Car trouble
I booked our hostels through HostelWorld.com and, as I expected, it wasn’t that easy since most locations were either closed or fully booked. In Budapest, we ended up in a hostel, a looong way from downtown, that, during university terms, doubled as a dorm. The five of us slept in a room where normally three girls spend their days.
The address I received upon booking was quite wrong, with a non existing street in the wrong district. Still, we managed to find the location rather quickly with the help of a tourist office we stumbled upon when driving into the city.
As we learned later, the hostel was actually closed when we arrived, meaning I had to deal with Hungarian speaking grandmothers running the front desk. My Hungarian was put to the test, but I survived.
Being so far from the city center, we parked our car close to one of the metro stops to eat pancakes and visit the castle district overlooking the city. After that, we had a drink at the Irish Cat Pub, where Jimbo probably embarked on his most fantastic experience to date, almost 9 years ago.
When we took the metro back home, I had a vision our car would have been broken into. It was. A side window was smashed and we drove around to find cops to report the crime to. They pointed us to a nearby police station which turned out to be closed, so we ended up with a makeshift plastic window put together at the next door gas station.