As it happened, I’d actually drunk too much wine to get up and feed the ducks before breakfast. For the first time in my life I didn’t even hear the alarm go off, but luckily Babel woke me at 9am and we still managed to get to breakfast on time. Armed with our stolen bread, we set off towards the lake and the ducks. The lake has a little island in the middle and most of the ducks seemed to be congregating there, so we went across the bridge and started to feed them. I don’t think they get fed as much as English ducks because some of them seemed quite ravenous and were practically fighting one another for pieces of bread. With Hungarian bread seemingly being so hard and stale, we had to be quite careful to make sure we tore it into sufficiently small chunks and didn’t choke them. A further complication was added by the swarms of small fish who suddenly appeared at the surface and tried to grab the bread before the ducks got chance. I have got some photos of the ducks which Babel took on my camera, but unfortunately it’s not a digital camera so it will be ages before I can see them.

I’d promised that I was going to attend a handicraft session at 11, so it was a bit of a rush to get back to the university on time. Me attending a handicraft session was actually a bit of a joke, because it is difficult to imagine someone less artistic and more generally hopeless at anything which involves using your hands than me. However, it was a week for being open to new experiences, and to be fair, I hadn’t actually tried cross stitching since I was 8, so it was not unreasonable to suppose that since then I might have developed more of a competency in it.

Such optimisim, however, was soon proven to be misplaced The task was really quite simple; we were given a small piece of cloth, some green thread, and a piece of paper with a pattern on it, and we had an hour in which to sew a star. I’m not quite sure what happened – either I misread the instructions, or I didn’t quite understand what the teacher said, or something, but the end result was that I did my star completely wrong It seemed you were supposed to make your stitches twice as big as my stitches were, and leave a gap between them or something, but I didn’t realise and so my star finished up far two small. Plus, whilst I had done my best to follow the pattern, the size of it meant that mine just came out looking all wonky as if I couldn’t actually sew a straight diagonal line. It was rather embarrassing I think in future if I try to cross stitch anything I need to draw the pattern on my piece of cloth first so that I can see what I’m supposed to be sewing.

After lunch on Friday was the akvobatalo – some sort of strange tradition of Hungarian Esperanto-events which requires that the Esperantists conduct a waterfight against the local fire brigade. On the pretext of being a pacifist, I decided that I didn’t want to participate in an enterprise which was so clearly doomed to failure. After all, as the Catholic Church says, a war is only just if you have a reasonable chance of success More pertinently, I didn’t have a water pistol so I would have been at an extreme disadvantage.

Nevertheless, Babel and I traipsed down to the lake with everybody else, and whilst he went to watch the aquatic activities, I settled down under a tree with my new Gunther Grass novel I felt mean afterwards because I didn’t let him have my camera to take pictures of the battle, but I was worried it might get wet and it has sentimental value Predictably, the Esperantists came off worse and in fact I was very glad I wasn’t involved because it sounds like the firemen were quite brutal. We heard reports of several people being hit in the eye, and one guy was hit by such a powerful jet of water that he ended up being taken to hospital

Babel and I went in the pool for a bit but kinda felt all swimmed out fairly early on, so headed off to the supermarket to buy provisions for the morrow’s journey. After that came the unpleasant business of packing up our belongings, before we headed out for our last evening’s entertainment. I was unable to work out whether it was la fina vespero de la IJK or la lasta vespero de la IJK, but nevertheless I decided to don a dress in honour of the occasion and Babel went so far as to wear a shirt. Not looking at all like ourselves, we headed off the the internacia vespero….

Tags: Esperanto, IJK, Szombathely

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Esperanto, Holidays and outings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.