18-June: Prague->Budapest

We got up earlier than usual (8am) today to pack, eat breakfast, and head to the train station to leave Prague.  It actually worked out very well for us that the day had awful weather.  We had a 7 hour train ride, so the weather didn't bother us at all.  I forgot to plug in the computer to charge the night before and my iPod battery was low too, so we had a lot of nothing to do on the train.  There are many stops between Prague and Budapest, we had a vast array of characters to share our compartment with (another 6 seat compartment).  Between Bratislava and some other small Slovakian town, we had a group of 4 men sit with us... it was kind of sketchy, they were talking about politics the whole time (from what we understood, it was all in Slovakian), and one guy spoke very good English too us, he was also carrying around 2 cell phones, and used both of them at various times during the trip.

We pulled into Budapest and immediately started heading towards the hostel.  It was a 2km walk, but didn't seem too bad, mostly because we had better directions.  When we found the place, we saw a sign on the door to call the apartment number using the dial pad... so we did, and it rang... and rang... no answer.  We tried again, same thing.  Then some people walked into the building, they let us in and pointed us in the right direction, we walked to the front door of the hostel and... it was locked.  We were beginning to get very worried.

Next, we waited around a minute and then decided to go find something to eat and come back later.  We walked around the corner to look at the menu of a Chinese restaurant and then, when we were about to head off to find an ATM, we were flagged down by a young man, he was the host at the hostel we had reserved.  Turned out that he was nearby at some apartments that can be booked through the hostel.  We were pleasantly surprised when he asked if we were hungry and said he would be cooking dinner soon.

At dinner we found out that 3 other Americans were staying there, and they were all from UNC!  Dinner looked very strange, it was pasta with some odd looking sauce.  We were both hesitant to try it, but it was actually pretty good.  It was nice to have a home cooked meal for a change, even though it was odd.  I think we're in for an experience here in Budapest.