hope for the best. Kuniko felt really bad about throwing away the ticket, but I didn’t blame her – it was something that could happen to anyone.
Finally we reached the front of the line, and luckily the staff that helped us was much better than the jerk we had last time. He explained that there was a fire on the German side of the border and that no trains were getting through. That meant that the train we had planned to take wasn’t coming, and so we’d need to rebook on another train. We told him we really wanted to have reserved seats whatever the price and he found business class seats for us on the train leaving at 3 pm. It shifted our plans about four hours later, but the idea of having seats for the long trip was totally worth the 50 euros that we paid for two biz class seat reservations. Our rail passes already covered most of the cost, so it was an easy decision.
So it turned out that losing our reservation paper was the best thing that could have happened to us. If we hadn’t lost it we would have checked out of our hotel, went to the platform and only then found out that the train wasn’t coming. We would have tried to rebook another train but it is likely that it would have been booked up by then. Never for us has bad news turned to good news as fast as that.
We walked back to the hotel and requested a later checkout, and the super nice staff said we could do it with a small 20 euro fee, and we jumped at the chance. The staff were so accommodating at this hotel – we were both grateful for the extra time with soft beds, air conditioning and a clean toilet. I didn’t want to have to use the toilet in the container box in front of the station!
So we had a chance to chill out in the room, eat chocolates and drink lots of liquids until it was time to catch our train. When we arrived back at the station with our suitcase, we couldn’t find our train on the board but the staff said it was on platform 4, and sure enough the train was already there waiting. We got on board and took our seats in business class – wow! There was a lot of leg room, a free welcome drink of sparkling wine, and plenty of space for our suitcase and bags. It was so great to go from possibly standing for five hours to reclining with sparkling wine. Once again the judicious use of money at the right moment can really change the situation dramatically.
As the train left we really got into the spirit of things and ordered up a light meal. The staff brought us a plate of Austrian beef and potatoes with a half bottle of red wine for Kuniko, and I had a Greek vegan salad and a tall glass of Austrian wheat beer. The staff was super friendly, opening the bottles, pouring my beer with a flourish, and generally being super helpful.
Later when we paid for the food (by credit card) he asked Kuniko if she’d like to tip. Tipping in Europe is a weird and sometimes awkward situation – I’ll write more on this sometime. She said, “Yes, I’d like to tip. Can you set the tip?” He entered in about 10% of the bill as his tip and it was done.
As the train made its way towards the Hungarian border we saw plenty of modern windmills, generating electricity and making the skyline a bit more dramatic. I hadn’t seen as many since we were in Denmark, where they really went big on wind power.
The staff changed once we entered Hungary, and we had to present our tickets once again. A guy down the way in business class got caught without a ticket, and had to pay for one on the spot. I wondered if there was any sort of penalty for that but it was handled pretty calmly from what we could hear.
After some back and forth on whether we should go out for dinner that night or just get to the hotel, we decided we shouldn’t miss the opportunity to eat a dinner in Budapest. I had a restaurant I wanted to try so we rode the train all the way the Budapest-Keleti station, and then used the Bolt application to get a taxi to the restaurant.
Rather than private drivers Bolt was working with the existing taxi companies, so our transportation was a yellow checkered taxi just like you’d see in New York. As we approached our waiting cab (reserved through the app) other people tried to steal it – for them it was an empty cab just sitting there, and so the driver had to determine if they were the people that had reserved or not. It looked like a pain for the driver, but when we showed my smartphone screen to him he knew it was me and we could go.
It was a short ride to TATI – Farm to Table, the restaurant that I had chosen. The interior was stylish and upscale, not the kind of place you want to show up to with a rolling suitcase. The staff acknowledged our reservation and offered to stash my suitcase in their storage room – nice!
Although the staff were a little snobby I was excited to eat some chicken paprika, and maybe drink some of our favorite Hungarian varietal kekfrankos. They had some on the menu by the glass, so we ordered up our food and waited eagerly for it to arrive. We focused on the pouch of warm bread with chive butter and tried not to fill up on it.
Kuniko ordered the chicken paprika and I ordered sheep dumpling soup with tarragon. The paprika was excellent – not a lot of sauce but the chicken itself was seasoned perfectly it was a slightly more modern take on the classic dish. The soup was excellent too – the tarragon balanced nicely with the meat and broth, I just wish there was more to eat. As for the wine it was a lighter kekfrankos so not as intense as we were hoping for but still OK.
While we ate there was a group of three sitting at the table next to us speaking English. One guy, an American, was talking non-stop about all his world travels and how old he felt as he was approaching forty. The other people struggled to get a word in as this guy was just a firehose of information output. It was hard not to listen and I sort of wished that they were speaking Hungarian so that we wouldn’t have to understand.
After our meal it was a little hard to get the attention of the staff, it seemed like they were not super interested in us or our needs, but finally we could pay the bill and wrap things up. I retrieved our suitcase from their storage area and refrained from stuffing it full of the wine bottles that they had lying around in there.
From there it was back in a taxi and on to our Budapest hotel. The drive was not really direct, but apparently that is just the way the streets work because later another taxi took the same indirect way.
We checked into our hotel and the staff seemed a bit, well, odd. Kind of like checking into a haunted house or something? We were tired and just ready for our room so we didn’t really mind. The elevator had strange controls – just touch panels with no really feedback after touching – unlike a button when you press it. That had us sort of tapping and pushing and pressing in various ways until finally the icon lit up. We didn’t really get good at it until the second day of our stay.
The room was a little different from previous rooms – decorated in a sort of 1970’s American style with lots of browns and tile and old lights. It was clean, though, and so we went straight to bed. Another day another country!
