Sunday, April 10, 2011

On the subject of time travel

Oh, the lessons learned while traveling are invaluable tools for self growth.  In our case, we recently learned we have been operating an hour behind the local time in Timisoara since our arrival. Cue the self growth. After arriving in Budapest, we assumed (yes, I know what they say...) the time in Budapest, Hungary was the same as that in Timisoara, Romania. Thus, we have been an hour + late to every event, dinner and  meeting scheduled on our behalf. Awesome.


Sure, there were signs that we were operating on a slightly different time schedule; the anxious rushing of food at breakfast, the panicked expressions of those picking us up for appointments literally, tracking us down on the side of the road as we were leisurely walking home from the ETC, and countless other details which I now make me shudder in embarrassment.
In all fairness we had absolutely no clue that we were late. See, we were trying to show up on "Romanian time" which is about 20 minutes or so after the time agreed, plus with the whole hour off thing, we've been excessively late.  Our hosts, out of politeness, weren't direct enough to ask why we have have been an hour + late to everything. And had we not missed our train to Budapest we still might be an hour behind the rest of Timisoara.
Initially, we just figured there was some kind of tricky daylight savings time that had taken place to destroy the travel plans of tourists. Clearly, this couldn't be on us. I mean, could it? Da. I don't remember the exact moment it dawned on us, however with this new knowledge that we have been living in the past for the better part of a week we realized how even outright mistakes could be viewed as cultural norms. Now that we have returned to the future, we are presently making history with our apologies.

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