The midnight train to Budapest

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"Two of the greatest gifts we can give our children are roots and wings." –- Hodding Carter

June 5, 2008, 11am Budapest, Hungary


Okay, so it was a 10:30 train. Now that I am safely in Budapest I have to admit how absolutely freaked I was to take a night train in Eastern Europe. The stories you hear are not good, and contain all sorts of crazy tales of druggings, robbery, rapes, murder, gang muggings and of course the big scary story- gassing! When I wrote my last quick blog in Krakow I was already gripped with fear having googled "night train krakow to budapest" over and over in different variations. I was of course slightly relieved to be reassured by some that the idea of a "gassing" is ridiculous- how could someone actually manage to pull it off without killing people (unless they had been trained in anesthesia), how could people actually acquire and lug that much gas around, etc. Of course the idea of organized pickpockets, etc., is warned about in Lonely Planet, etc., so you know to be on your guard. At some level I knew that it was highly unlikely that the train ride would be anything but uneventful, but I managed to work myself into a minor dither. The only thing that kept me calm was that I saw a "damski" notation on my ticket, suggesting that I would be in one of the nicer cabins with all women . . . and possibly a door that locked!

When I asked the guy working at the hostel about a taxi to the train station (it was 10:00 at night!) he laughed and said I would be fine walking the 5 blocks there. Even though I was a little nervous about it (and I knew my mom wouldn't be happy), I walked there anyway. Of course it turned out to be ridiculously well lit and the last couple blocks were in this extremely fancy mall area, complete with H&M and other fun western stores. When I got to the train I was guided to by car by the porters . . . the train car was filled with retired Americans chatting in the hall . . . English everywhere. I was in a lovely three-bed room that I shared with Barbara, a Brit with Polish ancestry. The bed was comfortable and the door locked- quite a relief! I felt very foolish for having been frightened!

At about 1 am when the train pulled to a stop in the middle of nowhere and the porter began slamming all the windows in the entire car shut. The slam woke me up, and my first thought was "they must be shutting the window's for safety since we are stopped in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night." Then the air conditioner turned on. My second thought was, "Shit! We're being gassed! The porter has organized with local hooligans and they are going to break in and . . ." at this point the thought ended because I realized we had both a bolt lock and a chain lock on the door and it would take a lot of time for them to break in, etc., people would have to be pretty drugged to not wake up with doors crashing, how could they really get THAT much gas, etc.

I still cracked open the window and kept my head by the fresh air :-) I went back to sleep after the train started moving again.

I slept terribly and woke up feeling foolish for all my fears. For awhile I thought I had lost one of my camera's memory cards (which I had cleverly(?) kept with my cash and credit cards in my bra, just to fool those train thieves!), which upset me a good bit. Just as I had come to the conclusion that, as we all know, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and I should be lucky to be safe and healthy . . . I found the memory card in my wallet. Phew.

I'm not sure why I was so much more nervous about this trip then about any of the traveling I did in South America. I was in Lima for goodness sakes, and I'm afraid in Poland? It hardly makes any sense, and I'm trying to figure out where that fear came from. Maybe I just need to avoid websites discussing backpacker myths!

Anyway . . . Budapest is beautiful. I'm still not feeling my best so I won't manage the full Budapest-tour, but the buildings are absolutely gorgeous. Yesterday I walked to St. Steven's Basilica which was amazing, and the practicing choir made the experience even better. I walked up to the Parliament building and could not decide whether it was gorgeous or an architectural monstrosity. Pretty amazing, no matter what. There were great memorials to the 1956 uprising, and I remembered learning about Hungarian history under communism during college. The Imre Nagy monument was my favorite, and I enjoyed reading up on him again. Nagy was an anti-soviet communist who believed in freedom of thought and expression, and that the market needed room to grow on its own a bit. His "new course" communism helped Hungary for a couple of years but ultimately the soviets invaded, shot innocents, and executed Nagy. His monument portrays him standing on a bridge with his back to the Soviet monument in the square behind him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Imre_Nagy%2C_Budapest_statue.jpg

The hostel I am staying at has possibly the worst beds ever, but I finally managed to sleep aided by antihistamine. Today I had a long wander which included visiting the large marketplace, sampling some gulash stew, some cherry and poppy seed strudel, and some marzipan. This afternoon I may either go see the castle over in Buda (I've been in Pest so far) on the other side of the Danube, or take the metro up to the baths. Tomorrow I take a 7am bus to Prague!

Lots of Love, and hopefully I will blog on my trip with my mom soon!
Anna