Today was, in short, frustrating, so I’ll try to be quick about my frustrations. We were told we would be in Vienna from 11-7. The bus didn’t arrive in the city until 1pm (so it was a 5 hour drive instead of 3), and then we were told we only had until 5 (purportedly because our bus driver didn’t want to spend that much time there?? Who cares what he wants because he is being paid to do a job??), but we had to be back at 4:45 to make sure we didn’t miss it, so our 8 hours in Vienna had been cut to 4.
Of course once we arrived we were hungry, so by the time we found a convenience store place to get food and ate it it was already 2 o’clock. Then we tried to find a hop on hop off bus but it wasn’t exactly working, so we basically gave up and decided to wander towards big monuments. Of course we wandered towards a church where a lady was standing wearing a tshirt with the bus company logo. Great, we’ll do this. By then it was 2:30. We were told that a full loop around the town would take 100 minutes, but the bus didn’t come until 2:55 and we were already at stop 5. At this point we were willing to do anything to see the city, so we bought our tickets and went with it.
The bus arrived, and it thankfully had audio that we could listen to in English, so that’s what we did. It took us around the city, but for the most part it was a city with lots of WW2 history, museums, theaters, etc, but not too much to actually see in the way of sights to make our bus tour that interesting. The tour finished at around 4:20, and we had exactly enough time to walk back to the bus before it arrived and we left.
Side bar to the fact that this bus was not comfortable in the least. It technically fit 2 to a row, but the seats were so small I could not in any way have comfortably had someone next to me, but luckily I got both of them to myself. To make matters worse was the fact that my knees honestly did not fit in the seats either. If I were sitting straight, my knees would be pressed against the seat in front of me, so of course I had to turn my body. Through poor planning and observation on my part, I’ll admit, there was a bar separating the window panes in my window, so leaning against the window to turn comfortably was also an impossibility. I magically was able to sleep a small bit both before and after Vienna, but in general I was grumpy about the experience.
When we got to Budapest our group all talked about meeting downstairs in an hour and a half to go to a cool ruins bar (not that I knew what that meant, it sounded cool though), but some of us decided we were hungry for real food so Phoenix, Kelsey, Megan, Eliza, and I all went to dinner at a place suggested to us by the restaurant, where I got ham pizza, and subsequently missed the time when all of us said we would meet.
However, I did have an app with a map, and it wasn’t that far to the bar, so I decided to go on my own because nobody else in that group wanted to go. I found it just fine, but when I got there the place was huge, just wide enough and dark enough that you couldn’t exactly see people on the other side, very long, and very packed with people. I walked all the way to the back, all around the upstairs, and I still couldn’t find them, nor was I 100% sure they were still there, and I didn’t have wifi to be able to check, and my phone only had 10% battery.
At this point I really wanted to find them to be able to stay, because it had a really eclectic cool vibe, but I was more afraid of my phone dying before I could find them, and I wasn’t sure my hotel was popular enough that a random taxi driver would know where it was, so I decided to leave.
By now it was midnight, but my path from the restaurant there was pretty well populated with people, restaurants, and bars along the way so it wasn’t too big of a deal to be by myself. Of course on my walk home it got sequentially less busy, with less businesses that were still open, less people on the streets, and generally less well lit. To make matters worse, I didn’t have the exact address of our hotel either, just the street it was on, but from our walk to the restaurant where we ate dinner I knew about where it was.
By them time I was within about 5 blocks from the hotel there was next to nobody else out, and the few people who were out were all men either by themselves or in a group of 5, both of which are inherently sketchy to a woman walking alone on a poorly lit street at midnight in a big city, and honestly I was just getting more and more worked up about the situation, including the fact that my phone was about to die and I didn’t think I could find the hotel without it, and there were no taxis going by (or any other type of car for that matter), so I knew if my phone died I would be very screwed. I managed to seem confident and make a lot of eye contact in an attempt to give off a “don’t mess with me” vibe, and of course nothing actually happened, but when I got to the street I knew the hotel was supposed to be on I went the direction I thought it was but for a number of factors (the largest of which being our hotel does not have a sign that lights up, nor even a very big sign in the day light) I saw no indication of the hotel, nor any other hotel where I could step inside and ask for directions (or any open business for that matter). Mind you, it is still midnight, I am still alone, the street is still less than optimally lit, my phone is still dying, but now I have no clue where I’m going. I stood still and did a lot of looking at the map, thinking about how we had gone to the restaurant, and looking around for our hotel because it was supposed to be close but I absolutely did not see it. There was only one lit sign on the entire street and it was directly in front of me, and I’m not sure what it was for but it was definitely not our hotel and it was not for an open business. Thankfully there was nobody else walking down that street, but by this point I’m near a frustrated/scared meltdown. I thought about turning the other direction, but it looked even more sketchy and less well lit then I already was, plus I didn’t think it was right. Finally I was able to think clearly enough to look far past the lit sign and notice that farther down the street there was light coming out of a business of some sort (though there was no super visible sign of what this business might be) and decided to go there to ask them for directions.
As I got closer I noticed, of course, that it was my hotel, right where it was supposed to be. I went to my room, and as soon as I had wifi I saw that the group posted about where they were sitting 10 minutes ago, so they definitely were still there and I somehow managed to miss them. This added to my frustration because I really wished I had been able to stay, but of course at this point there was no way I was returning to find them.
It took me a while to calm down from the worked up state I had gotten myself into, but I dealt with it by taking a shower and going to sleep, and also I walked 5 miles.
