A trip in Europe wouldn’t be the same without missing a train.  I am getting very good at not being at the place I need to be when the train is leaving.

I signed up for an excursion trip to Pecs, Hungary (city pronounced “paych”) where I would take a side-class about Doing Business in Hungary.  It was quite cheap and the class was fun overall.  So back to my train thing, it was scheduled to leave at 7:00am Thursday morning, so I needed to leave my dorm by 6:15am.  The only problem was that the Arena Nova party was the night before and it only happens once a semester.  It is 4000+ people and is held in the “Arena Nova”.  The Arena Nova is a very large warehouse size building where they hold all kinds of events throughout the year.  It is across the street from the dormitory.  I will take a picture of it and put it in Misc Austria shots photo album.  So everyone going to Hungary the next day didn’t want to miss this party.  Most of us decided that we would just stay up until we had to leave for the train and then sleep on the way to Hungary.  This would have worked out perfect, except I made the mistake of going back to my room and laying down “only for a second” around 4 am or so.  Next thing I knew I woke up to the sunlight in my window and it was already 10:30!  I was so mad at myself.  The bad thing was that my group had already prepared a presentation for the class and I was one of the presenters for it.  I’ve found that I do a lot of presenting because I am one of only a few native-English speakers here.  Anyway, I got a call from one of the guys once they reached Hungary and he told me how to figure out the train system and when/another train left that day for Pecs.  I found one that left at 3:30.  Since my cab driver was late and confused, I got to the train station and bought a ticket 2 minutes before the train left.  I jumped onto the train (well, more like stepped up into it more quickly than I would have in a normal circumstance) and right as reached the top of the steps the door closed behind me.  I don’t know how I got there in that close of a time.  I mean half a second, what are the odds of that happening?

So all is well and I was on my way to Hungary.  I had even had about 6 hours of sleep!  Things work out I suppose.  Although I did miss the first day of activities.

The Train had one connection in Szombately, Hungary and I seemed to get that with now problem.  It’s a good thing that Austrian guy woke me up!  So I’m not the most attention driven traveler.  I reached Pecs around 11pm and was very tired.  The guy who called me earlier that day to help me find a train told be the name of the hotel they were staying at.  Lata…, Latsa…, I couldn’t remember.  And I didn’t even write it down.  So there I was in the middle of Pecs with all my bags trying to figure out how I was going to get to where I needed to be as the information booths were closing one after another.  I asked 3 or 4 people if they spoke English with no luck what-so-ever.

By this point I really had to go to the bathroom.  There were some bathrooms down a ways, but it was all in Hungarian so I was a bit confused about which door to use.  Finally I found some pictures.  One had a skirt and the other had no skirt.  Okay I took the one with no skirt.  It was the right restroom, but when I pulled the handle I found that it was locked.  I was so tired and so hungry and so annoyed by this point that I yelled at the door to take out my anger.  The fun part is that a security guard came around the corner right as I decided to do this.  I was thinking.. “oh no in Czech Republic they hit people….”  Thank goodness he could tell I was foreign and only wanted to help me.  He didn’t speak English either.  Finally he went and got a woman for me to talk to.  She spoke German.  I was so happy to find someone I could talk to a little bit!  Later in the trip I realized that Hungarians are obligated to learn German as their second language, not English like Austria and most other European countries.  With this information I was able to speak and get around much better with the people by speaking my broken German.

I was able to tell her I was looking for my hotel and that I was very tired.  She asked the name of the hotel.  I said, “um… It’s something like Lata….Lata…”  and at that point she and the security guard both said “Latarum!”.  I was so happy to hear that.  The Security guard helped me get a cab and told the driver where I needed to go.  Oh, I also didn’t have any Hungarian money at this point, only Euros.  So the Security guard also convinced the Cab driver to take my Euros for a slightly more expensive priced.

I arrived successfully at the hotel LATARUM and spoke German like a pro with the receptionist!  He directed me to my room and gave me a key.  I opened the door and was greeted by one of my group members, and Icelandic guy, who said “Hey Hey loser!”  and gave me a high five.  We all worked on finalizing our power point slides for the next morning and actually ended up having a great presentation!  It was over Pecs and Wr. Neustadt.  Pecs has received the nomination for the European culture capital of 2010, and the presentation topic was to be about how Wr. Neustadt (my home city) could help promote and participate in this.  We had some ideas like holding bi-city concerts and art exhibitions between the two cities.

After class we went out for some sight-seeing.  A couple of the Hungarian students showed us around town and some of the great historical sights.  The really bad thing is that in all of the commotion of the first part of the trip I forgot to bring my camera!  I will try to find some pictures of the places I went online, and possibly some other students have pictures as well.  I know It’s horrible…

Hungary is quite a bit behind the rest of Europe economically and culturally.  The streets are not maintained very well and it just seems as though things are not running very smoothly.  There are no tram-ways in Hungary, just buses.  One of the tour guys was saying that it is because the tram-way employees went on a strike one year. Since the Hungarian government didn’t want strikes to become a habit, they got rid of the all the trams, bought a bunch of city buses, and none of the tram-employees ever got their jobs back.

Hungary is also going through a lot of changes.  It just recently became a democracy in 1989, and before that was communism.  The government knows that it is 30 years or so behind most countries in their form of democracy, so it is implementing all sorts of plans to try and catch up.  The people don’t like this because it means higher taxes and lots of change.  Many people are uncomfortable with change and lash out against the government.  There have been many demonstrations and riots in Budapest within the last month.  Hungary is not fully part European Union because they are still very underdeveloped.  So that is why they don’t use Euros as their currency yet.  The current currency is called the Hungarian Forint.  The exchange rate is approximately 210 Forints to 1 US dollar.

After our sight-seeing adventure we had dinner at the Hotel we took showers and got dressed up to go out on the town to see some Hungarian nightlife.  We stopped in at a few pubs and ended up at a nice dance club.  It was not as big as the one in Prague, but the music was good.  I didn’t dance as much because it was so crowded.  I mainly hung out with the Icelandic guys.  They have become really good friends of mine in the past few weeks.  They were all in my group for the presentation as well as a polish guy so we all got to know each other very well.  Their sense of humor is almost identical to mine!  We have a lot fun.

On the train ride back, which I didn’t miss, we were able to have dinner in the restaurant on the train.  It was a great dinner, and cheap too.  I had Chicken Cordon Bleu with mashed potatoes and a Coke.  We slept the rest of the way to Wr. Neustadt.  It was a long trip, and I still have some homework to do and a exam that we take here in Austria about the class in Hungary.  Hopefully I will visit Budapest in the near future, but I am going to wait for the social stability to return a little bit first.