The one tourist-y activity that I consistently enjoy is asking someone else to take your picture, mainly because of my family, who have made it a pseudo-game to make entertaining comments on the picture-taker's aptitude while the picture is being taken.[^1] This game has deep ties to the other game we play, "guess who will take the best picture" — like bughouse to crazyhouse, like ice hockey to ball hockey. I've thus, as a combination of these two factors, spent a lot of time asking young fashionable people to take our picture, trusting Instagram has trained them well. As far as possible demographics that can form winning strategies, young fashionable people are top tier. One such man took our photo in Budapest, earned a "very good" muttering under my mother's breath, and felt comfortable enough — he had just become our (highly praised) family photographer, after all — to share his views on Budapest with us immediately after. Thus sparked a conversation on European capitals, on the merits of Berlin,[^2] and Hungarian politics. Eventually (I'm not certain how we got here) he ended up sharing he was a doctor. And that is how, on top of Fisherman's Bastion, I learned to cure the cold I'd been nursing for nearly six weeks. ~ Conversations are interesting. The same fundamental action can be drab, routine, and uninspiring; it can be exhilarating, influential, life-changing in some way. What's more interesting is how some conversations can bounce like pinballs between these two extremes. Learning to take Advil lies somewhere in the middle; learning about the intricate dance of buying medicine in Hungary leans more outside. I once convinced a girl that I was the adopted son of an old-money British family in the midst of a tumultuous internal moral dilemma;[^3] dropping the act led to an insightful discussion on racial tolerance in Europe. Interlocution ebbs & flows, so does its utility, but patience and sincerity seem to find something to latch onto. Stop a guy on the street and you get some recommendations for Vienna; recklessly speak French to yourself and you learn to use ice in a sauna. YMMV, as mine has (practice Mandarin and you might just have disturbed a FAANG worker who speaks fluent English). Other snapshots: predict a 60k forint bill and you'll get a 110k one; "if there's no issue, create an issue" (more poetic in my dad's original Mandarin); accidentally wandering into a dive bar with your parents is much funnier than one would expect (again, YMMV).[^4] [^1]: Speaking Mandarin is one of the greatest assets abroad. Trust. [^2]: I wouldn't move there (a culture known for no outgroup has, strangely, quite a few); he wouldn't move anywhere else (unless it was for, say, a mandatory work placement in Budapest, which just so happened to be the case). [^3]: Sorry again, Rach. As you said — there's truth & there's Ministry of Sound truth. [^4]: Savar has commented my parents are just teenagers in other bodies; I argue I'm just my parents in teenager form. Either way, there's worse places to be than talking about nothing with my parents in some random European location.