Ten minutes later, as we stood waiting with our luggage around us, two young men came up and with heavy accents asked where this train was going.  We told them “Budapest,” but they seemed not to understand, asking us to point it out on their big map, which they unfolded before us.  Slightly puzzled as to who, in Central Europe, would not know “Budapest,” we accommodatingly pointed it out, and they wandered off, saying something about “Berlin.” 

  Within three minutes, I noticed Chuck’s briefcase was missing.  Panic!!  Our international money, the Eurail passes, his checkbook, his new Blackberry phone/email device, numerous important papers and some books he bought in Paris. 

  Chuck immediately realized we'd been robbed, and he ran down the ramp to the main station. Of course he found nothing and nobody.  We reconstructed what had happened, but our train was departing, and our reservations in Budapest would be lost, if we failed to arrive.  Mostly, I think, we were in shock, and so we followed our agenda; we boarded the train.   And we thought, “How dumb could we be?”  An old trick.

  So we spent the first half of the afternoon en route to Budapest kicking ourselves and the other half trying to list the contents. He also lost his calendar and address books, the later of which will be difficult to reconstruct.  It just got worse and worse, as he remembered more stuff. Housekeys! We still had my little freebie phone, and he used that to call the bank and start some cancellation procedures.  Having listed some PIN numbers and passwords in his address book presented all sorts of problems.  Thank goodness, we still had the tickets to Budapest (not part of the Eurail package) and our Czech kroners and Euros.  And credit cards and passports.  Things could have been worse.

  (Note: For the next ten days, we continued to remember items he'd stuck into the briefcase, mostly things of no value to the thieves, but priceless to us.)

For people who consider themselves savvy travelers, folks with over forty years of international wanderings, this was a bitter blow.  We suppose that our own complacency played a role; neither of us had ever been stung like this, and certainly never so badly.