Hungary

laura was reluctant to come back to hungary after her -not so great- experience there with liz in the big post college europe tour. they, along with all tourists to budapest, were constantly harrassed by the subway ticket checkers and even paid a fine once when they hadnt actually ridden a train without a ticket just to avoid being taken to the local station and spending the afternoon arguing... then after standing in line for hours at the ticket counter they were told they were too late to buy tickets for a train that was leaving hours later, and made to pay a fine on board the train because they were riding without tickets...

but kirk wanted to check it out and we were already in the area and surely the city would have cleaned up their tourist extortion act by now... or not... the situation was ridiculously the same, and our tix were checked sometimes three times on the same platform... ticket machines were closed, tourists were constantly being fined.... locals never bought tickets and were never checked... and on the last day out, we missed our train to the czech republic because we had to stand in line for 35 minutes for a metro ticket before standing in line another 20 minutes for a train ticket at which point, the agent refused to sell us the ticket saying we didnt have 'enough time' for the train that was leaving 5 minutes later and was literally 20 steps from the ticket booth...

but we loved visiting the hungarian baths, the history was interesting and the city was beautiful. we also visited the smaller city of eger nearby for a very relaxing few days prior to going to budapest...