I'm in Budapest!

Hey everyone, I am in Budapest for my second night. I have a converter to charge my laptop so I am able to post an update. Here's the breakdown of my adventure so far...

Wednesday I left from Phx to Charlotte, NC and had only about a 40 minute layover before I departed to Rome. The first flight was about 4 hours and the second was 9 hours. I got about 20 minutes of sleep on the Rome flight and I barely got any sleep the night before so I arrived in Rome extremely tired. Well, when I got to Rome, I tried to get some Euros from my bank account. I tried using my debit card but it got declined. I tried again and it said the card was blocked! If you're wondering, yes, I told Chase Bank that I was going to be in Europe for the summer, but they apparently did not care. Because it was blocked, I needed to make an expensive international call to tell them to unblock it and that I'm in Europe, but I had no money to make a call and there was no wifi in the airport. So I was sorta screwed.

The only way I was able to get out of this situation was to purchase a EU mobile phone and plan in the airport, and they charged my first call to the bank with the debit card I was calling the bank to unblock. I told them to stay on the phone after unblocking to make sure it worked because the Italian girl told me too. Good thing she did because after they "unblocked" it, the card was still declined. Then they said, uhhhh, wait.... ok try now, and then it worked. So I had to purchase the phone for 60 euros and the plan for 120 euros, which gets 200 minutes. After that 15 minute call, I was down to about 100 minutes, so it costed about 60 euros, or about $100 for the call. Ok, so at least I have a debit card that works.

Next I went to check for my bag because I did not see it earlier - I couldn't find it. I went to the people to ask if they took the bags off because it had been a while. They brought me in to the backroom and asked if any of the bags were mine, but none of them were. We eventually discovered that Phx placed the bag on the wrong flight to Charlotte, so they did not have time to put it on the flight to Rome! Now it's been over 4 hours so I didn't think I would even have the opportunity to make it to the city and back, so I decided to stay in the airport. I got some Euros and tried using them in the vending machine for some food, it obviously didn't work. But hey, I was in Italy, I might as well eat at one of the restaurants. I couldn't find a nice restaurant, so I ended up going to a couple cafeteria-like places in the airport for pizza and gnocchi. Obviously it can't be as good as in the city, but wow their cheese tastes so good. I mean, wow, the cheese... When the person asked if I wanted Parmesan cheese and I said yes, she put about a pound of it on my gnocchi.

I slept a little bit in the airport because I couldn't physically stay awake, I was too tired to even play angry birds. I didn't want to sleep because I didn't want anybody to steal my backpack, but I couldn't stay awake. I discovered later that if you stand next to the ticket counters you could connect to wifi, so I was able to do that to talk to my dad. He told me to try to find the USAirways departure ticket counter because since they lost my bag, they would reimburse me with money. I had searched the entire airport for USAirways but I couldn't find them so I looked online, standing next to another ticket counter, and discovered it's in terminal 5. Well, there was only terminal 1, 2, and 3... I had to look up where terminal 5 was, and you have to take a shuttle away from the rest of the airport to get there. Once I got there, there was nobody working USAirways because there were no USAir flights that night.

Alright, luck was not on my side at this point, but I found my way to my flight to Budapest, took it, found my buddy and we took a cab to my flat. Then we went to a bar for a couple beers. I was kind of excited to see what a Hungarian bar would be like. Well, let me tell you... In this Hungarian bar, they have Miller, Jager and Redbull, Coca-Cola, but also some Hungarian spirits. They played Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Usher, and so on. Also, they had the NBA playoffs on TV. It was like going to Half Moon basically haha.

Today I bought some clothes, toothbrush, toothpaste, deoderant, food (without preservatives!), so I am in my room with stuff and it's awesome to not be in the Rome airport with nothing.

Here's some pictures, but I don't have any of the city of Budapest yet.