So... on our free day a couple friends and I decided that we would decompress after 12 hours of bus ridin' the day before. We went to the Géllert Baths which were beautiful! Stained glass, marble, many many elderly Budapest-ians in bathing suits. The steam rooms were wonderful for 5 minutes, then unbearable. Then... shit.
I somehow lost my wallet including my passport and 2 credit cards. Ok, so before i went to the baths Matt and I went with our Hungarian mom to the train station to purchase our return tickets to Krakow and thats why i had my passport with me.. Anyways, I said i would meet a couple friends at the bath houses at 12 so i got dropped off there afterwards. The last time I saw my wallet was before entering the womens locker room where i stored all my things in my locker and an attendant locked it. After I returned no wallet. I think i must have dropped it along the way or something because I don't think someone actually stole it since i had other valuable things in the locker too. The most frustrating part was that no one would help me and i was just in blind panic at that point. The women were rude and wouldn't allow me to look around and retrace my steps for privacy reasons. at the front desk they tried to dissuade me from calling the police and were giving me and my friends shit. Thank god my Hungarian mom was super woman and helped me contact the police. my credit cards were cancelled. next, i just needed to get a temporary passport so i could return to krakow. so my hungarian mom and i ran all over town getting a passport photo (which is the most hilariously disgusting pic), getting my xeroxed copies of my passport that i brought with me in case (thank god!), and running to the embassy. they actually stayed open late for us! I ran out of the car (b/c of all my xc training ha and i'm all about unnecessary displays of my running prowess) to try and make it there in time before they closed. I ran down this street and i saw that there were all these fences of "construction" (american embassy security in actuality) and thought oh crap! and almost fucking vaulted over them until the american security started yelling "margaret! Margaret!" "slow down, around the corner" "Stop running!" "its ok" got my passport in 30 minutes. they even fudged my hungarian regulation size passport picture to fit into my temp. passport.
the us embassy in budapest contacted me yesterday morning saying someone from the baths returned my wallet with passport and credit cards. they are all invalidated now, but since my passport still has my polish visa in it i get A FREE!!! trip to warsaw to pick it up which is super lucky since i was trying to figure out when i would go there anyways.
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