All Hail the Dumb (Brilliant) Americans

July 24, 2007 by dunny.

We hit the road from Prague yesterday, headed to Budapest, Hungary for the night.  The drive was going fine and dandy…we were about 5 miles from the Czech-Slovak border and pulled into a gas station (so as to not spend ANY money in Slovakia…4:1 on the dollar apparently…how I’ll never know).  We pulled around back to eat our hot dogs as Andy expressed his bad feeling about the upcoming border.

Then up comes a Police van followed by two big Mercedes Paddy-wagons.  They blocked us in, walked over, and basically said since we didn’t have an Autobahn sticker on the car we had to pay a 200 Euro fine or go to jail.  What do you do?  You play dumb American.

Back and forth we just pretended we didn’t understand what the hell they were talking about…except we weren’t really pretended b/c we had no earthly idea what they wanted besides money.  Finally one of the cops pulled out a cell phone and called what we think was a friend that spoke English, so Andy jumped on and played the charity-rally-we-just-didn’t-know card while I schmoozed the cops some.  Long story short, we convinced them to just let us buy the Autobahn sticker and go with no fine or arrest or sever beating.

Hit the border, went straight through Slovakia, spent about 10 seconds in the corner of Austria, then into Hungary.  We found Budapest, knowing only that our hotel was somewhere on the northwest side of the river.  Then we realized Budapest has 3 rivers and follow the trend of not labeling their streets.  Oh, and let’s not forget, our water pump went out about 200km ago and we were overheating.

We got as close as we could figure to where we were supposed to be, and I ran into a Radisson and asked directions.  We were 2 blocks from our hotel.  Dumb luck?  Nah, pure brilliance.  Akos (pronounced Aakosh) and Leonel checked us over a few times to figure out why to hairy grease monkeys had an executive suite, then fell all over our story and drew a big Hungarian flag on the car for us.  Thanks fellas, yall rock.

Fell asleep quick after showers…staying in the nicest hotel room either of us has ever seen (thanks to Sam & Moni Lisenbe)…up this morning to figure out the next step.  Andy ran downstairs and found an off-license taxi driver named Zoltan Lukais (sorry if we misspelled bud) who called all his buddies and eventually found us a water pump, to be changed later today at some rest stop.  The guy even loaned us the cash for the part until we could find a machine…welcome to the Awesome Club homeboy.

On the way to the place, the taxi passed 4 Rally cars who immediately recognized Andy’s devil beard and screamed “Why the hell are you in a Mercedes?!?,” to which Andy yelled “Our water pump burst!!  Why yall here??,” to which they said “We’re lost!!” to which Andy said “The river’s that way!!”  The Party never stops people.

We’re fixin to head out…going to Transylvania today to hang with Dracula and check out Bran Castle where Vlad the Impaler once lived.  We’ll probably camp somewhere in the woods so sit tight until Thursday or Friday when we can get some Internet again.  As always, keep puttin up awesome.

Skip, out. (SkipLizard Homepage)

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