It was the Labor day in the US, so the embassy was closed. However, Budapest was quite open, so we went for a long walk with Greg all over the Pest side - from scouting the place where the embassy was, to Váci utca, to a nice rich lunch at some place facing the river (over several lanes of traffic and tram tracks and a ship moored).
I went with him to a tourist office or a bank so he cashed his travellers checks (took 15 minutes or less), then somewhere to take our photos for the visa, then went to a travel agency (on Váci or some extension of it) to get us tickets. They didn't have anything before thursday, but then there was some one-time promotional discount, where the tickets were only about 520$ each. The girls at the agency were the same sponzoruša as I used to see at the ifabo - dopičnjak skirts, very synthetic shiny stockings, long hair and the general air of interchangeability. The tickets were actually two-way, and still cheaper than one-way (which you can't really buy at all, US regulation).
Found a sandwich shop near the embassy, with about 20 kinds of small sandwiches. The girls bought about 30 of them, and we ate some in the park.
Greg was actually very pleased with my knowledge of the place, and went through several instances of culture shock (like the general use of brick for building and then covering it with plaster - which I later heard is unheard of in the US). All went fine, except that I had a glitch with the metro. Didn't quite understand what to do with the tickets, where to show them up, and so we were caught at the lower end of the escalator with virgin tickets in my hand, which we should have inserted into some machine up there before entering. He paid the fine and wrote it off as tourist experience.
Had dinner the same place as yesterday. It began to get a bit cold just like it was at home (where we had intermittent rain all last week, had to wear jackets all the time), so the restaurant placed two radiant heaters, gas powered, around our table. Which worked, as there wasn't any wind.