My journey.

After four months of living in Budapest, I'm finally leaving. I'm writing this on the airplane over the Atlantic Ocean, although by the time I post it online I will be in America. Now the past semester feels like a wonderful dream: everything was so different in Europe, but now it's all going back to normal. I'm waking up.

Budapest's airport is on the outskirts of the city, so reaching it was a challenge. There is public transportation that could take me to the airport, but the metro doesn't start running quite early enough for me to catch my flight at 7:00 AM. There is also a taxi service we could use, but a taxi could be unreliable. I didn't want to risk a taxi without a back-up plan. (In fact, a few of my friends arranged to go by taxi, but their taxi didn't come; it was quite a scare, but they got to the airport.)

In light of this, a friend and I decided to get a hotel by the airport and stay there the night before our flights, so that getting to the airport in the morning wouldn't be a hassle. We ended up getting to the airport without any problems. On the other hand, getting to the hotel the night before was quite a terror.

The main problem was that each of us had multiple heavy bags. Getting them on and off the metro was hard enough—in fact, it was no trivial task to fit them on the metro at all. Then we had to go from the metro to the bus stop, which involved a long staircase with several landings. We couldn't carry our bags down the staircase all at once, so we took one or two at a time, setting them on each landing in turn and going back for the others. Eventually some kind onlookers came and helped us. They must have thought we looked positively ridiculous, scrambling up and down the stairs with so many bags.

After we finally conquered the stairs and arrived at the bus stop, we noticed the elevator.

On the bus, my heaviest bag would fall over every time the bus made a sudden movement. So would my friend. After getting off the bus, we had some walking to do. This was the worst part, because for some reason one of my bags kept falling. No matter how many times I positioned and re-positioned it, after thirty seconds it would be slipping again. I was getting increasingly frustrated, and my friend couldn't help but laugh at me. Part of our walk was on a gravelly road with no sidewalk, where we had to hope that the oncoming cars saw us in the dark. (Apparently they did, because I survived.) Also, we had to cross something similar to an expressway exit, as well as a railroad.

After that journey, we were positively bushed. We fell asleep soon after arriving at the hotel, only to wake up four hours later for the early airplane. That's where I am now: on a nine-hour flight, writing this journal entry and intermittently sleeping. Was the overnight hotel really a better plan than an early-morning taxi would have been? We can't know for sure, but it was certainly a better story.

That night, when I was walking from my apartment to the metro, it hit me that that it was the last time I would ever make that walk. It was the last time I would see my neighborhood. I almost cried. Budapest was home to me for four months, and I'll never forget it. I've grown as a person, though the change was so gradual that I didn't really notice until it was time to leave. My experience in Budapest will stay with me for the rest of my life, and hopefully Budapest's fatty foods won't do the same.