Day 72 - Hit The Bricks

Yay burned CD. The gal behind the counter was pretty clueless about how to burn two memory cards to a CD. With her broken english, it would have been twice as fast for me to do it myself. It's not only hostels that require patience. Also, the word for two in hungarian must be one. I say I want one hour. She says two hundred forints. That's bull. The sign at the street says 100 an hour. I tell her so, but pay anyway because it's still cheaper than the other places around. Then I log on and find out I have two hours of time. I'd love to chalk this up to kindness on her part, but this is not the way it worked previously, so the process of elimination yeilds incompetence as the most likely cause. Oh well.

While I was waiting, I got to find out how hungarian childern get their sex education as twelve year olds were watching a threesome on the computer. But mores are a lot different here. Anybody who can stay up until eleven can see porn here. People talk about how sex is considered more acceptable and natural here. I'm not sure there's any real connection between the words porn and natural, myself. Oh well.

I've got about two hours before the train leaves. Time to catch the bus back to the hostel, have some lunch, and head out for the station. I still need to shave. One shower for a dozen people is not optimal. At least the toilets are in other rooms. The hostel in Belgrade is supposed to have free internet, so hopefully I'll be adding an epilogue to today's update from the hospital.

Later!

[later]

I'm boiling a second batch of pasta. A black cat sat in my first bowl. :P It's twenty two twenty. I am glad to have a place to boil pasta. The street signs here are in cyrillic text, so letters aren't what they used to be. I saw one word with a six and a four in it. I kid you not. I'm certain that at least one of the rows of aliens in Space Invaders is a letter here, maybe three or four. Regardless, I eventually found my way. I also made sure to get some serbian currency. Hopefully tomorrow's travel will be less harrowing than todays. But, barring a true catastrophe, it would have to be.

It started early. I had given myself a comfortable margin with which to make the train. Unfortunately, I didn't realize until I set foot in the station that I had missed an important detail. The gal at the info office had said I don't need a reservation, not that I don't need a ticket. My eurail pass was good for the Hungary leg, but not for the Serbia leg. I needed a ticket. I stood in line. My train would leave in twenty minutes. The young man at the front of the line was trying to explain string theory to the clerk. Once he was satisfied with the clerk's understanding he left. My train would leave in fifteen minutes. Three more ticket buyers moved through. My train would leave in ten minutes, and there was only a woman and a couple in front of us. Unfortunately, the woman was trying to get across why Deep Blue has consistently failed to best Casparov. Once she had accomplished this noble goal, she got her ticket. My train would leave in five minutes, and I had no idea where the platform (lucky 13) was located. The couple behind the woman spoke no language the clerk understood so the woman acted as intermediary. The clerk, obviously taking pride in her efficiency, went on break. I took off for track thirteen.

I got on the train with a minute or two to spare with no ticket. I knew the name of the border station on my eurail map. I figured I'd try to jump out there, buy a ticket and get back on. There was no telling if there would be another train to Belgrade today. Every stop was a new conundrum. Where's the sign? Is this the border? Am I going to get arrested if I don't have my ticket yet? For some reason, the train always seemed to stop well short of the station signs, even when I moved to the furthest forward car.

At one stop, the train really stopped. All was silence. I decided it was now or never and grabbed my pack. That was Kelebia. I headed for the nearest building. The first room was the office. I got pointed around the side to the ticket window. All I said was "Beograd". The lady behind the counter said a lot of stuff and wrote down a number. 4743. Wow. I hadn't picked up any extra cash since my first day in Hungary. I pulled a wad of small bills and coins out of my pocket. I had 4700. Crap. Then I noticed the fifty forint coin on the ground. Oh yeah, baby. The train was changing engines, so I had plenty of time to get back on. I at least had the foresight to check the schedule and find out that the train to Skopje leaves at 2PM. That'll be cool because it will give me a morning to take a few pictures in Serbia.

I didn't take a single picture on the train, at first because I wanted to stay focused on making sure I steered clear of any "imperial entanglements". After I got the ticket, I got thrown back to second class and the aquarium window. There were four inches of water between the panes and lots of moss. It was cool to watch it slosh when the train slowed down and sped up, but no pictures would have turned out.

There also wasn't too much to take pictures of. Wheat and corn predominated. There were also incredibly ugly brick homes. There are a lot of darker skinned people (turks?) living in them, from what I could see. Some were so terrible they reminded me of documentary footage I'd seen of the favelas in Rio. I'll take some pictures of them tomorrow probably. Part of me is also a little worried about being pegged as an American in this part of the world. I don't really know what anger is harbored here towards the UN intervention of the mid nineties. There aren't any active warnings on the US travel page, but I'd rather not push it.

Okay. It's almost midnight. I better drink some water and get some sleep. I want to have a big fat time buffer tomorrow. Oops, after I book my Skopje hostel, that is.