Rough start in Budapest
In my last post I left off with my arrival in Budapest, which initially was pretty smooth. Unfortunately things went downhill pretty quickly from there. My excitement for the ride into Budapest had woken me up a little bit, but I was still kind of drowsy from jet lag. I decided to take a shuttle bus from the airport to my hotel since it seemed cheaper and I just felt safer to me at the time. I was looking out the window the entire ride into the city…which is probably why I realized pretty quickly that we were starting to go in circles. We were at it for about 5-10 minute before I took out my phone and brought up Google Maps. My hotel was the one we were circling around.
After 10 minutes we left and started going in another direction. The driver let a passenger off at his apartment. Then we dropped some more people off at their hotel. Then we went back to wandering around the neighborhood my hotel was in. At this point I was pretty concerned. My worst feat was that I had fallen for some scam, booking a hotel that didn’t exist. Since they didn’t take any money up front so it would have been a pretty bad scam, but still… Fortunately after another 5-10 minutes or so the driver found my hotel and let me out. That’s when the next issue came up.
When I walked into the lobby the lights were dim and there was a metal grate over the reception desk. After wandering around the hotel a bit to see if there was another reception desk i went online and started calling every number listed on the website. The reception desk phone rang for the first number I called, but luckily someone answered the second one. There were lots of language issues, and I was way too tired to work through them. Eventually I gave up, and looked for the next nearest hotel online.
The only hotel that looked like it was in walking distance was about 15 minutes away, so I lugged my two bag through the streets of Budapest towards that hotel. To make matters more interesting, the day I arrived was also a national holiday. So there were crowds of people everywhere. When I arrived at the hotel I explained my situation, but the man at the front desk told me that there were no rooms available. I don’t know what happened in the minute it took me to collect my bags and start to walk out, maybe he took pity on me, I don’t really care, but he somehow found an available room for me. It was a smoking room and really expensive, but it beats wandering the streets of a city I’ve never been in before all night long.
From here things start looking up. The next day I walked over to my original hotel, sans luggage in case my room wasn’t available, but I checked in easy enough and they didn’t charge me for the night I wasn’t there. I go back, get my bags and move into my 1 bedroom apartment hotel room. It was a pretty sweet deal, for €36 a night, I got a one bedroom apartment all to myself. It would have been a little better if the reception was open 24/7, but everything worked out so I can’t complain too much.
I didn’t stay in the one bedroom for long though. I found out that I could stay at the Central European University’s Residence Center for € 10 a night…and, unlike the apartment hotel, they had air conditioning. I spent one hot, sticky, sleepless night in the apartment hotel before I checked out and moved in to the CEU dorm, which was my home base for exploring, apartment searching, and blogging for a week and a half.
