Walked to the train station (Keleti) via yet another on-the-go cheese and bread breakfast. Pekseg, I quickly learnt, is the Hungarian word for bakery. We went to get my Eurail pass stamped and reserve a sleeper ticket for our journey to Poprad-Tatry (in the High Tatras) but the lady refused to sell us a reservation, citing the short journey (2.5 hours to Bratislava, 4 hours from Bratislava to Poprad-Tatry) as a reason not to get sleepers.
We then walked through City Park to Heroes' Square. There is a castle on the lake there that looks like different parts of it was made in different eras, but charming all the same.
We wanted to go to the art gallery, which was highly receommended by my Hungarian friend Emese but it was closed as it was in between exhibitions. Instead we wandered through Heroes' Square and then went to the fine art museum on the other side, which had ancient pottery on the bottom level and European art on the top. Things began to devolve when I started saying things like, "he's going in for the blowjob" about a painting of Diana and Actaeon, then Boff and I started making up stories about the paintings until we could walk the galleries no more and went downstairs to have lunch.
After that we went to Budapest Zoo next door. It was quite a good zoo, very big (too much to see in the few hours we had allocated) and mostly modern, especially a natural history education centre in the middle that had live exhibits. The photo of the day is a pair of tamarins. I stood at the window trying to see them when one came and sat on the window sill and chittered at me. I called Boff over and as he bent down to take a photo another came along...
We ate dinner at a place called The Owl House, whose menu promised some authentic Hungarian cuisine. Yes, there was goulash and paprikash involved. They played George Michael's 'Ladies & Gentlemen' right the way through.
We took the night train to Bratislava. It turned out that I'd forgotten to get my Eurail pass stamped so I had to pay for a ticket from Budapest to the Slovakian border, then a Slovak inspector charged me from the border to Bratislava. We had nice carriage of passengers, a Czech businessman, a young Hungarian couple on their way to Berlin who helped us with the militant Hungarian ticket inspector, and a Canadian lady called Kathleen who ended up travelling with us to Poprad-Tatry.
Boff, Kathleen and I switched trains at Bratislava (I got my pass stamped at the station) and ended up in a crowded carriage of dodgy-looking Slavic men and found it very difficult to sleep for the four-hour journey.
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