Home is where the heart (and blood and sweat and tears) is

Last night was a szendvics (sound it out) that began and ended well, even if it was filled with a series of paying avoidable fines, getting lost after bedtime, and dragging over-sized suitcases up stairs.

After staying in the dorms for a few frustrating days, all the students seemed to find an apartment that worked, in my case a triple with two balconies, furnishings, and wireless for $1400 a month. My friends and I met the landlord at 9:30 p.m., signed the papers, and got the keys. We were so sick of apartment-hunting and so happy to have a place of our own we decided to go grab our yet-to-be-unpacked stuff from the dorm and move in the same night. Probably our first mistake.

It would have taken a lot to ruin the night, but the gods certainly tried. The first omen appeared on the metro, which generally works like car insurance (or for Margaret Levi-loving taxpayers, it's like quasi-voluntary compliance): authorities trust that you'll buy a metro ticket, and they'll only check to confirm you have one when you don't. Ultimately, it was my friend, not me, who was caught without a ticket on our way back to the dorm from the apartment, but the 6000-forint fine put a damper on the night for all of us (it's only $30, but that's twice as much as a monthly pass).

Fast forward about an hour, after we had packed our luggage into two cabs and arrived back at the apartment, or so we thought. Instead of driving to 26 Sziv Utca (Heart Street), we drove to 38 Sziv Utca, which is what the landlord had told us. Our first key (there are three, one to get into the complex, one for the security door, and one for the main door) didn't work. But it was dark, late, and bitingly cold, so the non-English-speaking cabbies wanted to get the hell out. I was offended they'd abandon three young ladies in a foreign country with nowhere else to go at midnight, but they helped us open the door (probably just because we hadn't paid them yet, otherwise...). Miraculously, it opened. Miraculous not because all three of us had already tried on our own, but because that wasn't our apartment (we eventually learned), so the drivers must have gotten it open through sheer will power. Then they left.

True, it was our fault that we didn't double check the address and that we didn't recognize the building and that we moved in while the world was asleep. But we weren't complete idiots. The thing about Hungarian flats is, they don't have numbers, so even if we were in the right building, we could only rely on memory to find the actual apartment. Still, we tried. We hauled our belongings up the stairs of the elevator-less building, which like most others operated with motion-sensitive lights that turned off every few minutes. Yes, I'm afraid of the dark. And it didn't help that the light switches matched the doorbells (we probably didn't make too many friends last night). When our keys didn't work, door after door, we gave in and called the landlord, who had obviously gone to bed, and that's how we found out we were definitely in the wrong building.

The right building was only a block away, not that that made it much easier to run all our bags from point A to point B in one fell swoop. And then another set of stairs and uncooperative lighting and probably pissed off neighbors.

But aside from that, smooth sailing! We got in, we got our flat, and we got a story to write about.