From the Eos/N95/Eee of Simon: Monday 13th July

We're catching the train to Budapest today, goodbye Glavni Kolodvor
(central station in Zagreb), hello Keleti Pulyaudvar (one of the three
central stations in Budapest...wait, what?)

On the train just before the Croatian border we are stopped for passport
control, yep all good, yay another stamp, this time to say I'm leaving
:) We get stopped just over the border as well, for Hungarian passport
control, yep you've got passports? Ok thanks bye. What??? No stamp???
Garh!!!

After the passport inspection has been completed, we move off... in the
opposite direction? I swear we were going the other way. Maybe we're
just changing tracks or something. No, the entire journey continues in
this direction until we reach Budapest. Bizarre. To make things worse
there is some tool who thinks that No Smoking in the carriages means you
can hang your head out the window and have a drag, meaning all your
lovely second hand smoke gets dragged into the other carriages behind
you. I was trying to find the guard, but since I didn't know Hungarian
for "There's a tool about 3 carriages up having a smoke", I don't
know how much good it would have done if I had. Plus maybe this is an
acceptable arrangement, since these people seem to smoke everywhere else.

We arrived in Budapest, at Keleti Pulyaudvar, which luckily is the end
of the line. It's much easier to confirm you're at the right place when
there's nowhere left to go. Hop off the train into the heat and noise,
first thing we have to do is look at getting some money. There is only
one ATM in the station, and the queue is about 10 metres long. We wait
for a while before progressing towards the head of the queue, when GAH
the ATM is temporarily out of service. I think it must have run out of cash.

We find our way out of the station and manage to find another bank ATM
that allows us to acuire some cash, so we jump on the metro and head to
Moszkva Ter (Moszkva Square) to find our hotel. Yep every time I say it
I start singing the Scorpions as well.

We're just across the road from Moszkva Ter ("taaaaaake me, to the magic
of the moment...") station, which is convenient. We drop our bags etc
and set to exploring. After walking for about 15 minutes, we reach the
Danube, which has seen better days IMHO. It's very brown and just
generally bleugh. The houses of Parliament of Budapest are an impressive
sight however, I can see why people say this is a pretty place.

We unfortunately have walked to the river pretty much exactly in between
two bridgess, and have to pick which one seems closer. It doesn't seem
to matter, cos wherever you walk in this city, it takes a while. It is a
BIG city. Having a look at the map, you wonder why you can't find half
the streets you're going past, it's because the scale of the map doesn't
allow it. They obviously couldn't fit them in, so only main streets are
shown. This can make things difficult.

We have a walk around the "Oktogon" area which is apparently pretty good
for food, and we manage to find a reasonable place, this place is quite
difficult for conversions on the fly as the currency exchange rate is
one Australian dollar to 155 Hungarian Forint. As such our first meal
cost 4000 Forint, which equates to roughly 28 dollars I think. We ended
up devising simpler ways of approximating like taking 2/3 of the price
and dividing by 100, which made things a bit easier.

After dinner we had a it more of a look around and then slowly made our
way back home. We actually had quite a pace going, but it was slow
because as I think I may have mentioned, this is a bloody big city. It's
actually basically two cities, Buda and Pest, and we're staying on the
Buda side, while everything good seems to be on the Pest side. Bugger!

6740 - Parliament, impressive building