Low-cost midlife crisis

We woke up in Austria and I was happy to note that we hadn’t missed all the scenery.

We were unexpectedly met at Vienna station by our friends Elvira and Feri, and had a delicious breakfast (at a place called Das Columbus, marking the fact that 15 hours previously, we’d been in Genoa) before boarding the train for Budapest.

This was to be the last train for which we didn’t have reservations and to remind us of some of the more challenging bits of the trip, it was pretty full. I had to stand for a while and when I wasn’t standing I was waiting for someone with a reservation to turf me out of whichever seat I was occupying.

And then, after nearly 4 weeks travelling we finally encountered a dickish railway employee. (OK, there was a guy in the train bar in the Netherlands, but I just walked away from him and he didn’t trouble me again). In Budapest we went looking to see if we could get sleeping places on our last train. The guy at the window first ridiculed E for even imagining that there might be places so late in the day (though we had tried more than once elsewhere only to be told that it wasn’t possible to find out from a distance – even when that distance was only from Vienna). Then he actually sold us tickets rather than seat reservations, and then when we told him he got all huffy and blamed E for the whole thing. Rude, shit at his job, and aggressive. He’d been to the customer service school that teaches you to look down at the customer and assume they are idiots. A genuinely bad experience – and one which leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Later on I went back to get his name so we could complain, and his attitude and body language were arrogant and snotty. The guy who was trying to mediate between us was very apologetic and kept saying “he’s sorry” when he patently wasn’t sorry at all. We need to remember how friendly and helpful and courteous all the other people we dealt with were over the last month to put this Hungarian arsehole out of our minds.

Anyway, we’re now on the train, getting close to the Romanian border and we’ll eventually get home about 10 in the morning.