My Flat Part I

The flat needed redecorating as the last time was more than 5 years ago. I'd done a deal with the local decorator to come up with me to do the work as, even with hotels, it was cheaper than hiring one in Budapest. I spent 5 days there and this is what happened...

I met Hobo in the pub at 07:30 and had a coffee while waiting for the bus. (No beer!) We caught the 08:30 bus into town just 5 minutes walk away from the train station. I got Hobo to ask for the train tickets and just handed him the money.

The First (of many) disasters of the day happened when we got to Szombathely. Due to an unexpected delay with our train we missed the connecting train to Budapest by 5 minutes. According to the route map I made, we could still catch a train to Győr and then get a direct train to Budapest but Hobo insisted it was no good. As he was Hungarian I bowed to his greater knowledge. (however, as it transpired, I'm not too sure that Hobo has used the long distance trains much and I probably knew as much as he did. File this away for next time when I'll insist we do it my way)

We had to wait 2 hours for the next train so we went to the nearest open pub. We also bought some food in a corner shop for the journey. We then caught the slow train to Budapest. At this point I was expecting it to go north to Győr but the train tracked the north of Lake Balaton.

The train stopped several times on empty track to allow other trains to pass and at Ajka we had th second disaster of the day. The train terminated there and we had to pile on a pair of buses. I thought they would be going direct to Budapest but no, a few miles on we got off at some station and got on another train. This turned out to be the halfway point.

We eventually got into Deli Station at 17:00, some 5 hours after we left Szombathely!

First thing to do was to go to my hotel and dump off my stuff, then get the key to the flat.

Got a book of ten tickets and went to the hotel. This turned out to be disaster number three as, in spite of having a booking confirmation, the hotel turned out to be shut. Not closed as in on a tea break but closed for refurbishment.

Oh well, not the first time I've ended up in Budapest without a hotel so I'm more than used to finding one at short notice so I thought lets get the key first before anything else goes wrong.

Went to the address I was given to pick up the key and 4th disaster! Ok I'm lying but the concierge and his mate looked a bit intimidating.

We went back to the flat and then found that the keycode didn't work. We hopped in as some guy and his car went in so that was OK. (Later found out the keycode was right but you only had about 10 seconds to push the door open. We kept trying to turn the handle and by the time we pushed the door was locked again)

After that I went to the sister hotel of the one that was shut. I've heard that a trouble shared was a trouble halved so if the hotel didn't have a room for the night I was going to share my problem of the shut hotel. The hotel didn't have a room for the night but the receptionist knew about the shut hotel and phoned around for me and eventually found me one that had a room for the night.

The hotel was about 15 mins walk away. (It turned out to be about 5 minutes walk away from the Blaha Lujza square which is a bit of a bus/tram/underground terminus.) Got to the Hotel, where they seemed to be expecting me, and booked in and dumped all my stuff off. Job done.