We had more than our fair share of adventures when it came to transportation in Budapest. We took a train from Tatabánya to Budapest, scoring ourselves the student discount (50% off) without any problems. If there's one thing we learned about laws in Hungary, it is that it depends. What does it depend on? The person enforcing the law. On the train back to Tatabánya our last night, we got in trouble with the ticket checker because we aren't students within the European Union, but we had gotten the student discount. Apparently that is a rule with some ticket checkers, but not with others. Luckily, we got away with a warning and a promise to pay for a full-price ticket next time. (Little does she know that the next time either of us buys a train ticket in Hungary, odds are we won't be students.)
Sarah at the train station in Budapest.
Funny story from that same train ride back to Tatabánya: We got on a train about twenty minutes before it left, so we just sat down and did one of our favorite activities - people watching. Little did we know that we were in for a treat with one particular person on the train with us. As a little bit of background for those of you who have never ridden a train, there are sliding doors between the train cars and depending on how nice the train is, those doors may or may not be automatic. The train we happened to be on was newer and Austrian, so it was nice and had automatic doors and all you have to do to open them is push a button and they slide open for you. Unfortunately for this poor traveler that we were watching, she didn't realize that the door was already open when she got out of the bathroom. As a result, she kept pushing the button, waiting for the door to open, not realizing that it was already open and pushing that button just kept it open. She began to get more frustrated and push the button for frequently, until she got to the point where she was going to attempt to manually "open" the door. She then went to put her hand on the door to brace herself for a strong pull on the door, when she realized that her hand went right through where the door was supposed to be, and the light bulb went on - this door has been open the whole time. She looked at us, realizing that we had known the whole time and laughed at herself. Thank you, fellow traveler for the laugh.
Sarah in front of one of the metros in Budapest.
As for a not-so-funny story, here's our adventure with public transportation in Budapest: We bought 24-hour transportation passes once we got to Budapest so that we could ride metros, trams and buses to our heart's desire. They write the time on the pass once you get it and it expires 24 hours from that time. The next day we had gotten tickets to get a tour of the Parliament and our plan was buy new passes once our tour was over. The only problem was that we ran into an elder that had served at the same time as me with his wife in one of the museums in Budapest. Talking with them, we got on the metro later than we had hoped and our passes expired while we were on the metro.
As luck would have it, they were checking tickets on the way out (they randomly check in a few places at different times throughout the day at different stops in the city. We got stopped, and had our passes checked. The lady said to me that they were expired and that we each owed a 6,000 forint (~$30) fine. She made both of us pay right there, despite the fact that it had just run out and we were going to buy another.
After visiting the Parliament, we bought new passes and I started asking around to find out the rule concerning these passes, and I learned that it depends. That's right, no fine print like in America, all of it depends on the controller who stops you. Almost everyone I asked said that we would be fine, but then one lady noticed from my accent that I was a foreigner, to which she said "You'll get ticketed for sure. Unfortunately, that's the way things are." So, because things are the way they are, we paid the fine and got new passes only to not have them checked the rest of the time we were there. (I was hoping we would run into a controller so we could get a picture with our fine, but no such luck.) Go figure.
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