I just want water that tastes like real water!!
Trip Start
Jun 29, 2008
1
22
58
Trip End
Nov 27, 2008
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Vienna,
Vienna,
Austria
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Safe drinking water: 'easy' you say, just buy bottled water. Well, this is fine if you like mineral water which unfortunately I don't really. If you only have local brands to choose from, and you don't know the language, then picking a bottle of water can be fraught with difficulties. Sure enough, you would think that once you had bought your first bottle you would be fine - but, no!! Our first bottle in Budapest was sparkling, despite the lack of evidence in pictures on the bottle and no apparent bubbles on shaking. So we looked for a bottle with different words to the bottle with bubbles - sure enough we got no bubbles but, to my horror, the water tasted exactly like mineral water but without the bubbles (I assure you this was even worse). When we finally did get what was the bottled 'plain' water, unfortunately even it tasted a little strange - but at least it was drinkable. What happened to all the mineral water, you ask? Ben could not possibly make his way through all of it; so much of it had to be discarded at our next flight security check-point.
Doing your laundry: it was very hard to come by self-managed, coin-operated laundromats in Eastern Europe. Everywhere we went, the hotels wanted to charge exorbitant fees, about $5 per item, while "Laundromats" were places you went and dropped off your laundry to be done by someone else - the "student"one in Krakow was $20 per load - more than double what you can do yourself. Ben, being well house trained, was determined to do his own laundry and wandered Krakow and then Budapest in search of one - finally he did fine a good one in Budapest, in the University quarter, which was lucky as we were down to our last items of clothing (Ben had even needed to hand-wash some of his stuff, drying it with a hair-dryer, for a couple of days).
Plane trips occurring in planes: what, you say? Well on Saturday morning, our flight from Budapest to Vienna had been cancelled. We were advised of this when we turned up at 7am, and were told "your bus is waiting outside". So, instead of getting our 1hr flight to Vienna, we had a 2.5hr minibus trip to Vienna. Unfortunately, our driver took 3hrs, and we missed our connecting flight to Cairo, so we were changed from our original Austrian airlines flight to an Egypt Air flight 5hrs later!! But don't worry, Egypt Air is fantastic - there is nothing quite as reassuring as everyone clapping when the plane lands safely.
