Once upon a time, a very long time ago, or May 1998 if you want to be more precise, I took a flight with Ryanair from Birmingham to Dublin. It was, in fact, the first flight I had ever taken in my entire life and hence a rather exciting experience. A week later, I attempted to take my second ever flight from Dublin back to Birmingham, and it was here that the fun and games started.

My family and I arrived at Dublin airport in good time and searched for our flight on the departure boards. For some strange reason, it didn’t appear to be showing at the time at which we had expected it. Curious. Eventually, a bit unnerved, my mother went over the a customer information desk and enquired. Customer Services proceeded to deny point blank that our flight existed. My mother duly produced the tickets. Customer Services then clarified that our flight had indeed once existed, but had since been cancelled. These were the good old days when you had proper paper tickets and had to go to a travel agent to purchase them. The travel agent had not informed us that our flight had been cancelled, or perhaps more accurately, Ryanair had not informed the travel agent. The time/day of the flight had been randomly moved without us knowing, and thus we had missed it.

The prospect of being stranded in Dublin airport was not one that appealed, and after various arguments between my mother and Ryanair staff, we were booked onto a new flight. There followed a mad dash across the airport to try and make it, which culminated in us actually running out onto the runway, so lax was airport security in those days But ultimately we missed that flight too and had to sit around in the airport for many boring hours before Ryanair condescended to fly us home.

Over the past ten years, Ryanair has metamorphosed from a slightly dodgy airline which sold flights to Ireland slightly cheaper than Aer Lingus, to the incredibly dodgy European budget airline that it is today. A lot of things have changed, from the online check-in system to the staff’s desire to sell you scratch cards during the flight. It appears that some things, however, remain the same. (more…)

One of the very exciting things to happen during my blogging drought was the development of the plans Babel and I have for our summer holiday. I had originally managed to get the week from 18th to 25th July booked off work, and ever since January when we booked our flights from East Midlands to Prague, we have been intending to attend the Internacia Junulara Kongreso, a week-long event for young speakers of Esperanto which this year is being held in the Czech town of Liberec. Babel very uncharacteristically offered to arrange the flights, and got us a really good price with Ryanair. The only downside was that they don’t run a flight on the Saturday we wanted to fly back, so we booked a return ticket for the Sunday instead. I certainly didn’t regard this as being much of downside, because it gave us the opportunity to spend a weekend in Prague, a place I have wanted to go to for years (more…)

Hmmm, how to describe the internacia vespero?! Some of it was exceptionally good and some of it was exceptionally bad. There were some incredibly talented singers, some stunning belly-dancing, and a few jokes which were genuinely funny. It was quite cool to see the Esperanto song Ska-virino performed in sign language too. But some of the acts were either out of tune, or simply went on for too long. I think as a general rule, people should only be allowed to sing one song, as opposed to three in a row, and there should be a limit placed on the length of sketches and the like. That way, it would be easier to enjoy the stuff which was genuinely excellent, and the stuff which wasn’t so much to your own personal taste would be mercifully shorter. Through no one’s fault, the temperature in the theatre building was incredibly hot and the whole atmosphere was so oppressive that once or twice I felt like I was going to pass out. It was a shame, because I probably didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have done, and I could hardly wait for the group photo to be over at the end so that I could run outside for some fresh air. (more…)

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. (more…)

I was glad not to be hungover on Thursday morning, because I wanted to go on another excursion. Only a little one this time, which mercifully didn’t involve getting on a coach I hadn’t realised before I went on holiday that Szombathely (or, at least, the Roman town which used to stand on the same site) was the birthplace of Saint Martin of Tours (he who gave his cloak to the beggar). Generally my family spend a lot of time praying to various Saint Martins, on account of the fact that that was my grandfather’s Christian name, and so I found the prospect of visiting his birthplace rather exciting. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

Monday… Monday… I think Monday was the day of dance, but I managed to avoid dancing

I decided I ought to make an effort to participate in some of the programme, and so I attended a lesson in Hungarian. I was genuinely interested to learn some Hungarian for obvious practical reasons, but the room was far too small to accommodate the vast numbers of people who had had the same idea, and it soon became a battle not to pass out from the intense heat. The teacher wouldn’t have won any prizes, but nevertheless I did manage to acquire the rudiments of vowel pronunication and a few basic words such as hello, thank you, and German so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. (more…)

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 (more…)

When I set off for the IJK the Saturday before last, I took with me a big empty notebook. The idea was that I would use it as a diary in which to record my experiences of the week, and that blogging about it once I got back would be a piece of cake. Of course, what happened in the event was that I ended up having far too much fun to even think about taking notes, and so now I am completely at the mercy of my memory. I was going to say that happily my memory is better than that of my ageing boyfriend, but my mother has just told me off for describing him as old. Apparently you wouldn’t know he was nearly thirty at all, because he looks so incredibly “youthful” (more…)