As a traveler I think the most important phrase is “Thank you.” That was what I learned to say before each country we traveled to. Even if you can't speak the local language and talk in English or gestures, it is nice to be able to thank someone in their native language. Second most important for me is “I'm sorry” or “excuse me”. That is very useful when on crowded buses or trains and you have to push by someone to get off. Third is probably “where is the bathroom?” or simply “toilet?” which gets the message across.
Anyway, here is how to say “Thank you”, in every country we visited, at least how it sounded to me. Please don't get too offended if I mangled your native language, I was trying 🙂 :
Taiwan (mandarin), China: Shi-shi
Korea: Gamsameeda
Egypt (Arabic): Shockram
Zurich – Switzerland, Vienna – Austria (German): Danke
Geneva – Switzerland (French), France: Merci
Spain: Gracias
Italy, Vatican City: Gratzie
Hungary: Kusonome
Czech Republic: Dekuji
Poland: Dziekuji (very similar to Czech)
Norway: Takk (pronounced like talk)
Denmark: Tack (like tact)
Iceland: this is the one I didn't learn. Supposedly it is similar to Danish (tack) but they add several syllables to differentiate from Denmark. Just saying “tack” is frowned upon, so I went with “Thank you” which everyone understood.
Since it is so close we decided to use our Eurail pass to take a day trip to Budapest. We had to get up early for this, to catch the 7:12am train to Budapest. It is about a 2.5 hour train ride.
Dense field of wind turbines in Austria. Big too, this continued for at least 10 miles.On the other side of the Danube is Slovakia. This is the closest we got this time.Budapest metro map
Our train was a little late arriving at about 10am. We planned to go on a free walking tour at 10:30am, which meant it would be a challenge to get there on time. We found the metro station outside the rail station, but there was a huge line for the single ticket machine. We decided we wouldn't make it if we waited in line, so we went outside to get a taxi. There were lots of taxis waiting outside the train station, but none of them would take us, they were all reserved. Then I noticed another ticket machine for the buses with no line, so I quickly bought us two tickets and we went back into the metro. The tickets worked and we made it to the tour starting point with 2 minutes to spare.
The Budapest metro is nice. Very clean and easy to navigate. As you can see from the metro map Budapest is made up of the Buda side and the Pest side.
I guess a lot of people had the same idea as us, because there was a huge crowd for the tour, so much so that they broke it up into 4 groups, and each group was still about 40 people. Our guide was named Zoltan and although he was Hungarian, he spoke clearly enough that Yanmei could understand him very well.
Buda Castle as viewed from the Pest side of the DanubeSt. Stephen's BasilicaOverlooking the Pest side from the Buda sideChanging of the Hungarian Presidential guard. After we watched this the guide mentioned they just started doing this 3 years ago as a tourist attraction.Matthias church
When the tour finished we had lunch. After lunch Yanmei wanted to go to a thermal bath house. Budapest is known for its mineral water hot springs even from Roman times. More recently when conquered by the Turks they started building bath houses. We went to Gellert Baths, which is not the biggest one, but is supposed to be less crowded and touristy. I wasn't too keen on the idea, but it turned out to be pretty nice.
One picture of the main pool from the entrance. After this I didn't take any more. I think it's a little rude to take photos of people bathing, although some people were doing it.
It is mixed bathing with swim suits required. First you shower, then you go into the swimming pool or thermal baths. We went to the baths. There is a certain sequence they recommend, but we just did whatever we felt like. It wasn't very crowded and sometimes there were only a couple of other people in the large thermal pools with us. I'm not sure what the age limit was, but there were no kids running around wrecking havoc, so it was easy to relax and float around in the pools. We also used the saunas. They had three levels of saunas, I tried to go in the hottest one, but the floor was so hot it burned my feet so I left after about 5 seconds. If I had flip flops and a towel to sit on so I didn't burn my legs I probably could have stayed a few minutes.
I actually enjoyed it quite a bit and would have stayed longer but we had to get back to catch our train back to Vienna. After so many days on the road, and a long walking tour it helped relax my joints and soothe my sore feet.
I know there is a Veeva office in Budapest. I looked up the address and I wore my Veeva shirt just in case, but we didn't have time for a visit this time.
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