This weekend featured the most overly-complicated visit to Tokaj ever.

Baldur and I were scheduled to take a train which would arrive in Tokaj at 6:10 in the evening, after which time we would meet Sarah, who was already there. At 6:08 the train stopped very briefly. We were indecisive about whether or not it was actually a train stop. Just before we could make up our minds to stand up and check it out, the train started moving.

I began acting clearly distressed, to the point where the man across from me asked where we wanted to get off, to which I responded, "Tokaj," to which he responded, "That's what I thought" (all in Hungarian!). He mentioned that, had he known, he could have helped us... My Hungarian was not sufficent to provide a response other than "Thanks."

We got off at the next stop, twenty minutes later. There was another train headed back in the direction we wanted to go in scheduled to leave in ten minutes. Being two square to hop on the train and wing it, we ran to the ticket counter, looked agitated for a couple of minutes, decided to get on the train sans tickets after all, ran back to the train, only to arrive at the platform exactly when it was pulling away... Fortunately for us, another train was leaving in an hour, so we got two tickets (each for less than you'd pay to take the metro once in NYC) and drank some train station beers (cheaper than the tickets!).

At 8:45 our local train chugged into Tokaj. This time I was smart enough to ask the friendly conductor which stop was ours (the fifth). We met up with Sarah, ate bean gulash soup (yum!) and drank some delicious Tokaj white wine. That part was good.

Sunday morning we woke up and enjoyed a leisurly breakfast in the Bacchus etterem, the only one in town that was open and that we hadn't visited yet. Before drinking more wine, we decided to scope out town... This took forty-five minutes, or approximately half the time it took to eat breakfast. When I pictured Tokaj, I imagined verdant vinyards stretching far as the eye can see, and rows of wine cellars, and dozens of restaurants serving hearty Hungarian cuisine. It is very cute, but really nothing like that at all. The three notable things about Tokaj are: 1. The cute houses, 2. A 500 meter high hill, 3. The site where the Bodrog (a small green river) flows into the Tisza (a larger, brown river). There are also some nice churches and a museum, but, it being Christian Europe and all, everything was closed.

We drink more wine! This was also a good part.

Around five or six, we think that maybe we should head back to Budapest... However, living in a city and being spoiled as a result, no one had thought to check any of the train times. So, we showed up only to find out that the last train had left twenty minutes before. Oops! This was more or less not a problem except for the fact that Baldur was supposed to be in class at 8:15 the next day... The only train that would sort of get us there on time left at 4:18 and involved one change of trains. Horry!

We had to find a new place to stay -- because late March is not tourist season, the one where we had stayed the night before had been more or less unheated. Certain members of our party were too cold; hence, plan B. From what we could tell, the first hotel had no space but their neighbors did. It was unclear whether we should call the neighbors or just show up, so we called another hotel instead. This place had space and wasn't too expensive, so we agreed to stay and started walking over.

On our way back to town, a car pulled up on the side of the road. The man inside (who spoke no English) said he had come from the hostel to pick us up. Seeing that we were skeptical and unwilling to hop in a car with a complete stranger in a small Hungarian town at night, he phoned up a woman who spoke some English... She and I negotiated; we were still skeptical; she also mentioned that the hostel was quite a ways out of town. We said no thanks and set out to find someplace else.

Eventually we passed one in town with the lights on, and things worked out well. It was a bit more expensive, but they had heating, comfortable beds, towels, internet access, and even breakfast in the morning (although this was moot for those of us waking up at quarter past three). We go to bed and sleep well.

There were two guys in the train station at four in the morning. One of them was just snoring a lot, but the other came over and tried to strike up a conversation... He might have asked where we came from, but I was understandable unwilling to talk to the kind of guy who wears grungy camouflage and sleeps in a train station before dawn, much less talk about being American. He didn't bother us anymore; the train came; we arrived in Budapest before eight. I slept from nine to eleven and have been on another planet ever since.

The end!