To Vienna and beyond - part I

Ahhh Vienna...

I could never tell that a less-than-48-hours trip to Austria could be so adventurous. But again, is like Kosta says, "you live your life like in a great adventure movie, Tete". And yes, hehe, he's absolutely right.

Plus, I realise now that there's the "Belgrade factor": it seems that everytime I leave Belgrade to go somewhere else, the trip ends up turning into a crazy journey. Like the Shabla episode. And like this one now.

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I took my train to Vienna at 15 past 10 in the evening. After getting informed with an officer on the station which one was my train - and, of course, listening to the infamous line "hablas espanol?" after telling him I'm from Brazil (and I only told him my nationality because he asked if I was russian, haha), I took my seat inside the wagon.
In my cabin there was a south korean girl and two polish, a girl and an old man.
The girl, around my age I guess, was coming back from a volunteer work in Kosovo, with serbian people - people which, both she and the old man said, they were really found of. She told me that once, when they were getting ready for a surgery and the local radio started playing a kolo, all the surgeons started dancing, even though they were about to start a medical procedure, haha. She was coming back to her hometown, but she said she was hoping to be back to Serbia real soon.
Now, the old man really reminded me of a singer I know from the opera theater, in Rio: same way to speak, cool and easy, same beard and face shape. I forgot the polish man's name, but he also had a very interesting story: he's a writter (politics writer) and he was, among other cities, visiting Kosovo as well, and collecting material for his new book, about NATO in the Balkans.
The three of us (the south korean girl spoke almost no english at all, sadly) shared quite really nice talk till we reached Novi Sad, when we fell asleep.

We woke up as soon as we reached Subotica and had to show our passports, to then enter into Hungarian territory. The passport control guy made the funniest face I've ever seen when he saw my huge name in my passport, hahaha. After stamping and giving it back to me, he exclaimed, in a rather funny accent "Name... Suuuuuper!", making thumbs up to me, hahaha. Oh god...

I slept til the sun started rising, right before arriving in Budapest. Looking through the train window and seeing things written in hungarian all around only increased my feeling that hungarian is, perhaps, one of the most unfamiliar western languages I've ever seen before. It'a a language that kinda scares me, haha, don't know why...
Anyways, I jumpped off the train in Budapest where, after looking at the board with the trains' schedule for a while - I was still feeling rather sleepy - I realized that everything was written either in hungarian (ouch!) or german. Lucky me I spent time enough in Germany last year to understand some basic stuff, which allowed me to locate my platform and head to the train that was gonna take me to my final destination: Vienna


Sorry folks, need to move now to meet some friends in Zemun.
Stay tunned in for the next part, hehe ;)