Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Thanks to Bonnie, I was once again dragged into discovering more of the surrounding world during July of 2004.
The final route was an amalgation of cities that would be nice to visit, cities where there was someone to visit and cities that more or less fit the route.
First stop: Budapest! I felt pretty early on in the planning stages that the most difficult/stressful/error-prone part of the whole journey would be getting from Budapest's airport and to the hostel where I'd meet Bonnie. It's a whole different thing to be lost in a foreign country alone than to have someone else to be lost with, and even more so when you don't have a single clue about the language. Arriving at a warm airport with a few heavily armed policemen strolling around and being unsure about what kind of bus to look for didn't feel too promising either. One quick (okay, I waited in a short line for quite a while) visit to an information desk, taking off one shirt and finding a nice pair of Belgian backpackers to hang on to made everything feel much better, and I got all the way from the airport by bus and metro to the hostel without the slightest incident.
Sometimes, unexpected things happen. A wrong turn, a wrong thought, and you end up in a place you never expected to be, out of your way to some more or less extreme degree. You're just in a place where you feel totally lost.
This, for me, was such a place. I ended up getting off a very empty tram here somewhere between ten and eleven in the evening our last night in Budapest. Bonnie, more or less by accident, got off with most other people at an earlier stop. There was an announcement of some sort over the speakers and the other few people in the tram got off, so she jumped off to check. When the tram suddenly got moving again I was still on it and she wasn't. Figuring we'd meet up back home and that getting off and on a different tram meant paying for another ticket I stayed on. Then I gradually realized the route felt very wrong indeed, and eventually my worries got the upper hand and I jumped off as indicated above. The inconspicious green area is a cemetery, safely protected by a high wall and with a carefully locked and forbidding gate guarded by dogs. The area to the south is industrial, and also very much locked up and abandoned at night. The road is most likely a pretty normal road running parrallel with the tram line, but it's hard to say since it's basically completely unlit at night, giving the worried tourist the feeling that you could be pretty much anywhere in the middle of nowhere.
For reference, I present this wonderfully cluttered and compressed image. The green dot is roughly where we started, getting on the late-night tram by all indications (number, for example) bound for home, the red dot where I got off the tram and the blue dot is where I'd very much prefered and wished to get off the very same tram.
Fortunately, I had modern technology in the form of mobile phones at my disposal. So I placed a semi-panic-stricken call or two to Bonnie and got her moving to look for me (she'd got herself a nice travel-all-you-can-pass) while trying to figure out my position myself as well. Even better than modern technology though, I had the indispensible Lonely Planet guide with me! With it I guesstimated my location (as soon as I got to a streetlight that is), and then managed to get the exact location pointed out on the map in a nearby gas station (thank someone for 24-hour open stores in gas stations!). Then I just set off to the nearby railway station and spent some worked-up half hour or so waiting for Bonnie to get there and hold my hand the rest of the way back.
I'm just glad this kind of thing didn't happen on the way to the hostel the first day or something. Then I wouldn't have dared trust the Budapest public transportation, and especially not my own ability to figure it out, at all ...
Kava! Kava, kava ...
All the fun of Brussels stemmed from more or less one source, one concept, one good idea brought into reality with great result; the Hospitality Club. In all fairness, there are other implementations of the same idea, that probably work just as well too, but that's not really the point. Follow the link for more information. The point is that Bonnie found someone to host us in Brussels, and that we had a great time staying there and socializing with a whole bunch of other people our host hosted at the same time more or less by accident. We also spent a nice evening meeting a few other local Hospitality Club members in a bar with 2004 different kinds of beer. You just can't have a bad night when it starts in a place like that ...
And a good and long night it was, ending somewhere close to 5 or 6 am. That made getting up at 9 to start the travel home feel a bit more ... demanding than one might expect.