June 21st:
Our last day in Budapest, but we have till 9 pm to further explore the city. After a quick visit to the Central Market Hall, we walked to the House of Terror, the former headquarters of the nazi and communist governments in Budapest. Impressive, depressing and interesting. The films they showed us there were awful, just as the gallows in the basement and the many stories from survivors.
After this we needed fresh air and walked to Heroes Square and spent the rest of the afternoon playing cards and relaxing in the park right next to it. We didn’t feel like walking much and had seen most of the things we wanted to see anyway. Our train wouldn’t leave for a few hours so we decided to just enjoy the sun.
A few minutes before midnight we departed from Keleti station. The first night we travelled through Hungary and Serbia and arrived at Beograd at 8 in the morning. Serbia is really beautiful by the way. I had this grey and forlorn image of this country but the landscape is absolutely amazing with green mountains, vast fields and lovely houses! We had booked seats only for our first night but were lucky again and had an entire compartment for ourselves! This didn’t result in a great night of sleep obviously, but at least we had some space and the possibility to lay down.
At Beograd we got on the night train to Istanbul and met a nice British couple, who shared our compartment. We would be staying almost 24 hours on this train, but it looked comfortable and we had nice company. It’s a good thing we decided to make this journey before high season, because once again the train was practically empty and the British couple got their very own compartment as well after a while.
At Sofia we were joined by Helle from Norway, which was really fun. She was travelling to Istanbul as well, where she would catch the train to Ankara. The day was over before we knew it, so we prepared the beds and hoped for a good night of sleep, which wouldn’t be a problem we thought, since we were still so tired from the night before. However, first at around 1 am someone wanted to see our tickets. At 3 am we had to get out of the train, by our visa for Turkey and passport control. At 3.30 am they wanted to see our passports again and at 4 am they found it necessary to check our tickets. Seriously! We ‘woke up’ at 6 and had breakfast with some cookies we had left. But at least we were very close to Istanbul!!
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