Are we in Buda or are we in Pest?

Wendy, Nicole and I decided to take a trip to Budapest, and Wendy was in charge of the accommodations. She decided that we were going to rent an apartment for 3 days (Nicole and I were leery since we are used to hotels) but it was her shtick so we let her at it. We went to the address provided, ran the doorbell and the a young guy, let's call him Sergei, answered. It was his apartment and we learned he worked at a hotel and he crashed there when he had renters. So he showed us around, gave us a 1/2 open bottle of wine as a welcome gift and he was off. The apartment was definitely a bachelor pad, but it was fairly clean and in a good location.

After a long day of sightseeing, it was time to get ready for bed. That is when the fun began. There was 1 bed in the loft and then a fold-up sofa. Well after 2 hours of trying to put the bed together, Nicole laid down on it and it collapsed and broke. We tried to repair it as best as we could but Nicole took the pillows and made a makeshift bed on the floor. At 3 o'clock in the morning, we were awoken. There were a bunch of drunkards outside our apartment window singing "Riders on the Storm." Here we are in Budapest and drunk Hungarians are trying to sing in English and they were doing it very badly! While we were hysterical, we were also very tired. Nicole found a hat to put on to muffle the sounds and Wendy and I split a pair of ear plugs and survived the night.

Next up, we decided to do a load of wash because Wendy had a lot of clothes that she had spilt beverages on and I needed to wash some underwear since I had another week and half in Europe. This washing machine had about 10 buttons, all in Hungarian, none of which made any sense. We finally got the machine to do something and it proceeded to run for 3 hours. When it finished our clothes were wet, not sure they were clean and the washing machine had eaten a pair of my underwear never to be seen again.

The last morning we needed to be up by 7 for a 9 am train. Our apartment owner had arranged a taxi for us. Well we woke up at 8 and chaos ensued. We were running around the apartment throwing stuff in bags, trying to shower and dress when we heard the front door unlock and open and a strange man walk in. He spoke little English and started to pack our suitcases! We were like what the hell is going on? We finally figured out that our cab driver was Sergei's father, that we were late and he was trying to help us make our train. As we abandoned the apartment like it had been bombed, we hoped we had everything. We had our purses, our passports and we could buy anything that was left in our wake.

We got to the train station in plenty of time and settled into our cabin for our trip back to Vienna via Hegyshalom. We will never forget our stay in Budapest nor the challenges that come with NOT staying in a hotel!