First off, in case you haven't noticed I uploaded about 450 photos from Budapest onto Facebook. Almost all of them are labeled so you should be able to tell what the heck is going on. And yes, I know I took about fifty photos of the Parliament building. Deal with it!!Also, for those who need more info on the missing luggage situation, what happened was that I had a very short layover in Vienna while flying from Budapest back to Copenhagen. And by short I mean I have no idea how the airline thought this would work. The scheduled time between landing and the closing of the next gate was thirty minutes. Keep in mind that this was a smaller flight that had to take a bus to and from the terminal. Plus I didn't realize that traveling between Denmark and Hungary requires that you have your passport and carry-on checked again (it turns out that only works for countries that are party to the Schengen Agreement, which Hungary will not be a part of until March 2008... thanks a lot). And of course this plan assumes that the flight will actually take off on time which didn't happen either. However Tyrolean Airlines (a.k.a. Austrian Arrows) at least had a plan to get me on board the next flight. I was hurried off the plane and onto a special van that took me to an expedited customs and baggage check and then I got to through a top secret door straight to the jetway and onto the plane.
My checked luggage on the other hand was not so lucky, so I got to be the guy who sits next to the conveyor belt for an hour with an increasingly dour look on his face as he starts to realize that the baggage from his flight has been completely unloaded. After an hour or so I gave up and looked for a place to report missing luggage. Never having lost any before I didn't quite know what to do. There was no place with a sign saying "lost luggage," but I went to a security desk and asked. After some confusion we concluded that I needed to go to the SAS arrival counter. I went over and took a queue number, and I think I was about twenty five or so from the top. I walked around pretending like I might actually find my bag lying around and came back after ten minutes to discover that the line had moved one spot. I repeated this exercise in futility again and once again the line had moved one spot. It was a little past 11 o'clock at night. I don't know about the train from the airport to downtown, but the last train from central station to home stopped running around 12:40 or so. People were crying. There was an announcement every fifteen minutes or so that started with the phrase "due to extraordinary volumes..." Things were not looking good for the Pete-ster. Fortunately the line started to move much faster and I think it only took another twenty or twenty five minutes or so to speak to someone. Although I was half expecting to be told I was in the wrong line, things started to look up. They knew that the baggage had been left behind in Vienna it was just a matter of getting it to Copenhagen. So I got my service number and went home. I could track the progress online and the baggage arrived the next afternoon. I wasn't fretting too much, since I was completely reassured by the fact that the SAS website didn't even have an option for "lost luggage," only one for "delayed luggage." Anyway it finally got delivered around noon on Thursday so all is well.
So anywaaay back to the fun stuff (sorry, that was a really long explanation of the luggage situation). I landed in Budapest early afternoon last Thursday. My first two tasks were to take get some forints (the Hungarian currency) and get to the hostel. The first was accomplished pretty easily, and let me tell you nothing makes you feel like a pimp than taking 50,000 of anything out of a cash machine. I tried not to think about the fact that the exchange rate was something like 185-to-1. Let me tell you that is not an easy computation to do in your head. From the other travelers I spoke to the general method of converting to dollars (U.S. or Canadian) was to take off two two digits, divide by two, and then add some kind of fudge factor like 10%. Then I found my way to the ticket counter for the airport minibus and got a ticket, and eventually made it to Kalvin 
House, my hostel/hotel for the week. At $70 a night it was a little spendy for me, but in anticipation of the heat I decided I would need a little pampering - this turned out to be a very good choice in my estimation. It was a very nice place with a very helpful staff, and my room had fifteen foot ceilings, a small patio (from which to watch the ten or so semi-feral cats play in the courtyard), a nice bed, a shower that didn't look like it would be painful to use, and (gasp) an air conditioning unit. It also had free internet and wi-fi, although I didn't bring my laptop. Yep, things were looking good and after unpacking I took off for my first of many hikes throughout Budapest, this time to Géllert Hill.
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