We walked to the station to try and book trains for Istanbul again. It was hot and so were we by the time we arrived. The station was almost unrecognisable from our time there in 2012.
Malcolm commented that we had been spoiled in Novi Sad by Olivera and we needed one of our youngsters to steer us through our issues in Budapest. We thought of John and sent him an email to let him know we were here in his parents' city. We took a queue ticket for the bookings and a youngster approached us and said "why don't you go to the Other International Ticket Office up the end of the corridor?" There we only waited 10 minutes while people were waiting an hour or more at the main office.
Unfortunately the lady who served us tried to book us from Novi Sad to Istanbul without success and ended up giving us a list of trains to Vienna and back so we could book the trip there. We look like doing that tomorrow.
Very frustrating. We tried to console ourselves in the station restaurant but we were treated there like foreigners. So we bought a big bottle of water and accepted two more that the city was handing out for free and paid AUD55 for a ride on the City Sightseeing Bus. We needed the water as the buses were not air-conditioned and it was now over 30C. We had to plug earphones into overhead sockets, which were behind our line of vision so another helpful youngster in the seat behind found the English channel and adjusted the volume for us. We sweated and drank a lot. We saw the castle and the citadel, churches including Lutheran and synagogues, the opera house, museums, statues, columns, toalets, bridges and lots of river cruise ships on the Danube.
We did nearly two circuits around the city, not game to get off in the sun. Progress was slow and we got little wind as the bus was stopped for more time than it was moving. By 3pm the temperature dropped to about 30 and we got off at a stop 900 meters from our hotel. We shambled along home and spent the rest of the day under the AC and the shower. The TV and the fridge were now working so the room is all good.
We found a restaurant called Little Italy and had pasta for dinner. Time to break that habit as certain relatives would frown on it.
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