Budapest and group idiocy

Beautiful weather and Budapest make a great combination. The city centre is a lovely place, even on orthodox Easter Sunday, which meant most things were shut and others were slightly odd. The shut things included most shops, which wasn't much of a hardship, but also included the funicular railway to the top of Buda Castle hill. This disappointed me greatly as the train was extra cool, and teased onlookers by carrying cement up to the top of the hill. My cement bag costume was left at home, so I wasn't allowed on.

We had arranged to meet up at the Pest side of a bridge since it was the birthday of one of our intrepid lot: Debbie. This was rather surreal, as we could see the bridge for about twenty minutes before we got to it. This in itself is not particularly surreal, but the bridge was completely full of cyclists, on both sides. When we finally reached the bridge, it was still full of cyclists, who were queueing up for a huge distance to join the, well, queue. Thousands of them kept cycling past for maybe forty minutes more, using various modes of cycly propulsion. My favourites were the people who had decided to participate, but couldn't be bothered to actually expend any physical energy, and hence had hired rickshaw drivers to take them around. Making a green statement whilst remaining upper class.

This meetup in the pub taught me a very important lesson: read your own maps. A group of 16 or so people cannot make decisions quickly, and everyone follows the person in front. This resulted in most of us going toward the wrong station on the way home. It also resulted in an irate member of our group angrily telling us this fact, and proceeding to lead us all off in another direction. Which was equally wrong. Some four of our group are still not back, it is 10:50pm. We are supposed to be leaving at 7:30am. Groups do have their downsides.