A drunken swim in Lake Balaton
Wednesday was the day I had been looking forward to the most. I was so incredibly excited about going to Hungary that ideally I wanted to *see* Hungary, rather than sitting talking to a pile of Esperantists, so the chance to go on an excursion was one I relished. Unfortunately, I’m not a person who deals well with being herded around as if I’m part of a group of cattle, nor a person who enjoys being spoken to like a five year old, and for that reason the day failed to meet my expectations until halfway through I succeeded in getting drunk.
We were up early and just had time to grab breakfast before our coach allegedly departed at 8am. It didn’t depart anywhere near 8am, because it soon transpired that we had far more people than seats. In a shocking feat of bungled organisation, people whose names were not on the list (and who therefore quite possibly hadn’t paid) were allowed to occupy seats whilst people whose names were on the lists and had every right to expect a seat were forced to stand in the aisles. The chief organiser “helpfully” suggested that couples free up extra space by sitting on each other’s knees, but much as I like Babel, I wasn’t prepared to sit on his lap for two hours 
It must have been gone half eight when we did set off, and in a change to the published programme we were first taken to a small town whose name unfortunately now eludes me, but which boasts some fairly spectactular underground caves. These caves are rather special because they host a large underground lake on which it is possible to row a boat.
When this was explained to us initially, I naively assumed that we were going to sit in a large sort of boat whilst a fully qualified cave employee proceeded to row it. In fact it was only on this understanding that I entered the cave at all, being as how I actually find caves terribly frightening. I had a bad cave experience when I was about nine and had never succeeded in entering one again since 
Nevertheless, enter one I did and after an interminable time spent standing in a queue, I realised to my total shock and horror that the boats we were talking about were a small, three person affair, with a single paddle. It was fortunate that I was standing in the queue next to Babel and that he seemed to understand what to do, because left to my own devices I would certainly have drowned 
The lake didn’t look very deep admittedly, but it looked like it could be dangerously cold if you fell in, and the boats really weren’t terribly stable. Ours was rocking all over the place as the guy behind me moved backwards and forwards taking photos, and there was the added complication of the cave walls.
The walls of the cave were rather low and narrow in places, only just big enough for us to pass through, and at times there was a real danger of us hitting the wall or ceiling. Luckily we did eventually emerge unscathed, and it’s the sort of experience which seems fun after the event 
From there we headed to a wine factory where we were scheduled to have a guided tour. Wine factory isn’t the right word but I can’t think what the right word is. Like a brewery, but for wine. Not a vineyard, because they don’t actually grow any grapes there, just process them.
I will give you some advice for free – if you’ve never visited a wine production plant, don’t bother! Honestly, there is nothing to see besides a random assortment of barrels and machines, and there is an overpowering stench of vinegar. My boyfriend and I gave up partway round and sat aimlessly in the sun for a while instead.
A description of Wednesday would not be complete without mentioning the second most annoying person who we encountered during the course of the week: a small, three year old boy. This child was an utter menace, and why on earth his parents had decided it would be suitable to bring him to this event I can’t imagine. He was left to run riot all over the place, his parents frequently never seeming to know or care where he was or who he was with. And on the relatively rare occasions when he was in their random vicinity, they totally failed to keep him under control. He could be seen publicly hitting his mother and receiving no sort of chastisement, and he even whacked me on the head with a bottle.
At the wine place it was no different. He could be heard screeching all over the place, and during the meal which followed he was left unsupervised to play with potentially dangerous farm equipment, so that in the end my boyfriend had to step in and rescue him. I spoke to several people who all voiced the same sentiment – that if he’s this badly behaved now, they dread to think what he’ll be like in a few years time
Anyhow, as mentioned there was a meal. We had to wait a long time for it, but when it arrived it was a delicious goulash with potatoes so pleasant that even I condescended to eat them Water was free to drink but everything else had to be paid for, so seeing as we were in a wine sort of place, my boyfriend and I decided to order ourselves a glass of white wine. It was very nice white wine indeed, but it turned out we needn’t have gone to the trouble of paying for it…
I had known from the start that wine tasting would be on the programme, and wine tasting was not something which I had ever done before, but somehow I had a quite fixed idea about the format it would take. i am certain that whenever I have seen wine tasting on tv, people are given a small drop of wine in the bottom of a glass, they sniff it, swilj a bit around their mouths and promptly split it out. It doesn’t involve a lot of swallowing.
This wine tasting session, however, appeared to be different. We all crammed into a sort of cellar, and were informed that there were no fewer than seven different types of wine for us to try. 
We were each issued with a glass into which the first wine was poured; I had a sip and wondered vaguely where I was supposed to spit it out to…
It soon transpired that I wasn’t meant to spit it out at all! The idea appeared to be to down the entire glass of wine as quickly as possible in order to have an empty glass to fill with the next variety. Two glasses in I realised that I was already rather drunk, and not wanting to go through that whole hangover business again, I confess that I had to sit a few course out. I did take advantage of the free cheese though, which was handed out to help clear our palates in between glasses and was really rather delicious. I managed another couple of glasses of wine at the end, and they were quite delicious too, but I was glad I hadn’t had any more, else I would really have struggled to climb back up the steep cellar steps.
By the time the proceedings were over, we must have had 100 exceedingly drunk Esperantists, many of whom were enthusiastically singing drinking songs and engaging in all sorts of hilarity. As for me, I was now sufficiently inebriated to be able to overlook the appalling organisation of the day In a step which to me at least seemed a little illogical, the plan was seemingly to transport us two coach loads of drunk foreigners to Lake Balaton for an hour in order that we have chance to swim.
Lake Balaton is huge. Like, seriously massive. I’m not sad enough to wiki it and give you the figures but it’s certainly the biggest lake in Central Europe, Ryanair have named an airport after it, and all the East Germans used to go there on holiday during the Cold War. Hopefully not all at the same time, but you get the picture It was also incredibly pretty. To say the surrounding countryside was hilly would be slightly misleading, but nevertheless it certainly wasn’t flat and the overall impression was very pleasant.
Upon arrival you could be forgiven for thinking you had arrived at a genuine seaside. There were all the tacky stalls which you might expect in the UK, and then a beautifully sandy beach, completely devoid of the painful sort of pebbles which you often get at the sea. The water was delightfully warm, and there were no fish in sight. I’d always been apprehensive about swimming in lakes in case I encountered any fish, but this experience reassured me somewhat
If I had met a fish, I was probably too drunk to care – the latter part of the afternoon disappears beneath a haze of wine, and my main memory of what we got up to in the lake is probably not one my boyfriend would thank me for sharing… At least we remained sober enough to remember to get the coach home, unlike one fellow Esperantist who I later learned had been abandoned!
That was the night we had the delicious potato bake, and if I remember correctly, the evening’s entertainment was provided by Rolf’s highly hilarious Esperanto version of The Weakest Link. He didn’t manage to be quite as ugly as Ann Robinson, but otherwise it was pretty cool and having now had the chance to witness him being sarcastic and arrogant in the flesh, yes I can understand why people might want to shag him. If they were straight, like.
Being a little stressed out by something I’m unable to blog about, my mission for the night was then to get drunk. Unfortunately it transpired that the trinkejo was out of white wine, and so I rather tentatively attempted to drink a glass of red. The first two glasses weren’t very pleasant at all – they tasted far too much like vinegar – but the third one was really quite nice. Because it was from a different bottle, not because I was so drunk vinegar had started to become appealing It was actually probably the most enjoyable night I had at the IJK. I had a couple of interesting conversations, one which was very interesting indeed in fact, and by the time we got to bed it was 4am. On the one hand that sounds quite horrific, but on the other hand if you think about it, we still had time for a whole four hours sleep before we needed to get up for Thursday breakfast. I was pleasantly surprised to wake up on Thursday feeling absolutely fine, because I was always under the impression that red wine gave you dreadful headaches
Tags: Esperanto, IJK, Szombathely