I had intended to get up at 7.10, but the nearby church thought I should get up at 7 to be on the safe side. I think its bell chimed 40 times. I expect it was to call people to early mass, but it worked very effectively as an alarm clock.
Budapest was nice enough but it’s good to be heading to somewhere with an easier language. Hungarian almost defeated me. However, on my final morning, waiting at the station for my train to Austria, I manage to order and pay for a coffee entirely in the Magyar tongue. Take that, Hungarian!
Today is mostly a Buda day. My hotel is in Pest, the station I arrived in is in Pest, and the boat trip went from that side too, but today I’m venturing across the river.
My new hotel has a light on the smoke alarm that flashes so brightly, I can see it through my eyelids, and people upstairs in the dentist’s (I think) decide it’s a good idea to move furniture around at 5am, but I have cunningly brought an eye mask and earplugs with me – essentials for travel.
First a quick film review of Before Sunrise. It’s a film in which not much happens. It’s basically a couple of self-involved people in their early 20s talking to each other for two hours. My advice would be to watch this when you are as young as possible, while their conversations still seem profound rather than inane. I expect I would have enjoyed this much more when I was a student but I haven’t the patience any more.
Everything goes very smoothly this morning – I wake up just ahead of the alarm, the train from Bellgrove is on time and Avanti has not cancelled first class (as they did once before) so I get plenty of free coffee and a somewhat bland avocado bagel delivered to my seat for breakfast. By the time we reach Carlisle, the train announcer is apologising for the delay. Should be OK though – I’ve left plenty of time for the transfer in London 🤞
It feels like I’ve had my head down all year and barely registered what I’ve been up to, so I’ve just scrolled through my calendar, photos and blog to find out what I actually did do this year!
This week I’ve been staying in East Kilbride, guinea pig sitting, so I treated myself to a zonecard to make the rigmarole of travelling between Glasgow and EK less annoying. But the annoyingess of travel is very much in the eye of the traveller.
A wee photo post for you, because I was called upon this week to go to Glenrothes for work. It is not the most photogenic of locations, being one of those ugly new towns that are all shopping centres and roundabouts, but as I had already travelled for over three hours (!) I thought “what’s another hour?” and went for lunch in St Andrews, which is much prettier.
I was listening to an audiobook of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes yesterday when there was a line so intoxicating that I had to stop in the street, rewind it, and then quickly google it before I forgot it (because it’s hard to mark a page in an audiobook).
K C Murdarasi 