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Day 9
I checked out and headed for the station to leave my luggage. A large sign indicated the ‘Luggage Room’, which turned out to be a big but very dark room despite the bright sun outside. A man sitting behind the desk took my bag and wordlessly tore off a ticket for me. I wondered how many hours of sunlight he got each day. Maybe his eyes had adjusted to the lack of light and were now super-sensitive.Another short metro ride back to the centre of the city, and I switched lines to the city’s park. Lunch used up most of my remaining florents at a restaurant near the national museum of culture. I’d had quite enough culture the previous evening and was feeling very poor, so I skipped that museum in favour of the transport museum, which cost just 150 florents to enter (about 40p, US$0.28).
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Day 8
No repeats of the previous days delay – I knew the metro by now and I was in the centre in no time. I had a few other things to do before seeing more of Budapest, the first of which was to arrange to leave it. I went to the MAV office (Hungarian railways) to book a seat, and found yet another take-a-number system. I took a number and went to play with the touch screen information terminal while I waited.It was quite a long wait, but the system on the touch screen terminal was excellent. I looked up trains to Istanbul, Venice, Bucharest and Athens, so I had quite a lot of food for thought by the time my number was called. It was all getting very complicated. I could go to Istanbul, where I could then connect to Greece easily, but I’d be way ahead of John, Chris and Sunil so we’d probably never regroup. Bucharest would be a good place to stop on the way to Istanbul or Athens, but it seemed silly to go there simply because it was conveniently located. Going to Athens directly was a long trip, and it would probably result in passing the others in Italy somewhere but not managing a proper regroup. Venice was an interesting option, putting me in northern Italy to get to Greece from the other side, and almost certainly meet up with the others en-route, but it meant cutting short on Eastern Europe.
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Day 7
I imagined I might be sharing a compartment with some seasoned travellers, and that we’d exchange stories about our adventures long into the early hours.Of course, as it turned out, none spoke English – though one, a Romanian farmer, was happy to try out his high-school English. The others also looked as though they were on business rather than pleasure, so we were all in bed by 22:30.