Important Advice for Life

If the train to Budapest leaves Thessaloniki at midnight and is scheduled to arrive in Budapest at 10am, that does NOT, I repeat, NOT mean that it is scheduled to arrive in Budapest on the following day. In fact, it will arrive in Sofia Bulgaria the next day, and you will end up sitting next to a mother with several small children who ask lots of questions (Where are you from? How old are you? Are you married? What do you do? Will you come to Blagoevgrad? You will stay with us!) and then you will end up on another train through northern Bulgaria that you cannot get off, not even to buy food or coffee or water or a phone card, and you'll spend four hours at the Romanian border filling out papers about bird flu, and your phone credit will die, and you can't phone home to tell your parents that you are alive or your friend in Budapest what's up. Finally, you will realize that you are scheduled to arrive in Budapest the following morning, that is, the trip is actually 34 hours and you are not even half done, and you'll abandon the entire endeavor in Bucharest, where a Japanese-Romanian translator will help you find a hotel and food, and you'll have no idea how much the money is worth, especially since things have recently changed so that some bills say 100,000 and some say 10 and it means the same thing. But there will be coffee and pastries for breakfast and oh thank god, a plane ticket to Prague.