Part of the challenge of international travel is to land somewhere at the right time.
I never made it to New York City before the World Trade Center fell. The downside of this is that I never got to visit the World Trade Center (presumably I would have had a better time than Homer Simpson), but the upside has been that (as many have said) New Yorkers are far friendlier post-9/11 (they have also been more religious), and therefore my first NYC experience was better overall than it otherwise would have been.
As I've written before, I've been to Istanbul before Erdogan's steady Islamization of Turkey (which has been slowed, but not stopped, by his party's drubbing in the 2015 Turkish election). Unfortunately, I never made it to Cairo before the troubles caused by the so-called "Arab Spring", which has made the city a very very unpleasant place to be a tourist in. The problem, as you might guess, is knowing which place to visit before it falls to shit.
Turkey is slowly turning to shit, Egypt quickly turned to shit (as did NYC in September of 2001), but which countries are turning to shit now and how fast? It's not always easy. Unfortunately, the "quickly turned" category seems to describe Budapest as the Mediterranean migrant crisis worsens.
LONDON — About 2,000 migrants remained stranded near the Keleti train station in central Budapest on Wednesday, and hundreds of passengers were delayed overnight on five Eurostar trains after migrants blocked tracks near the French port of Calais, as Europe continued to grapple with a surge of desperate migrants.The NY Times being the Times, of course, they have to blame "right-wing parties" for daring to suggest that maybe these people should stay in the country they were in.
In southern Europe, at least 11 migrants drowned when two boats sank after leaving southwest Turkey for the Greek island of Kos, Reuters reported, citing the Turkish news agency Dogan.
The developments served as a reminder that while much of the focus of Europe’s humanitarian crisis in recent days has been on the influx to Hungary, Austria and Germany, countries across the Continent are still struggling to deal with the increasing numbers.
Tens of thousands of migrants, buffeted by conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, have been seeking refuge in Europe, only to find themselves confronted with a patchwork of incoherent asylum policies across the 28-member bloc.
Instead, let's be realistic: these people don't belong in Europe. They are not in Europe's best interests to let in. They are the beginning of a crisis of citizenship and identity which frankly Europe (especially Eastern Europe) cannot afford.
But the bigger concern, frankly, is that Budapest is at least for now and possibly forever not a good place to be a tourist. (Oddly, Budapest's Wikitravel page is currently free of any specific warnings related to the crisis)
Related: How fast Muslim terrorists can destroy a city.
