Budapest

The road in from the airport is narrow and lined with billboards emphasizing happy, smiling people using products that most of the residents here can’t possibly afford. In the space between the advertisements I can see a blighted landscape: industrial strength tower blocks sporting a thick skirting of graffiti, Eastern European cars, covered in soot and with unpronounceable names, parked haphazardly on sidewalks.

Hungary is one of the latest members of the bureaucracy-laden megalith that is the European Union but because of their newcomer status, the Hungarians have not converted their local currency, the Flourit, to Euros. This means that travellers are confronted with an intimidating array of zeros on the banknotes and a hamburger and fries could cost you millions.

My hotel of choice, the Le Meridian, is full this weekend so I’m forced to take up lodgings at the InterContinental- a last minute change made under duress.

There was a time, back before I started living out of hotel rooms, when I associated chains like Hilton and InterContinental with, if not luxury, then at least reasonably high standards. Now when I see one of them (or any of their associated partners) on my itinerary I find myself wondering if there might be any park benches available instead.

The InterContinental Budapest didn’t let me down. Walking into the lobby I was confronted by a sea of conventioneers dressed in green plastic capes and matching crowns. A small woman with the look of a frightened zoo animal was holding one of those ridiculously large checks they hand out to lottery winners. I couldn’t make out who the check was made out to but whoever the lucky recipient turned out to be was going to walk away with €26,000. That kind of money should have bought them a better hotel.

Check-in was pleasant but I should have sensed trouble when only one out of the five lifts was operational. My room was a carbon copy of all other InterContinental rooms I have ever stayed in. These guys learned branding from McDonald’s: each bit of furniture, every picture, every shampoo bottle, are clones of ones found in InterContinentals all over the globe. No deviations allowed. Resistance if futile. You will be assimilated.

The location of this hotel, on the shores of the Danube, couldn’t be better but my room overlooked a construction site. Turning on the heater produced, nothing. I found that no heat came as a set with no Internet. Three trips to reception finally secured me a room with heat, Internet, lights, hot water and a decent bed. As an added bonus they threw in drunken obnoxious neighbours with shrill voices, a feature which seems to be complementary at all InterContinentals.

Not that I ended up spending much time there.

I knew the weekend was going to be a miserable. Our task was to migrate a container ship load of media and accounting applications from one system to another all the while placating an IT manager who resented our very presence and who had convinced his finance director that the whole project was little more than a slice of pure evil. Yep, that should end well.

In the end we got the job done because, well, because we had to. It might be dedication or fear but whatever the motivating factor was, by Monday morning all systems were operational and I even managed to make my flight back to London.

It’s a week later now. I’m sitting in my bed typing this while a kid from Poland tears out a wall in the living room. We have rising damp, which sounds a bit rude but is a fairly common ailment of flats of a certain age- over a hundred years in our case. Groundwater seeps up into the brickwork and through the plasterboard leaving ugly brown and yellow streaks along the walls. The only way to eliminate it is to rip out the drywall and scrape your way back to the masonry. Once this is done they inject some environmentally unfriendly stuff into the wall and seal it all back up with concrete. The process takes two days and leaves the entire flat covered in a thin coating of gritty plaster dust which, I have no doubt, turns to a solid mass in the lungs.

Truth be told I really should be in Budapest again this weekend but the project was running over budget and I figured we could save a few quid by not sending me out. Mistake. I’ve had a phone attached to my ear for the past 48 hours trying to sort things out between UK and Hungarian teams and make sure we don’t miss something vita which will prevent the users from working on Monday thus causing the local management to chase us with flaming torches.

I’m feeling massively guilty about being here while my colleagues toil away in the field- they haven’t left the office before three in the morning for days on end and not only is there no light at the end of the tunnel, there isn’t any tunnel or, for that matter, lights as 60mph winds knocked the entire city off-line. In my mind I’ve just run away from a fight and in punishment, the very second I cancelled my flight and hotel I came over ill and, at this very moment, feel like someone is running a belt-sander over my throat: a physical manifestation of emotional trauma.

The dust has settled in the living room and I haven’t had a call from Budapest in about 20 minutes. The e-mails keep coming in but they are easier to ignore. I think perhaps it’s time for tea and toast. What can I get you?