Anna Barry and Claire Bushell | Guest Contributers
We spent the morning trekking around Dublin getting money from very generous French tourists, using our best broken French. We thought we were saying 36 hours, but apparently it was 306 hours, making our challenge of being handcuffed together seem that much more impressive. A quick stop off to Dublin bus nabbed us free tickets to the airport. Then we realised our information booklet was missing and all our emergency contact numbers and general safety tips were gone forever, *cry*. The airport was a mixture of free GBK, getting to know other despairing teams and having our handcuffs abducted by security.
The flight to Budapest courtesy of lowcostholidays.ie was uneventful. The air host very kindly gave us food and tea. Begging at the airport and the machine eating our money were low points. Our time in Budapest consisted of trying to blag a place to stay céili dancing and meeting some really cool people from all over Europe. We didn’t actually meet any Hungarian people, BUT we did meet the Leeds Mascot 06/07. Now how many people can say that?!
The next day at the train station, we managed to obtain cheap tickets to Serbia with money we had collected along the way. This begun our lengthy ordeal with the Serbian rail. NEVER. TRAVEL. TO. SERBIA. BY. TRAIN. EVER. The train was only supposed to be a delightful 8 hours. But with the train crashing into a car we got bumped up to a lovely 11 hour ride, meaning we missed our night train back to Budapest. We had no Serbian money, no signal on our phones and nowhere to stay *double cry*. Thankfully we made friends with two extremely lovely Serbian guys on the train, who found us somewhere to stay while we waited for the morning train. As we entered the dark and dingy “hostel”, with the words “be care-folo” ringing in our ears, and climbed the graffiti ridden and crumbling stairs we began to wonder if we would ever see daylight again. After being quickly felt up *shivers* by the toothless landlady, we were shown to our room with two seemingly homeless men. Our attempts to resist sleep in the beds that smelt like R. Kellys sheets (piss) were futile due to absolute exhaustion. Claire nearly fell to her death on the iron below her bunk bed, when she was poked awake at 5am by the gruff Serbian man whose face was literally centimetres away from hers. Anna Slept soundly through the whole ordeal.
The feeling of relief when we got on the morning train back to Budapest was palpable, although a little hindered by the man sitting behind us with a massive machete. By the time we had got back to the airport and heard our flight had been delayed for 2 hours we didn’t even care….. we were just grateful to be alive.
