From Budapest to Canoe Sprint World Cup in Szeged

This story is going to be about a spontaneous trip starting in Budapest. Despite this trip took only two days it was full of unexpected stuff so expect it to have multiple parts.

From Budapest to Canoe Sprint World Cup in Szeged

Recently I have been living in Budapest for a year, and on 18-20 May 2018, a Canoe Sprint World Cup took place in Szeged, Hungary. Canoe Sprint is a sport I had been doing since ten years old until my early twenties and I am still very connected to it. I guess most of you don't have much idea how this sport looks so here you can look at top athletes competing in the Olympic race in Rio de Janeiro (Unfortunately, you will have to watch it on YouTube).

Some of my friends were going to compete in the race in Szeged, and we (me and my flatmate in Budapest) hadn't been to Szeged before so we had decided to travel to Szeged to see the city and the race.

Full-fare train tickets in Hungary aren't that cheap as I originally assumed. The price of one way ticket from Budapest to Szeged is 3705 forints (13.41 USD or 0.0022 BTC [7/14/2018 2:51:47 PM]) for a 191 km long travel. You can get 5% or 10% discount when ordering on the Hungarian railways website but I have to warn you their website looks like it was created at the beginning of the Internet era (maybe it was..) thus it is not user-friendly at all. When I had been buying tickets for the first time this guide helped a lot. The positive is that you can often buy significantly cheaper international tickets departing from Budapest on the Hungarian railways website.

We took a train at 7:53 in the morning and after 2 hours and 22 minutes we arrived in Szeged.

The race of my friend starts at 13:04 (1:04 pm), so we go to see the city first. And here is the evidence we are in the right city!

There is a really huge church on the square and you can go to look inside for free.
And this is a nice gate! Gate of the Heroes is memorial of the Hungarian soldiers who fell in the First World War.

OK that's enough I won't bore you with more sightseeing stuff because, to be honest, I am not much into it. I rather explore life and food in the area.

We were starting to be hungry, so we stopped by a food kiosk offering langos. That's something you must try for sure when visiting Hungary. Let's see these cuties:

The right one is the original langos (..yeah already half eaten) and the left one is some super duper langos I forgot the name of. The gold was inside it: ham, cheese, sour, and jalapenos.

OK I will tell you my story with langos.. Every time I see a langos kiosk I have this huge appetite for a langos, so I must get it and eat it. Then I feel really full and a little sick, saying, "I will never eat it again!" and after a week the cycle repeats..

I highly recommend drinking beer with langos. The more, the better!

And here we are! We crossed by the John Bull Pub. My friend pointed out the similarity to Uncle Sam, so we went to sit there for an English beer.

It was around noon, so we started to think about how do we get to the Olympic Center of Szeged where the race was going to take place. The Olympic center is situated eight kilometers (5 miles) west of the city of Szeged. We had one hour to get there, so the plan was to catch a bus and get there with ease. We couldn't find where the bus goes from so we asked the waiter in the pub, and he was very kind and willing to help. After he tried to google it up, he called somewhere to get the info for us.

In a hurry, we got to the bus station, and some bus came immediately. We got in, but as fast as we got in, we were kicked out by the bus driver. The reason for it was that this bus was a special bus to transport only the athletes from Szeged to the Olympic center. So we started to read the timetables and after several minutes (hey it was hard) we found out we cannot get there in time by bus.

I panicked a little bit but, hey, "Let's get a taxi!" Unfortunately, no taxi mobile application is working in Szeged.. Uber is banned in the whole of Hungary, and I found out that the only 'working' app in Budapest is Taxify. So we googled up a phone number for some taxi service, and I called them. The female operator picked up the phone speaking fluent Hungarian only so after the call ended up I had no idea if I ordered the taxi or not. Fortunately, in five minutes the taxi arrived. We explained quite easily where we want to go and in 15 minutes we arrived at the Olympic center.

We got out of the taxi, and we were walking towards the tribune when the security staff stopped us and didn't let us go further. We searched for some staff that speaks English so they can tell us what the hell is happening. After a few contacts, we found out that this entrance on this side of the canal is only for athletes and their staff and that the visitors have to enter on the other side which is like five kilometers (3.1 miles) away by the road.

There was no chance to catch the race going by the red road, therefore we were discussing the problem with them a little longer. I was trying to explain that I need to catch my friend's race and that I traveled here from Budapest to see it. After a while, some more powerful guy came in to save us. He gave us paper blue bracelets, and with them, we could go through this entrance and magically overcome all the security people. Thank you, man! It is much appreciated! And in five minutes we were in the right place on the tribune, ten minutes before the race was going to start.

The race was the final of K2 men (Kayak with 2 people) 200 meters, and it was over in like 30 seconds, and this is video from the tribune:

We had a few beers, looked at a few races, then I wrote to my friend (racer) to meet up in the Szeged center in the evening.

In the late afternoon we started to walk beside the whole canal to get to the visitors entrance (to the proper one). We found a bus station easily and got back to Szeged.

Thanks to a lucky coincidence, a wine festival was just heating up in the Szeged center.

Many people, and more importantly so many wines to choose from. No time to waste so we bought wine glasses and started to taste wines throughout the festival. After an hour we met up with my two kayak friends (the one I wrote to + another one I haven't mentioned yet). We bought a bottle of great tasting chardonnay and sit there to talk and drink it up. Then we started to move through the city center, and this showed up: Hungarian rap.

It is around 22:00 (10:00 pm), no train goes to Budapest anymore, and we have no place to sleep yet. We are considering options like to sleep somewhere on the floor in the hotel where my kayak friends are accommodated. But then my friend from Budapest said something quite random: Let's flip a coin if we go to the town called Makó right now (It is a place 30 km away from Szeged my friend found randomly on the map) and yeah I agreed.. and the coin decided to go!