Tuesday – we succeed in buying postage stamps but fail in buying icecream!
It wasn’t much surprise that my boyfriend overslept on Tuesday morning, and so I took the brave step of stealing a couple of rolls from the breakfast buffet in order that he not waste away. With his figure, I felt this was indeed a real possibility, but he seemed strangely unimpressed by my criminal cunning and expressed a desire to go to MacDonalds instead. It was another glorious sunny day, and we sat outside on the main street with our chips and milkshake, soaking up the atmosphere of our beautiful surroundings. Whilst trying not to look at the mayonnaise and assorted gunk inside the burger my boyfriend had ordered, my eyes alighted on the building across the road and it suddenly struck me that it must be the local tourist information office. Once our chips were finished, I insisted that we go across the road and take a look, because I was on a mission to acquire some postcards.
Now, normally when one goes on holiday, acquiring postcards and souvenirs is a relatively straightforward business. I don’t know, perhaps I am scarred from spending too much time in Switzerland – surely the most capitalist country in the world – but generally in a holiday location I expect row upon row of tacky tourist shops selling not just postcards, but tea towels and ball point pens and T Shirts with slightly obscene slogans. In Szombathely there was nothing of the sort, and it was really very refreshing to visit a place which was so pure and unspoilt 
The guy in the tourist information spoke English and German, and so we took the opportunity to ask if he sold postcards.
“Oh yes”, he replied proudly, “we have four!”
Four?! 
He reached under the table, only to produce a small cardboard box which indeed contained postcards with a selection of four different pictures. Only one of these seemed to be a nice view of the town so I bought all mine the same – the rest involved a lot of pictures of Roman soliders and hog roasts. All that remained now was to purchase some stamps. Unfortunately the tourist information office didn’t sell these, so we set off in search of the normal post office.
I was absolutely convinced I had seen one of these earlier in the week but had no idea where, and in the end it was just good fortune that we stumbled across one. Once inside, Babel did an admirable job of purchasing stamps with hand signals, and we even picked up a useful leaflet about phone cards which gave us the correct Hungarian spelling for United Kingdom
Tuesday was allegedly the sporty day, and after lunch Babel was all fired up to take part in the football competition. Suitably attired in his English shirt and chanting songs with highly dubious lyrics, we set off for the two swimming pool again in the belief that that was where it was being held. Once we arrived, however, it became clear that there were no other Esperantists in sight so we headed back to the uni, in the process unfortunately missing them as the walked in the opposite direction 
Now I come to think about it, I’m not sure we ever got to the bottom of what happened with the football competition. We certainly couldn’t see it anywhere and some people said it had already taken part, so in the end we just ended up going swimming again. That was actually a lot of fun, and the world didn’t end because I was wearing a bikini, so it’s all good The pool was really exciting actually because they turned on an amazing sort of wave machine which caused a really strong current in part of the pool. If you got in it’s path you were whisked round in a circle and it was quite difficult to extricate yourself again until they turned it off.
Tuesday evening we didn’t want to stay out too late because Wednesday was the day for excursions, so instead of drinking we met up in a cafe in the main town square with some other friends. Several of us were experiencing severe caffeine cravings, and the rumour was that this was a place which did a nice iced coffee. Upon arrival we actually tried to order some icecream as well, but here we ran into problems. We were fortunate enough to have in our number someone who spoke fluent Hungarian. She did her best to order us all an icecream, but the shocking news came back from the kitchen that they had actually run out of chocolate. There was much confusion whilst alternative icecream flavours were translated between Hungarian, English, Esperanto and Serbian, and the net result was that the waitress came back saying there wasn’t enough icecream of any sort to fulfil our order :cry:
When the iced coffee arrived though, it *was* exceptionally good
Tags: Esperanto, IJK, Szombathely