a weekend trip to hungary's biggest summer resort

... would've been really cool and action-packed, had we actually gone in the summer. Unfortunately, as I conveniently forgot after two straight octobers in SoCal, there's this season following summer that's called "autumn" or "fall," and 90% of everything that caters to summer tourists is, well, closed. That was only really an obstacle, though, when we wanted to eat, find somewhere to sleep, party, or take a bus or train. Riiiiight.

The travelling party was just Patrick and me, which was a nice departure from the "go everywhere in Hungary with large groups of American students" strategy we've all unintentionally been pursuing so far. Our itenerary:
2pm: get out of class
4:30 pm: miss train
5:30 pm: catch (more expensive (a relative term, since it was like 800 forint)) train, but have to sit in the smoking car, cause there aren't any other seats
6:15 pm: think my clothes are going to smell like smoke forever, since everyone in our car has been smoking since before we left the platform and nobody bothered to open their window for ventilation
8 pm: miss our station to get off the train
9 pm: arrive at hostel after an hour of walking from the next train station in the sporadically lit countryside (almost all widely-spaced homes, no open anything), discover we're the only guests
9:05 pm: discover the hostel guy speaks hungarian and german, and doesn't want us to try to understand what he wants to tell us in hungarian. Hostel owner calls this guy (who looked like maybe our age or a little younger) on the phone to come to the hostel and translate. He stalls for time by taking us to the room (narrating things in german, like "This is the light switch for the hallway") and leaving us for a minute while he waits for the guy to get there.
9:10 pm: The guy arrives, and the following exchange results:

[hostel-owner is at desk in little office, guy stands in front, I enter]
Hostel owner: [something spoken really fast]
Guy: "When will you leave tomorrow?"
Me: "Kilenc-kor? [9am]" [hand gesture indicating approximation]
Hostel owner: [something]
Guy: "If he is... not here when you leave... lock gate... outside gate? And then throw keys through the fence to nearby the door, and he will find."
Me: "OK"
Guy: "Where are you from?"
Me: "The States?" [I feel like the intonation makes it apparent that I don't agree with American politics and would like to impress upon people that I'm not somehow stereotypically American, whether that's true or not (which I don't actually know)]
Guy: "Where in the US are you?"
Me: "California. I go to college? university? in Los Angeles." [nobody knows where colorado is, so it's convenient to cut to the chase]
Guy: "I see. Why are you... here?"
Me: "I'm studying mathematics in Budapest this term."
Guy: "I see. why did you choose... Hungary?"
Me: "Well, it's my first time in europe, and..."
Guy: [interrupting] "This must be... strange for you."
Hostel owner: [something fast]
Guy: "Please pay... um... thr-... um..."
Me: "Tudom magyar szamok?" [I know numbers in Hungarian?]
Hostel owner: [quotes price]
Me: "OK"
Hostel owner: "Good evening"
[exeunt]

and i thought to myself, y'know, now that you mention it, yeah--"strange" is a pretty good word for it.

Anyway, that was about one third of the English we spoke all weekend, which would be a good sign, like we're learning the language, only most of our Hungarian consisted of the expressions, igen, nem, and um... az [that]?

The argument could be made that the trip was even more interesting because of our utter out-of-placeness--though we saw some other tourists later, all of them were Hungarians, which felt kinda cool, actually. Anyway, everything was very pretty, and I'll give some highlights of the next day at some later point (specifically, the number of trains, buses, etc. we missed), but maybe no photos because Patrick may have lost his camera, and I don't have one of my own.

Szia!
Sam