Memories of a Rail Junkie in Budapest

Call me a Eurail junkie. In 1985, when they extended the pass to include Istanbul, I endured the “longest” day-long train ride in the world—between Salonika and Turkey. It was a sedentary purgatory that prepared me for the heaven of the Blue Mosque.
 
So when Eurail tacked on Hungary last January, I knew I couldn’t resist. After eight days there, I’m eager to tell other Eurailers the ropes.
 
For a start, don’t use the Eurail pass inside Hungary. Every day you have a Eurail pass ticking away, you lose money in Hungary because the distances are short and the internal fare cheap. (The trains themselves are old and dirty, and the amenities poor.) So buy one of those new-fangled passes in which you have so many days to burn off a limited number of train days.
 
And pay for your trips in Hungary with forints (60 to the U.S. dollar when I was there, at banks and IBUSZ, the state travel agency; you can get 80 to 90 on the street, buy Youth Hostelers warned me that the exchangers mix Czech and Yugoslav paper currency in with the Hungarian).
 
And you can get $100 a day’s worth of forints with your Visa card at the modern-looking bank, MKB, across from St. Stephen’s Cathedral in downtown Budapest. Ask MKB for their other locations if you intend to roam about the country.
 
Don’t get caught with a lot of forints at the end of your stay. It’s a hassle to get them changed back into hard currencies. I unloaded mine at Gyors, the last big city before Vienna—taking a shave (400 forints) and some brandies, which are sold in the ABC state supermarkets from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
 
Don’t bother to get a travel visa in America. The Hungarian consulate in Vienna will give you the documents inside an hour for only a few extra schillings ($18 for the fast service), and the consulate is only a short tram ride from the West Train Station.
 
Finding a place to stay is the hardest part, unless you’re willing to pop for $200 a night at the five-star hotels that line both sides of the Danube. Being a professional skinflint, I spent my first night at a three-star (the Astoria at $70) and the next four days “with a family” at $10 a night, contracted through IBUSZ.
 
Alas, after I took the metro and a bus to “my family,” I discovered I was staying on the far outskirts on the sixth floor of a public housing high-rise with a 40ish widow who left at five a.m. for her factory job. She spoke no English, and her German was marginal. So my hope to learn first-hand about the flight of Hungary away form communism was denied.
 
There are two ways to avoid this. Insist that they put you in the neighborhoods closest to downtown, with a family that speaks English. Or haggle with a family person at the train station: They meet the three trains a day that come from Vienna to rent rooms.
 
The Hungarian News Agency publishes a free four-page Daily News in English that’s full of leads on what’s going on. The day I left Hungary, the lead story was the return of a printing press to the leading clandestine organization. International Herald Tribunes don’t arrive until 4 p.m. the day of publication, and the concierges of the big hotels tend to refuse to sell you one if you’re not registered.
 
One news-starved afternoon, a suave diplomat from Ghana kindly let me get my daily fix from his reserve copy. “Just put it in the slot for Room 612 when you’re finished,” he said genially. And while I couldn’t afford the five-stars’ rooms, I had afternoon drinks on the lovely Danube side terrace of the Intercontinental and coffee at the Hilton. Remember: The best way to feign upward mobility is to take the buffet breakfast at the first-class hotels.
 
Getting around Budapest is a snap. There are three subway lines (five forints—12 cents—a pop) and many new, clean and frequent buses and trams (six forints). You can get a day-long pass for 48 forints. Be sure to get a map of the city with the subway and bus lines showing.
 
Don’t be turned off by the opacity of the Hungarian language. (For more than a thousand years, the Hungarians have guarded their uniqueness by hanging on to their difficult language.) I found an ingenious “dictionary” for 99 forints—it consisted of plastic strips, on one side of which was English / Hungarian and on the other side Hungarian / English. Believe me, you need one when a place to eat is not called some variation of “restaurant,” like in the rest of Europe, but “eeterem.”
 
The language barrier means you should go to a train station with the time and destination of the ticket you want to buy. Each of the three main train stations has white sheets with complete schedules. The lines for this information at IBUSZ are cruelly long, so plan to get to the train station early enough to jot down the numbers of the schedules you need. You’re supposed to be able to buy the consolidated train schedule handbook, but I never found one for sale.

 
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, November 28, 1990