Pest-ivus for the Rest-of-us

OMG! This morning Kris woke up at 6am (pretty much broad daylight) to some Hungarian thug stealing my bike!! Uh, a bright yellow, with pink T-mobile sticker bike - totally not cool to be trolling around on if you're a local I'm sure. Our window was wide open on the fourth floor, so he heard some commotion on the alley below, and sure enough, my bike was already gone and the guy was ready to snip the lock on Kris' bike. Luckily, Kris yelled out the window and scared the guy off...and probably woke up all of the Cosmo Hotel in the process. Our hotel felt pretty bad about it. Kris tried to file a police report. The police came in jeans and sweatshirts with reflective vests, and Kris told the story, but they never wrote anything down except Kris' info. They told Kris to send in a photo of the bike and a description of what happened and they would file the report then. We talked to our hotel receptionist and asked what the ramifications were and he shook his head, nothing you can do, and it's just the way it is. He had called the bike rental place and said they would come pick up the other bike, and that seemed like the end of it. We figured we would lose our 10,000 ft. deposit (like 50 bucks) and that would be the end of it.... 10 missed calls later from the Hungarian police, we realized that apparently that's not the end of it! We had to go back to the bike shop and negotiate a settlement price for the bike. The bike shop guy was actually a really nice guy and we ended up (after Kris negotiated free parking from the hotel, and our deposit and next day's rental taken into account) only about $45 down. Not too shabby I guess, thinking they might have stopped us at the Hungarian airport on the way out if we hadn't settled up :)

In the meantime, we slept through breakfast because of all the commotion so early on, then we had to switch hotels to Ibis Centrum because we had changed our itinerary to add a day in Budapest and Cosmo was booked solid. Finally we headed out for sightseeing to Gellert Hill, which is the taller peak overlooking the Danube. We saw the Liberty Monument, Citadella and St. Gellert statue then hiked down to Memento Park.

For dinner we went to an awesome place called Klassz.

written by

blondie on September 4, 2010 from Budapest, Hungary

from the travel blog: Central Europe

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