Eastern Europe Idiosyncracies (1)

After the mm trip to Prague a couple of years ago, I’ve been positively itching to get back to Eastern Europe to sample some more honey-cream cake, cheap beer, and communist memorabilia. And so it was with bated breath that I boarded an easyjet plane, destination Budapest, Hungary, a city famous for opera, wine, and Soviet tanks crushing an independence movement (circa 1956).

The flight was the usual combination of safety videos, nauseating announcements from the crew (a message once every five minutes highlighting some promotion or other), and sleep being disturbed by crying babies/neighbouring elbows/deep-vein thrombosis. But the post-landing experience was something else in the realm of Eastern European quirkiness.

Everyone hates waiting for their bags. After a two-hour flight with only a magazine for company the bag-wait is tedious and often frustrating, especially if the airline has ‘mislaid’ your bags, a euphemism for them being sent half-way round the world in the wrong direction or been left on Gatwick’s runway. Fortunately this extreme case did not afflict us. Instead, we discovered that those crafty Hungarian officials have devised a new way to reduce the baggage waiting time. The plan is simple and brilliantly executed. As you exit the Boeing 737 and disembark the aircraft you are directed onto a mini-bus, one of those long, low minibuses which have about three seats and you only ever see at airports. You follow everyone else and board the bus, noting wryly to your companion that the terminal building seems to be only about ten yards to your right. ‘Wouldn’t it be a laugh if this bus does a circuit only to drop us off about five yards from where we boarded?’ you may well comment. At which point the bus sets off, does that very circuit and leaves you off next to the terminal entrance. Of course, the whole process of getting 120 passengers off an aeroplane and into a bus takes the best part of ten minutes, by which time your bags are happily circling round the conveyor-belt, ready to be collected.
 
Environmentally unfriendly, undoubtedly bizarre, but surprisingly effective.