Everything's better when she's around

Rachel, Ben and I left Grenoble the afternoon of Thursday, February 23. We took a train to Geneva and met up with another friend, Stephanie, who would be joining us in Budapest a couple days later. We went to a hostel (the same I stayed at back in October, actually) and I went to sleep while they went out for Chinese food. I had woken up that morning not feeling well and my condition had gradually worsened throughout the day. By 10pm I had a horrible cough, general discomfort and a creeping headache. Sleep beckoned, especially since we had to wake up at 6:45am to take a train to Geneva airport in order to catch our 9am flight to Budapest. Things went flawlessly and I chuckled to myself as Rachel and Ben had to check their large bags, while I snuck mine past the check-in woman's watchful eye. Rachel and I brought massive backpacks, but this was Ben's maiden voyage so he was only equipped with a small rolling suitcase, a constant joke throughout the trip.

Still feeling poorly, I slept most of the flight and woke up just before landing in Budapest. We disembarked and walked across the runway (typical easyJet procedure; in order to cut costs and increase turn-around time, they rarely pull up to jetways) and it struck me - I WAS IN HUNGARY. The passport control line took ten minutes and followed the standard glance-flip-scan-stamp routine. We grabbed Rachel and Ben's bags from the luggage belt, walked past the shady taxi drivers, and searched out the airport transport bus (amusingly named the REPTERBUSZ; as soon as we saw it we laughed and started growling and acting like raptors) to the metro station. We each bought two transport tickets, anticipating needing to use one for the bus, but no one else was validating theirs so we just pocketed them and hopped aboard. Ferengy Airport is fairly modern, but the remnants of the past were instantly visible as soon as we boarded the Soviet-era bus and drove to the station. Narrow ramshackle houses slept in the shadow of Ford billboards as brand-new Audi A8L's aggressively overtook ancient Peugeots and random Hungarian brands. There were no street signs and no bus stop markings and the bus driver didn't speak English, so we sat on the bus until we arrived at our fairly obvious destination, Kobanya-Kispet metro station.

We walked off, the bus left and we stared at each other while old Hungarians milled around lottery outlets, pastry shops and more mobile phone accessory stores than we could count. What now? Earlier I had consulted my faithful Rough Guide to Europe and knew we wanted to take the metro to the city center, Deak Ter, so we walked into the bustling station and found a city map. Aha. The Deak Ter stop was along the blue line and since we were at the terminus, Kobanya-Kispet, it was obvious there was only one platform to choose from and we simply had to hop aboard. We validated our tickets, walked onto a tram with "CCCP Fabricated 1973" markings and rumbled into Budapest.

Little did we know that the snows would soon arrive...


I have to run back to the dorm to grab a snack before my 6pm basketball game, but hopefully I'll be able to update more tonight or tomorrow (after the obligatory Friday snowboarding session, of course).