Day 48 - Revenge of the Trains

The battle rages on between me and the trains. I got onto one headed for Budapest (Hungary), left on time, no problems with border crossing / passport, people on the train fine and arrived into Budapest on time. Pretty sweet I thought.

Then I got to street level of this train station. Now it was described as the 4th largest train station in Budapest in the south. First up, no one in information spoke English but tried to help out as much as possible. There were no money exchanges like at every other major train station and no ATMs either. It also wasn't linked to a metro which normally makes getting around so much easier.

This left me with a bit of a problem as I didn't have any local currency, yet needed to catch trams and buses (between ATMs and money exchangers, I shouldn't need any and trying to explain in Bratislava that I needed to change crowns into Hungarian would have been painful).

Also after you've been on a train for 3 hours and need to go to a bathroom, a little bit of a problem with no money in europe. In the end I managed to haggle the bathroom attendant (who didn't speak English) into accepting 1 euro - which was probably 10 times too much.

So I headed off into what I thought might be the suburban shopping area. A really strange place and finally found a cash machine. When you are walking around with an extra 30kg pack, the last thing you want to do is be walking blocks and blocks. Got to the cash machine and it gave me a single 5000 note - which there was no way the bus driver was going to accept (like handing a bus driver a $50 for a $1 fare), if he was going to at all - they are really big here on buying tickets from machines and drivers usually don't accept payment.

So I went to a convinence store to break the note on a drink (when I really should have gotten food) but they gave me all notes back and weren't interested in change. Wandering back to the train station, none of the machines would accept notes, only coins. So off for a chocolate bar and trying to get change in coins was not easy.

Eventually managed to get a ticket for the trams but to be honest, I had no idea where they were going. The diagram of the system didn't make any sense but in the end I jumped on a tram and would see where it would go. Worse comes to worse, spend half a day on trams and then have to walk (kinda why I try to arrive somewhere around the middle of the day so I still have some daylight hours to try to find the hostel).

The thing about deciding about going to Budapest at the last minute, I have no maps, guide books or anything. I kinda pieced things together from dodgy maps and descriptions on the internet. So not the smartest thing I've done - turn up in Eastern Europe, no currency and no idea where I am.