Onwards to Budapest

After two and half day in Slovenia, I'm off to Budapest, my prime destination this trip. But Slovenia has earned a little soft spot in my heart, particularly Ljubljana. Beautiful and mellow in its quiet charm, it had a peaceful and laid back attitude that does not intimidate and allows you to slowly take it all in. The hostel I stayed at, Hostel Tresor, was clean and nice, and extremely central to the old city. I had the pleasure of sharing a room with a lovely roommate in Adelaide, another exchange law student, this time from Belgium. Her continued comfortable presence made this temporary home warm to return to after my day trips. I will miss our soulful conversations and her gentle smile. On my last night I also met Ming, an avid marathon runner from Austin, Texas, who paid forward an earlier friendly gesture he received by treating me to a ramen dinner, in Slovenia! I promised him I will pay that forward too, on my last leg, to try to treat another traveller on a nice dinner.

The trip to Budapest was a 6-hr grinding bus ride. I had initially wished to take the train for long trips. I'm particularly fond of European train travel. But in this part of Eastern Europe, it seems that bus travel is the way to go for most connections. Had I chosen the train, I would had to ride first to Vienna, then off to Budapest, unnecessarily extending my journey many more hours. In addition, owing to my last minute trip planning, it was virtually impossible to book a train ticket online. Due to some archaic reason, after purchasing an online international train ticket, they would have to MAIL you the hard copy (either to your home or a hotel in your DESTINATION country). Needless to say, that was impossible. So I resolved to booking online bus tickets, and found the company FlixBus quite a popular and easy choice. As it turns out, it wasn't as bad as I thought. The driver made two quite prolonged rest stop, one even long enough for lunch at a pit stop restaurant. In fact, since the bus wasn't packed, it was rather comfortable. Had I been on a train, I might have had to battle for a seat and hold onto my overly unnecessarily heavy messenger bag on my lap. We arrived shortly before 7pm, and owing to the easy online instructions on how to take the metro to my hostel, it wasn't too long arriving at the comfortable of a thankfully clean, and quite lively hostel in the middle of everything one again. This time, I'm in a room with three other Irishman, one of whom, Colin, a commercial lawyer currently working in the UK (what is it with lawyers on this trip?) went out to grab a bit with me.

Coming to Budpest from Ljubljana is like leaving a small town and being dropped into the middle of a big city. Your senses are immediately over stimulated by the lights, the rush of traffic, the frequent pedestrians and weaving bicycles. In fact, it feels like Hong Kong. We roamed up and down our street, looking past the numerous burger and kebab joints in search for something more authentic that doesn't ring like a tourist trap. I get the impression that this city never sleeps. I'm going to hold off on bar crawling for another night. Tonight just going to mellow out. Budapest is hip. It's a little chaotic, a little crowded, a whole lot messy, and it seems, a ton of energy.