Incident at Szombathéley

Traveling to a foreign country is always an adventure, especially when the language of the country you are visiting is as familiar to you as Middle High Klingon. Hungarian is certainly one of the more impenetrable tongues on the continent. Penny, a practiced linguist, and I attempted to 'crack the code' of the language we encountered, trying to guess how many genders Hungarian might have (it doesn't have any, actually), what endings denote singular or plural, what significance various diacritical marks have, etc. We didn't get very far.
Sunday morning we boarded our train at Keleti Station for the return journey. This time it was packed and, as we didn't have seat reservations, we were forced to sit in the smoking car (ugh!). This leg of the trip was also an express train. The conductor, who spoke only a little German, made his rounds and informed us that we had to pay a supplement to the tune of 900 Hungarian Florints (about $5). We didn't have that many florints left. What would it be in euros? we asked. He consulted his electronic ticket gizmo and announced that it would be 36 euros. I think we simultaneously exclaimed our disbelief: sechsunddreißig euros???? That would be about $55, an outrageous sum. Penny would have none of it and dug in her heels. The conductor, poor man, who was just trying to do his job, became intransigent on the issue. We were at an impasse. He confiscated our tickets. The last word we heard from his lips before he stormed off was: Polizei! We were going to be dragged off the train by the police at the next station. Somehow the aid of another passenger was enlisted, a young lady who acted as translator. It seems that the conductor had missed a decimal point on his gizmo. The actual conversion was 3.6 euros, not 36. And he obviously had no idea how much a euro was worth. The crisis was diffused and we paid our florints/euros. We had to change trains at Szombathéley, boarding an Austrian train for the second leg of our journey. I'll bet that conductor was glad to see the back of us. And here is yet another view of the Danube from Buda Hill.