Was I ferfi or noi?

It was just before dawn on a wintry Saturday, and I had hopped off the Bucharest-to-Budapest overnight train in a place called Mezobereny. The town of almost 11,000 in the eastern Hungarian plains was my destination for the weekend, but I had chosen it quite at random, with a simple goal: to find out what was there. I knew what was not there: any notable tourist attraction, a hotel or restaurant with even a single TripAdvisor review, a concentration of English speakers. But first I had to use the bathroom, and that was presenting a problem, since the stick-figure-free signs read “FERFI WC” and “NOI WC.”

I gave a befuddled look to the only other soul in the waiting room, a bundled-up elderly woman. She pointed. Ferfi it was.

On my way back to Budapest from more tourist-friendly Transylvania, I had decided to spend my final weekend in a place utterly unknown to me — and, it seemed to any tourists — just to see what would happen.

I’d shown up with similar intentions in other places — a weeklong stop in a small town in Mexico, a day in a pistachio-farming village in Turkey, two days in a small Chinese city along the Yangtze. But those were easier missions for various reasons: I speak Spanish, the Turkish are notoriously hospitable to strangers, and in China, well, as the only foreigner in town, lots of people wanted to meet me (or at least trail me at a safe distance).