Monday, June 24
So here's us, just after midnight, sitting dejectedly in the Frankfurt Hahn International Airport, which is not actually located in Frankfurt, waiting for a bus that we've got no guarantee of even getting on.
We'd been sold tickets for the 11:45 bus into Frankfurt, a mere 30 minute wait from when we had landed. But when we got outside, the bus stop was crowded beyond the concrete block meant to contain it. When the bus showed, we shoved our things into the underbelly and got back in to what could be loosely defined as a “line.” A woman was on the steps leading into the bus, arguing loudly with the driver in German. What we'd eventually made out is that she had purchased tickets for the 12:30, and was trying to get on an earlier bus, and the driver wouldn't let her. Perfectly reasonable. But she was having none of it. Eventually someone from inside the station had come out and helped remove her. But then as the rest of us asses of masses tried to push our way into the bus, the driver halted us, ran down the bus and back, and came back up to say there was room for only two more. Amanda was already on the bus; i was stuck behind some teenagers far pushier than i. She tried to get the driver to allow me in yet, but he wouldn't budge, so she got off.
I was bitching pretty vehemently about the situation, how they'd oversold the tickets by seriously double, because there was clearly still a full busload of people standing outside in the beginnings of drizzle when the bus drove off. Amanda was being more rational, talking calmly about how we'd just get on the next one and arrive at the hotel a little later. As we came to a rest against the metal pull-down door of a closed shop, she opened the suitcase, removed a pair of pants, and announced her intention to go change as she started in the direction of the water closet.
As she was a few paces away, i tossed casually, “Did we just trade personalities?”
She stopped in her tracks. “I think so...”
When the next run of the bus came by at 12:30, we were more assertive. Baggage thrown in the compartment, came into the line right near the front like assholes, got in and sat down ahead of most of the other people. Frankfurt was not a very long stop for us; it almost wasn't worth paying for accommodation even if things had all timed out the way they were supposed to. Our train out in the morning was leaving at 6:22, leaving very little time for actual sleeping.
Our hotel was literally across the street from the train station, so that would be nice in the morning; however, it was not so great that night. The airport shuttle made a total of three stops before coming back to Frankfurt Hahn, and the Frankfurt HBF Train Station was the last of them. We got the scenic route all around the city, taking two hours before finally reaching our destination. To the great surprise of the night clerk, we checked in at 2:30am, informing him that we'd be leaving by 6.
Amanda took a shower, i took a shit and uploaded a blog, and then we slept for an hour and a half, charging our devices. Those five things i've just listed were apparently worth 50 Euros. In the morning we had our things packed up and were out of there in a record ten minutes.
Our train to St. Polten left the station exactly on time, at 6:22am. A six-hour ride, we both slept for most of it, but during intermittent moments of wakefulness we'd get some shots of the beautiful German countryside as it passed, misty-topped green mountains passing us by constantly and all that natural splendor. We knew our last couple days would be mostly seeing rural areas from trains, and this is exactly what we had hoped to see.
The train actually arrived in St. Polten, Austria, right on time as well, at 12:35. Our connecting ride to Budapest was to leave St. Polten at 12:59, giving us a window of 24 minutes to find some food and board. We had not eaten yet at all, you see, other than the chocolates found on our pillows (kind of a peanut buttery Kit Kat). Breakfast wasn't to be served at the hotel until 7, and though there were pastry vendors open at the train station, we had not had the time to stop and sample their tasty products.
But if the shock from being on a train that was on time to the minute hadn't worn off by the time we entered the terminal, it did a moment later when we discovered that our next train was delayed not by the eleven minutes Amanda had incorrectly and optimistically read it as, but by an hour and eleven minutes, leaving at 14:10. Well, plenty of time for lunch, i suppose.
St. Polten, though, is not a large train station. All we saw for food options was McDonalds. Getting to another floor, we found a tobacconist, a bookstore, a convenience store, more promisingly a grocery store, and finally a deli, where we picked up some sandwiches, a pretzel, and what we thought to be some nice fruit juices. The juices turned out to be kind of a flavored, carbonated water, and were mostly awful. My grapefruit selection was superior to Amanda's dragonfruit, but not by much.
Every subsequent time we'd check the departures board, our train would be delayed by another minute. 14:11, 14:12, 14:13, 14:14.
If only we'd been delayed in a larger station, where there's so much more to do. But no, our choices were to hang out down in the station itself, where it is warm-ish but crowded, or up on the platform itself, where it is gloomy and raining.
There's a little glass shelter with some benches up above, and so we decided to head for that. By the time we sat down, our train was scheduled for 14:17.
This sucks. We'd chosen the 6:22am train from Frankfurt because it would land us in Budapest around 4pm, giving us some time to do a little bit of exploring of another city before we had to leave. It wasn't much time, granted, but now that we're probably not going to reach Budapest until 5:30 or even 6pm, i'm sure that a lot of things are going to be closing, and we'll probably just end up sitting in our hotel with the WiFi, doing things we could just as easily do at home.
Waiting for the train now...
--
Got on the train, had to push our luggage past a parked baby stroller, containing a sleeping baby, that someone left right in the middle of the walking aisle next to the luggage racks, in order to get to our seats. We found them occupied by an older man and his briefcase. Amanda politely informed him that he was in our seats, and he refused to move, even after we showed him our tickets. He clearly spoke only German, but was waving his arms around as if to tell us to find another place to sit. Instead, we found the man who checks tickets and asked him for assistance, which he provided enthusiastically. The pair argued back and forth for minutes, and i could tell that our benefactor was on the verge of losing his shit and yelling at this pretentious twatwaffle, when finally he picked up his suitcase and left. The ticket man followed him back, so we never got a chance to thank him. I don't know what became of that guy, but i haven't seen him on the train since.
Nothing much else to report; train's been moving for a couple hours now, there's internet available on the train, sometimes, and that's pretty cool. Otherwise, just watching scenes of Germany flow past us through rain-streaked windows. Wanted to get something from the dining car, but they're not serving food, despite canned audio after every couple stops saying they are.
--
We have made it to Budapest, despite the odds.
Here's what i mean. Shortly after i finished typing out that last part of the log, the train stopped in Gyoer, as it was scheduled to do. As we were pulling in to the train station, Amanda made the decision to go use the water closet, since we'd be getting off just three stops later. It's been our experience throughout the trip that using the bathroom just before getting off the train is a good idea, since many of the stations have pay toilets, and in some countries, public restrooms at all are few and far between. But you can always count on the train to have available facilities.
A far larger percentage of the passengers than i expected began clustering up near the exits. I had expected most of these people to be going on to Budapest, not getting off at wherever we were. It only makes sense, usually the largest amount of people are going to the larger cities. But then the train shut down, and a bunch of railroad workers started coming through, telling all the stragglers like me that we needed to get off the train. It would be going no farther.
Everyone, including a man who had been snoring loudly and sleeping through his cell phone alarm for the past hour or more and had to be woken by security, disembarked. I gathered up our things, but stood there like a dumbass, waiting. They kept telling me in Hungarian or German, i'm not sure which, that i needed to leave the train, and i kept trying to explain that i was waiting for my companion, who was in the toilet. They didn't seem to understand, even though i was holding two backpacks. I was starting to wonder what the hell happened to that girl, she'd been gone an awful long time. The train had been clear for minutes. I was worried that she had come out and been shooed off the train without being able to let me know. But i couldn't make that assumption, just in case she was still in there. I couldn't leave her on the train.
The worker between me and the lavatory moved ahead of me, giving me a clear path to the bathroom. The indicator on the handle was red, meaning occupied. I knocked. The occupant made a noise indicating a human presence within, and i correctly identified it as Amanda.
“Hey! We need to get off the train! What are you doing in there?”
“What? Why?”
“I don't know, but we need to get off the train! Hurry up!”
See, this is why you shouldn't poop in public, ever.
One of the workers had said to me “autobus,” which seems to be the general word for bus in every European language but English. We got into the bus station, a dimly lit and crowded place, and saw two buses out front. One was just closing its doors. A man in a yellow vest was standing near the door. I said to him, “Budapest?” and he shouted excitedly, pointing at the one that had just closed up, of course. He rushed out into the rain, assuming we'd be behind him, and we were.
He flailed his arms at the driver, who got out of his seat and out of the bus, then took our suitcase from me and ran it around to the other side of the bus as he waved us in.
We couldn't find two seats next to each other, so we ended up sitting at almost extreme opposite ends of the bus, me two seats from the front, Amanda almost all the way in the back. The bus ride lasted for right around an hour, which i thought strange, since it was yet to be over an hour and a half by train to get to Budapest.
Then we found that we were not in Budapest. The bus had simply taken us to Tatabanya, the train's next scheduled stop.
We followed the herd of people straight onto the train tracks themselves, bypassing the station and the platforms, and loaded directly into a train car with its doors hanging open. There was a sheet of paper taped to the window that said something about Budapest, so we, being surrounded by people whose language we did not speak, were forced to assume it was the right train, but harbored doubts.
Every other train in the station left before we did. There were people crowded into the entryways, forced to stand due to lack of available seating. I later overheard some of the standing group's conversation with a woman who was floating around the aisles; they were speaking in English. The elder man was telling her that they were from Mexico: he, his wife, and their five daughters, traveling around Europe for “some time now.” Budapest was, for them as it is for us, the last stop on their journey, and they are flying home tomorrow. “Seven people, thirteen bags!” he mused. That explained why the airlock was full of luggage.
The train did get us to Budapest, over three hours late. We had been excited for this city. There was a reason we'd gotten so little sleep last night and missed the hotel's breakfast just to get on a 6:22am train: it was so we could get to Budapest by 4pm and be able to actually do some things in another foreign city, rather than just spend the day traveling again. But by not getting into the city until almost 7:30, and then finding out the airport was, again, pretty far from the city and thus our hotel pretty far from the city, we didn't get checked in until after 9.
So here we are, in our hotel, far from the city, and it's 10:00 and we've still not eaten dinner, because nowhere within walking distance is open this late. We can't go have adventures in the city because it's at least an hours' walk and we've got no transportation, unless we want to pay for a taxi again (we don't). Whatever the hell happened to that second train, it completely screwed us out of seeing Budapest other than our hotel and the airport. These last few days have been a total waste. We should've seen Budapest, we should've seen Plovdiv. If we'd known it was going to turn out this way, we'd have just paid more to fly out of a different city. Our travel planning would have been done quite differently. It was nice to save money by flying out of Budapest instead of, say, Athens, but if saving money were what this was all about, we'd have just stayed home.
We've ordered a pizza, it should be here soon. It's about the best we can do.
In the morning, the hotel has a breakfast buffet, so that's something to look forward to. After that, we head to the airport, and we fly back to Chicago at 9:30am.
It's definitely been a good time, but i'm not too sad about leaving. I'm ready to go home.
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