Stag party escapee in Budapest

You would not believe how interesting and mysterious things can happan to participants of a Budapest stag night. Some would make the pages of an Edgar Allen Poe compilation.

There are diverse views on how welcoming or unwelcoming Hungarian folks are. Some say people here are very pleasant and open to guests, whereas a few claim Hungarians to be rude and cold. Well, sometimes we never get to know the circumstances of these opinions conceiving, thus having to resort to our imagination as to how people come to believe that local folks becoming irritated is an unnatural and excessive response to tipsy Englishmen singing through the night at the top of their lungs.

However, most of those having spent a stag night in Budapest are of the conviction that Hungarians are the most friendly and easygoing people they have ever met. Just ask the guy from my last group who is now only being referred to by his pals as „The Wanderer”.
His group arrived to Budapest for a whole long weekend of fun and spectacle. They were whole-heartedly enjoying themselves participating – among other programs – in a Strip bar night out the very first day. The nightclubbing was hilarious and exhaustive. After coming out of the club in the morning, tired and jaded, the group went to rest at their hotel. Everybody but this one guy. He was in urgent need of cigarettes, so he went to buy some. Not until late that afternoon was it that his friends started to notice he had been missing. We looked in all public spaces of the hotel, in all the shops and stores in the vicinity, but he was nowhere to be found. I, as their guide, began to worry where he could have disappeared and started calling hospitals and emergency wards. The rest of the group had to carry on with their schedule, and it was not until the next morning that to everybody’s relief he was found in a pub some 2 kilometers from the hotel. He had a giant smile on his face that nobody could understand. But „The Wanderer” wasn’t short of explanation. Very eagerly and with a glaze in his eyes he let us know that he had been having a real life experience. He had spent an entire 24 hours with the folks from the pub, who kept him involved in vivid conversation and card games. He had even been invited over to other places and kept well fed. He’d had the ultimate experience of hospitality – „The Wanderer” insisted. Well, I was happy he’d had a great time, because I had not. He’d given me a hell of a short sleep the previous night.