Two missing hours in Budapest.

The last time I came to Budapest we spent our days exploring, but this time it was strictly a boy’s affair. On the second day I woke up on the floor of the apartment and was surprised, initially, that I was alive. I couldn’t remember crawling — and I mean that quite literally — back through the front door, but the video evidence was there. I’ll come back to that later. We wasted no time in opening the first cans just a few minutes after my arrival in the city. We crashed our way through the contents of the fridge before heading out in search of more.

The bars of Budapest are alive any night of the week. The best are abandoned old building complexes that have been converted into sprawling, eccentric mazes of rooms, bars and music. They are the sort of places where once you lose your friends your only hope is to circulate long enough to bump into each other. This isn’t a problem, because you make a new friend around every corner.

Anyway, the last thing I remember was kissing a girl on the dance floor. My moves had impressed, or perhaps simply overwhelmed. She was pretty, and her even prettier friend seemed keen on Oli. In between kisses, the girl and I plotted how we could get them together. My girl was self-conscious, so when her friend told my man she wasn’t going to kiss him, she questioned my motives. She thought I had only kissed her to clear the way for Oli. Coherent argument was beyond me, and so the opportunity was lost.

The next day, some point after waking up, I asked Oli if the coat next to me was his. Strangely, its sleeves were inside those of my coat, suggesting that I had worn both of them. It was grey, smooth and most oddly of all was from Zara. After sitting up straighter I discovered a Zara woollen jumper and some matching light grey mittens. Hung up by the door was a big red woolly scarf.

Here’s what I know for sure: even after three days, neither one of us can remember a thing after the kiss. The timestamp on the video of me crawling through the door was 3.41am. The final image from the bar was tagged at 1.25am. This is odd, because the walk back to the flat takes fifteen minutes. Oli could taste kebab, which fills in one gap. The photograph at 2.59am of me lying spread-eagled on a pavement fills in another: the mud all over our coats.

Later on, when we walked — well, staggered really — back to the last place we remember to return the clothes, the pretty barmaid (everyone is pretty here) laughed and asked us in her slightly broken English “so… you have a woman’s clothes… but no woman?!”. Yes. That’s about the sum of it.