A Clear Morning in Budapest, and an Unplanned Stop in Bratislava

The rain broke overnight, and the next morning came in clear and cold instead, fog sitting low over the Danube in a way that made the Chain Bridge look like it was floating on nothing. I stood under a tree that had somehow held onto every yellow leaf while the ground around it had already let go of all of its, the bridge behind me, and let someone else's photo decide what the morning looked like.

Buda Castle sits up on its hill, and I took the funicular rather than the stairs, two little carriages named Gellert and Margit passing each other halfway up on tracks still scattered with the same yellow leaves from the promenade below. At the top, the Matthias Fountain stopped me longer than I expected: a king on a rock ledge, hounds at his feet, a stag already taken down beside him, the whole scene cast in bronze gone green with age, water still running down stone that has clearly been running for a very long time. I walked the castle grounds, then walked back down into Pest, no plan beyond staying outside until my legs said otherwise, which took most of the day.

I got back to Wombat's with just enough time to sit under the hostel's stained glass skylight, a jigsaw of blue and green and gold panels with plants hanging under it and a paper snowflake someone had left on my table, before I had to leave again for the train.

A three thirty train that ends somewhere else

The plan was Vienna. I had a ticket, a rough idea of a hostel, and no urgency about it until somewhere past the Hungarian border it occurred to me that it was the weekend, and that I had not actually confirmed anywhere to sleep in a city where beds tend to disappear on weekends. I looked it up on my phone with the kind of mild panic that only shows up after a decision has already mostly been made, found very little available, and got off at Bratislava instead, a little after six, on the same train that would have carried me the rest of the way if I had let it.

Wild Elephants Hostel had a kitchen and common room built for exactly the kind of night I needed, people cooking at the same six burners, trading stories about trains missed and trains caught, nobody in a hurry to be anywhere else.

Two days of rain and walking alone, and the first real conversation of the trip happened because I got off a train early by accident.