The adventure of the Hungarian pedal boat :)
Sunday was our first proper day in Szombathely. We awoke to a beautiful blue sky and the promise, so I thought, of a delicious continental breakfast. Hmmm. The breakfasts during the week proved to be a little “interesting”. I had expected to be served standard continental fare – nice soft rolls with ham, cheese and black coffee, but there were a couple of things that Sunday morning which surprised me. First off, no rolls, but rather slices of a rather hard, chewy sort of bread. The same loaves reemerged at various meal times during the week, and I have to confess that they didn’t really grow on me. Even when they were fresh they seemed a bit stale, and the taste was peculiar – salty? sour? I couldn’t put my finger on quite what it was, but it wasn’t the usual delicious sort of bread which I’m accustomed to eating abroad 
There was, however, an ample buffet with plenty of ham, cheese and slices of cucumber. What the slices of cucumber were in aid of I never managed to ascertain, but also they were recycled with worrying frequency, serving not only as breakfast, but also starters and puddings. I’m not a fan of cucumber but I was quite prepared to ignore it. The only thing which really upset me about breakfast was the total lack of coffee.
Seriously, throughout the entire week we were not served a single cup of coffee in the university. Every breakfast time there was a choice between a cup of milk and a cup of one of the strangest substances known to man, masquerading as tea. I don’t generally go in for drinking tea outside of England as I don’t believe that foreigners can make it properly ( 
) but nevertheless I would have happily drunk it in an attempt to get a even a small amount of caffeine into my system. I’m not generally fussy about types of tea, and would have been as happy with Earl Grey as Darjeeling but my God, this stuff was foul! Imagine a cup of warm water into which someone has dipped a tea bag for twenty seconds and then proceeded to add in excess of ten spoonfuls of sugar. Seriously, it was just a cup of horribly sweet hot water, and it was terribly difficult to swallow. As the week progressed I got a little more accomplished at drinking it, but that first morning… urgh, yuk
The drink was in fact that only aspect of breakfast which remained constant. One morning we were served the most delicious danish pastries, along with soft little loaves with doughnut-jam in the bottom. Another morning we had chocolate cake. One day I was served a plate of grey mush which turned out to be scrambled egg and mushroom, and another I was randomly presented with a couple of hot dogs. It certainly provided a bit of excitement in the mornings, and I just about managed not to oversleep any day and miss it 
Immediately after breakfast on the Sunday was the solena malfermo, and so we all processed through the town to stand outside some sort of official building and listen to speeches from local dignatories. Tim was chosen to be the representative of the UK during the ceremony, a role which involved him waving about a balloon on which I believe he had written the word Britio. In any case, he managed to get permanent marker pen all over himself… even in his ear
The official business over, the idea was for us all to participate in the urba ludo. It was a nice idea; divided in groups we were issued with a map and a set of instructions to follow. By answering the questions on the sheet, we would have chance to explore the town and get to know our way around it. Unfortunately, the groups were rather large (15 – 20) and my sense of direction isn’t terribly good anyway, so the whole thing became a bit of a bind. After half an hour or so my boyfriend and I decided to give up, and we ended up in MacDonalds having a rather delicious milkshake. It was reassuring to find that the Hungarian word for milkshake is “shake”
I know that to some people it will sound truly dreadful that we travelled halfway across Europe and then at the first opportunity went to eat in an American fast food restaurant, but I disagree. I think MacDonalds is an amazing resource. No matter where you travel in the world, when you see that distinctive logo you can be sure you’ve found a place where you can get adequate food quickly and cheaply. I always eat in MacDonalds when I am travelling – it is just so simple, and particularly so in a place where you don’t speak the lingo sufficiently to order anything complicated. When we went to Geneva earlier in the year indeed, MacDonalds was almost the only place we could afford to eat!
The remarkable thing about this MacDonalds franchise actually was the size of the portions. We went for a large milkshake and ended up with something that in England we would consider small. The Hungarians obviously have a healthier, more modest way of life
Suitably refreshed we headed back across the town to the university, and I must take this opportunity to mention what a beautiful town Szombathely is. It’s difficult to describe without photos, but the town centre was far grander than I had expected. The main square was simply enormous – beautifully paved and surrounded on all sides by imposing buildings. There was a rather cool fountain, a massive monument of a religious nature, and a whole host of other statues dotted around the place. It was the sort of place where you had to fight the overwhelming urge to constantly take photos – I think I could actually have sat there all day and just drunk in the atmosphere
My boyfriend had to attend a meeting about the IS, so I headed back to the room for a bit of a rest before steeling myself to attend dinner on my own. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of that dinner and most subsequent ones. Seeing as I would stand more than a fighting chance of winning the competition for World’s Fussiest Eater, I had fully expected to spend the entire week starving hungry and needing to run to MacDonalds after every meal. It turned out, however, that the food was of a very high standard and although there were undoubtedly things I didn’t like, and certainly a few nights when I needed to fill up on Jaffa Cakes afterwards, on the whole I was quite impressed I was particularly pleased that the portions were so generous, and also that there was a remarkably low incidence of green things. At no point did I end up with an objectionable salad on my plate, and when I did end up with potatoes they were actually pretty edible.
The result is that I would highly recommend Hungarian cuisine I think that this first day we had chicken and rice which was fairly unexciting, but over the course of the week there were some very tasty sausages, several meals which involved absolutely delicious dumplings, some soup which even I managed to eat, a gorgeous concoction which resembled a plate of Ebly Wheat with sausage chunks, a very interesting sort of bake with potato and egg, and – best of all – Schnitzel and chips :) I wasn’t so keen on the lentil soup and I declined every opportunity to eat a gherkin, but other than that it was pretty cool
Sunday afternoon my boyfriend decided he was going to go to sleep. To be fair to him, he was probably tired after the traveling and he had been up later than me the night before, but as a general point people who sleep excessively, especially during the day time, piss me off intensely. With the possible exception of when you are shagging someone as attractive as Babel, I can’t see any possible reason for paying money to go on a holiday to a new country and then spending the entire day and night in bed. People who want to sleep could reduce their carbon footprint by doing so at home
Anyhow, I was way too excited about being in Hungary to want to sleep, and so I decided to be brave and explore. I was actually pretty scared by the prospect of doing such a thing, because I didn’t have a map and I had no idea how safe a country Hungary was. A certain person several years ago had given me the impression that it was most unsafe indeed, but having been there I can honestly say that where we were at least I never saw the slightest indication of crime, nor felt threatened at any time of day or night.
I exited the student home and set off down a busy main road, my thought process being that if I walked down a busy main road it would be nigh on impossible for me to get lost. I walked past a sort of housing estate which I guess was 60s Soviet-style, but in matter of fact I didn’t find it ugly – the buildings reminded me of Davos sanatoria with their flat roofs. Is sanatoria the plural of sanatorium or have I totally made that up? Hmmm.
I was momentarily excited when I saw a sign for Tesco, which seems to be big in Eastern Europe. I formed a vague plan of walking towards it, in the hope that I could buy some toilet roll. My boyfriend had explained to me the importance of buying toilet roll at Esperanto events because apparently everybody else steals it. As it happened, I never got around to buying any and it turned out to be unnecessary in Szombathely once I cottoned on to the fact that whatever toilet roll there was was kept in a dispenser *outside* the toilet and you had to remember to collect it before you went it. I never made it to Tesco anyway, because I was distracted by a side road with a bridge.
I get very excited by rivers. The river in Szombathely is tiny, it’s just a stream really, but I couldn’t resist abandoning the main road to go and look at it, and there surely wasn’t any harm in branching off down one side road, so long as I didn’t do anything too complicated. I made it to the bridge, and noticed on the far side of it that there was actually something rather exciting. It looked like a big water park, and I set off to investigate it intrigued.
It soon became evident that the town does indeed possess a really cool outdoor swimming pool complete with slides which I would be far too scared every to go on. Even more exciting, a slightly duller flash of water on the other side of the carpark caught my eye, and I realised that the town also possesses a beautiful natural lake.
It really is a gorgeous lake, especially on a bright sunny day and I was highly impressed to have been in Szombathely for less than 24 hours and already tracked down the local duck population Hungarian ducks were a little different to British ducks actually – initially I thought they were all female because the mallards didn’t have green heads, but on closer inspection the males did prove to have a little blue stripe on their wing to indicate their gender. I walked around the lake in the baking heat, which took about 45 minutes. There were lots of people fishing, and messing about on the water in boats. I decided to stop on a bench to reapply suncream, and there it was that I had my first encounter with a Hungarian.
A lovely elderly lady came and asked if she could sit on my bench. At least, I assume she asked that and I indicated that she could. She then started saying something complicated to me in Hungarian, at which point I adopted an expression of confused panic and started saying “angolul” which was about the only word I could remember from my phrasebook. On the third repetition of this, she appeared to understand to the extent that she started talking to me in German. Phew She actually didn’t speak much German at all, so the conversation was somewhat stilted. I explained that I came from England and tried to say how beautiful I thought Hungary was. She then began a mantra of things she could remember about England.
Beatles… Rolling Stones… Eliz… Elizabetta?… Charles und Dianna… tot… sehr traurig… kleine Frau… Indien…
I agreed that the death of Princess Dianna was rather tragic, but I was totally lost when she started talking about a little Indian woman… until she started doing hand actions and suddenly it came to me in a flash – she was trying to say that Mother Teresa had died on the same day as Diana
After that little adventure I was joined by another friend and we sat on the bench for a while before he showed me a really cool shortcut from the lake back to our accommodation by means of a little path alongside the river. I returned to the room to retrieve my boyfriend, and I was so excited about having discovered the lake that I ended up heading back there with him. It was then that I managed to fulfil one of my lifetime’s ambitions.
I have always wanted to go in a pedal boat. Seriously, since I was a really small child. Just somehow I’ve never had the opportunity to. I’m not sure how it came about, but Babel seemed quite enthusiastic about the idea of pedal boats too, and managed to make himself understood well enough with the rental man for us to successfully hire one for an hour. It was such good fun! It was quite hard work to keep up the pedalling, although Babel was probably pedalling more vigorously than I was, but it was terribly exciting. We were able to get right up close to the ducks, and we even saw something which looked a bit like a Hungarian variation on the theme of a heron.
What hadn’t occurred to me before was that pedal boats actually needed to be steered. This was somewhat more problematic – there was a sort of handle to turn but it didn’t seem to move the boat in directions you would expect Luckily Babel was able to steer it most of the time, because when I had a go our course was kind of erratic 
I have no idea what we did that evening. Perhaps we had an early night and read. I certainly got more reading done than I usually would on holiday, which was quite cool because I finally had time to get to the end of ‘The Forgotten Garden’ by Kate Morton. I need to review that, and also ‘Fatherland’ which I finally finished yesterday, at some point but I don’t know when I’m going to have time!
Tags: Esperanto, IJK, Szombathely