Budapest, Hungary

Arriving from Vienna, our first impression of Budapest: “like Vienna, but more bohemian.”  Case in point:

1. Ken arranged for us to stay in an apartment for two nights and the owner told us he would pick us up from the train station.  This was somewhat odd, but we figured, maybe he’s just a nice guy?  His email correspondence said, “I’ll meet you at the beginning of the train.”  Hmmm... kind of vague instructions, right?  We had no idea where the house was located, but sure enough, we stepped off the train in Hungary and he was standing right there on our platform. “Ken?”  he asked, as he picked us out from the crowd.  We piled into his car as he multi-tasked on his iPhone (Ken instantly liked him).  We sped to his neighborhood, where his gave us the keys to his house and even set us up with dinner reservations that night (best goulash ever!).
2. At the ATM on our way to dinner, Ken decided to pull out $US 100 in Hungarian currency -- and the machine spit out one bill (only one bill!) with the value of 20,000 forint.  We laughed -- when the dinner bill came to 8,000 dollars, it felt like we were playing with Monopoly money.  (As a sidenote, Hungary’s long term plan is to replace their currency with the Euro).
3. The following day was “annual trash day,” that is everyone piled junk from their house onto the streets (i.e., broken bookcases, old toilets, flat tires... not your conventional bagged garbage) and we were told, “please ignore the garbage, the gypsies take what they want and then the garbage trucks will come along tomorrow.”  Sure enough, massive junk piles of over ten feet accumulated in the streets but by the next morning the streets were perfectly cleared.