I left for the train station pretty early in the morning. There were a few trains I could've taken to Budapest, but I saw no reason to stay in Slovakia any longer than I had to so I got the first direct one at around 10. I was almost late because the lock in the bathroom door was jammed and there were a few scary minutes I thought I might have to beg to have someone break down the door, but I eventually freed myself. I hopped on the tram nearby and tried to pay for a ticket, but the reader wouldn't take my credit card or Google Wallet despite indicating it would take both, so I gave up and sat down for the short ride to the train terminal. Then for the first time ever, someone actually demanded my ticket. I tried to explain that I made a real attempt at paying and that my card had been rejected, but was told that it was my fault for not understanding that the reader wouldn't take Visa. I pointed out that my card was a Mastercard and was told that it was my fault for not realizing that the reader wouldn't take Mastercard either. There was a big tap to pay logo on it and I'm not sure how one is meant to tap to pay if not by using Mastercard or Visa, but apparently that's a failing on my end. They demanded 80 Euros and I really had no choice but to pay - the card reader he had conveniently did take Mastercard, apparently. However, I looked it up and the official website says that the fee should only be 50 Euro, so I think I'm going to dispute the transaction since something about this doesn't seem right. They did seem to have uniforms and be real inspectors but I think they might have been trying to take advantage of me all the same.

The train to Budapest was only 2.5 hours and was uneventful. One thing I've yet to touch on is that my cell data in Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Poland, and Germany is actually much better than everywhere else - in these countries I've had normal data speeds rather than the crippled, awful connection I'm used to from elsewhere. Once in Budapest, I looked into buying a metro pass for many thousands of forints. Hungary is the first country I've visited where the exchange rate isn't even close - the Euro, Franc, and Pound are valued within a fairly narrow range not more than 30%!a(MISSING)bove the dollar, the zloty is about a quarter, and the krones are somewhere around 10 to 16 cents. The forint, on the other hand, is about a quarter of a cent, meaning that a normal transaction will cost a very large number of forints. Anyway, I paid a pretty fair price for a metro pass and got onboard a tram. Immediately I was impressed with what I saw. The architecture here is really cool and there are unique buildings everywhere. I often have a hard time describing what it is that makes me like or dislike a city since it's often so vibes based, and the same is true here - I can't articulate exactly why, but I immediately liked Budapest more than any of the cities I've been to for a while.

I met up with Miriam from Slovenia at a big park with some museums in it, primarily one that I think was supposed to be shaped like a book but looked far more like a giant halfpipe. Either end could be climbed up to and had a great view of the immediate area, and inside the building was a museum of ethnology. It was here where I first started trying to look a little closer at Hungarian. While we didn't pay to go into any of the exhibits, there was a fair amount of stuff on display that was free to access for anyone (mostly pottery). Much of this wasn't labelled in English, so I had Google Translate try and decrypt what is often an entirely unintelligible language. There are somewhat frequently words that are obviously derived from Latin, German, or Greek (probably Slavic languages too, though I couldn't tell), and these are usually intuitive - I didn't need Translate to tell me what "Foto" or "Oktagon" meant. The names of the pottery, however, didn't have any of these obvious connections and I was at Translate's mercy. We found that some of the items were "vases", some were "cups", some were "silks", some were "bastards", and some were "bullshits". I feel for Google on this one since there was of course no context for this at all and apparently there is some Hungarian word which can be accurately translated to either "plate" or "bastard", so it's tough to hold that against them. In longer sections of text that I translated it seemed to be very accurate. I have yet to visit a tobacconist, but if I do I'll be sure to ask about their