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.

Babel booked our flights from East Midlands to Prague in January and got a very good deal on them with Ryanair. I was pleased that he had organised it so far in advance and thus saved us money Something went slightly wrong with the booking, and in a moment of confusion he entered the first half of his personal email address followed by the second half of his work email address, but at the end of the day I didn’t think that this was a big issue. What could possibly go wrong which would require Ryanair to contact us?

Hmmm. Well the holiday is getting closer now, and as I was in the process of putting together a private webpage from which we will be able to download all our travel documents and itineraries, I randomly ended up on the Ryanair website on Wednesday night. I was confident that our flights were correctly booked, but sometimes flight times do change by half an hour here or half an hour there, so I decided to log into the Ryanair system and check. There are three different ways in which you can manage your Ryanair booking, two of which involve entering the places you are flying from and to, together with some personal details. I tried it these ways multiple times, but my input of East Midlands to Prague was continually rejected as incorrect. How strange

Eventually I had to opt for the third method which was more of a hassle because I needed the reservation number and Babel’s card details. It took me a while but eventually I located the necessary information and logged in. I was relieved to see that my flights were still there, but imagine my surprise when I noticed that I was now flying from BIRMINGHAM to Prague, and on FRIDAY 17th July rather than Saturday 18th!!!

I stared at the computer screen in confusion for some time, trying to absorb what had happened. Seemingly Ryanair had cancelled the flight we had purchased and allocated us a different flight on a different day from a different airport How rude! A bit of further investigation on their website confirmed the worst – the airline is due to stop operating the route between East Midlands and Prague before Babel and I are due to fly. The only Ryanair flight from the UK to Prague on the day we had booked to travel is from London Stansted at 6am, hence, I suppose, them reallocating us to a geographically more convenient flight from Brum.

But on a different day?! I knew there was a real chance I wouldn’t be allowed to have the Friday off work, and if so I stood to lose a lot of money, as well as having the disappointment of a ruined holiday.

In a bit of a panic I spoke to Babel and he recommended that I give Ryanair a call. I duly did so the next day, but I might as well not have bothered. As Damon so rightly said on my Facebook status, their customer service policy equates to the two words, “Fuck off!”.

Yes, my flight had been cancelled. Yes, I had been given another flight. Yes, this was the most convenient flight available for me and they’d gone above their obligations by transferring me to it with no extra charge. No, I couldn’t have my money back if I wanted to cancel it. Well, only the government tax back, but that would be subject to an admin fee for processing the refund. No, they didn’t think this was slightly unreasonable, nor did they think it was their fault that I stood to lose £65 Babel had already paid for airport parking at an airport we were now no longer flying from.

GRRR!

I had to hang up before I exploded :cry:

The situation was eventually resolved by my manager allowing me to have the Friday off work, but that’s not the point and we’ve still been put to a lot of inconvenience. Our return flight was booked from Wroclaw to East Midlands on the assumption our car would be there. It now won’t be, so we’ll arrive at East Midlands some time around midnight and have to check into a hotel. If I hadn’t thought we needed to fly back to East Midlands, there’s no way on this earth I would have booked a flight from Wroclaw which is not in the remote vicinity of Bialystok. Etc etc etc.

The upshot is that I will never, ever be flying Ryanair again. If anyone else has any horror stories, feel free to share…

We both knew that the Universala Kongreso, the biggest Esperanto event of the year, was scheduled to take place the following week in Bialystok, Poland, but neither of us had much inclination to go. Some of our friends were admittedly planning to attend, but the age range tends to be a lot older and we didn’t think there would be much to interest us. To me it was all academic anyway, since the only way I’d been allowed to have the week of the IJK off was by convincing a manager to rearrange that week’s audit to the week of the UK.

When we were attending the British Esperanto Congress in Salisbury, however, we were able to listen to a talk from a Polish Esperantist called Przemek, who is part of the local committee organising the congress. If I’m honest, I was expecting to be mildly bored by his presentation, but somehow against my will I ended up being completely enthralled, with the result that by the end, both Tim and I were seriously wishing we could attend. This year’s congress is extra special, because 2009 represents 150 years since Zamenhof, the creater of Esperanto, was born and not at all coincidentally, his hometown was Bialystok Tim was actually so enthused by the presentation that he began to consider going to Poland without me, although in the nicest possible way, I did think it was a little unlikely that he would be motivated enough to arrange all the tickets

Anyway as far as I was concerned, that was that… until one day a couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with a colleague at work and he happened to mention that the solicitors firm which I was supposed to be auditing in the pertinent week might be about to be lost as a client of my company. A tiny little bit of me began to hope that that might be the case, but all sorts of rumours abound in the workplace, so I didn’t really give much credence to it. It was over a week later when I happened to be working for the guy who was the manager on that job, and he casually mentioned that the client had indeed been lost due to the owners becoming involved in some sort of tax evasion scheme which my firm felt was a little dubious. I scurried back to my desk to check the staff planner, and noted that I was temporarily showing as unassigned for that week. Ooooh!

Booking holiday is never straightforward in my job but the gods seemed to be smiling on me this time because I managed to get it all organised and authorised before anyone evil noticed and booked me to audit a pension scheme Babel said that he thought he would be able to have that week off as leave as well, and so it was all systems go

It wasn’t until we had both got the additional week booked off work that I realised how complicated it was actually going to be to extend our travels. I have to confess that my geography of Poland is not terribly good, and so it was that I was under the naive impression that because Liberec is relatively near to the Polish border, it would be a mere hop, skip and a jump to Bialystok.

Erm, think again Poland is not just huge, it’s absolutely bloody massive! Bialystok is right up in the top northeastern part, near to the border with Belarus, whilst Liberec borders the bottom southwestern side. To get from one place to the other would take a good 14 or 15 hours by train, so involve leaving Liberec pretty early in the morning and arriving in Bialystok rather late at night.

Arriving in Bialystok rather late at night was not something I was keen to do, on account of the difficulties involved in booking any accommodation and the impossibility of explaining that we might not arrive at it until 11pm. Booking the IJK is all very straightforward – you agree to pay a certain amout of money to the organisers and in return you get a room to stay in, meals to eat and as much entertainment as you could reasonably hope to expect from a week spent in a small Central European town with a few hundred young people crazy enough to speak Esperanto. No really, that’s a lot more fun than it sounds if last year’s IJK in Szombathely is anything to go by

Booking the UK, on the other hand, is far more complicated. You have to pay a random and arbitrary kotizo for which, as far as I can tell, you receive sweet FA. Certainly not any food or accommodation, which, unless you request it by some random date in May, the World Esperanto Association declines to help you with. Great. I tried looking at some hotel websites in Bialystok but with a grand total of two Polish words (yes and grandmother!) I quite clearly wasn’t going to get very far, and there were virtually no translations into English. Worse still, hotel rooms in Bialystok were nowhere near as cheap as I assumed they were going to be in that part of the world, and the extortionately high kotizo we had had to pay to UEA (€360 in total) meant that I couldn’t afford a hefty accommodation bill on top of that. What I ideally wanted to do was stay in some cheap student accommodation – halls of residence, that sort of thing – but despite my attempts to politely contact them, UEA wouldn’t give me any details to get in touch or offer to book it for me. I managed to find a solitary phone number via Google, but again, without any Polish I was hardly onto a winner

It was then that Babel had the bright idea that I should try contacting our Polish acquaintance from Salisbury, Przemek. Sometimes it can be really helpful to have friends all over the world, and this was certainly one of them After a brief conversation on Facebook, Przemek offered us a room in student accommodation for the tiny sum of 8 Euros per person per night, on the condition that we didn’t mind helping out a bit with the junulara programo. The promise of such cheap accommodation certainly makes volunteering seem worthwhile, and I can’t imagine that it will be anywhere near so much hard work as the IS in Biedenkopf was for poor Babel!

Accommodation sorted, the only remaining problem was transport. We ultimately decided to stick with our original plan and spend Saturday night in the Czech capital, Prague. On the Sunday night following the IJK there is a Eurolines bus which leaves Prague at 9pm and arrives in Warsaw at 6am the following morning. I gave a lot of thought to the mode of transport, and having read a lot of horror stories online about people being gassed and robbed in overnight sleeper trains, I decided that going by bus would be significantly safer, albeit rather more uncomfortable. I’m not 100% convinced that we shall get a great amount of sleep, but nevertheless it will be an adventure, and when we get to Warsaw we will have ample time to find some breakfast and navigate our way across the city centre before our train to Bialystok leaves around 9.30. It’s still a good two and a half hours by train to Bialystok actually, but luckily direct, and so if everything goes according to plan we will be at the congress by midday on the Monday

Everything may, of course, not go according to plan as it is without doubt the most ambitious journey I have ever tried to plan and the risk of getting mugged or pickpocketed somewhere along the way is not entirely negligible. The adventure doesn’t end upon our arrival in Bialystok, of course, as there is the not insignificant matter of us actually trying to get home again…

When we first booked our flights to Prague in January, we originally booked return flights because we weren’t actually intending to go to Poland. We now don’t need the return part of that flight, and it was necessary to book a new flight home, preferably from Poland. It would have been nice to fly from a nearby and convenient airport like Warsaw, but we’d already paid a substantial amount of money for airport parking at East Midlands, the airport from which our outbound flight was departing, so we desperately needed a flight which would get us back to that airport and enable us to retrieve the Moosemobile.

This was easier said that done. It turned out that over the entire weekend we needed to travel there was a grand total of ONE flight from Poland to East Midlands… and that was from Wroclaw. If your geography of Poland is anywhere near as shaky as mine you will have absolutely no idea where that is, or even how to pronounce it, but essentially it’s all the way back in the direction of Liberec, a good 10 hour train journey across a diagonal of Poland. Needs must though and luckily the flight is late in the evening. With the train tickets booked, so long as there are no upsets along the way, we should be in a good position to get home on time.

Or at least, that’s what I thought when I booked the flight. On Wednesday this week there was a significant upset to all plans which nearly through the entire holiday into jeopardy, but that is something so annoying that it deserves a rant post all of it’s own…

Babel and I were actually pretty much out of forints, and whilst I did have quite a few euros for emergencies, we’d left it too late to find a bank to change them. It was now already about midnight, and our train was leaving Szombathely at 6.48am, but nevertheless we trotted off to the town centre in search of a bank with a cash point. We found one after a brief search, and after a failed attempt to withdraw money on my debit card, I ultimately managed to obtain 5000 forints on my credit card. A transaction for which my bank has kindly charged me in excess of £3

Our financial situation resolved, we retired to the trinkejo for one last time. It turned out they were trying to get rid of the stock, and so I was able to pick up glasses of wine for as little as 100 HUF I was soon quite happily drunk, and the dwindling hours until our train left began to seem more and more irrelevant with every mouthful. Knowing that we had to get up at 6am, we really hadn’t intended to stay up until 4, but somehow it happened By the time we said our goodbyes and according to Babel did a couple of things of which I have no recollection, it was gone half four….

One and a half hours later, the alarm sounded. Luckily Babel heard it – I was still drunk and left to my own devices would probably have ignored it. Somehow we managed to drag ourselves out of bed, throw our remaining possessions into the cases and make a dash for the station. My dashing was somewhat hampered by the fact that I was incapable of walking in a straight line, and it was now that all my months of route planning really paid off. If we hadn’t known the time of the train and had the tickets pre-bought, we would totally have missed the plane. As it was, we got on the train by the skin of our teeth, and once the Hungarian ticket inspector had come round to inspect my ticket, I allowed myself to drift off into a deep and peaceful sleep…

About an hour later, I was rudely awakened by my boyfriend saying in an irritated tone, “FFS, wake up!”. Blinking in a confused manner, I gradually dragged myself to my senses and realised that there was another ticket inspection, this time on the Austrian side of the border. Babel isn’t old enough to be allowed to look after his own train ticket, and he didn’t know whereabouts in my bag I was keeping them, hence the confusion. After that, I just about managed to stay awake and before half nine, we found ourselves arriving in Vienna.

The bus to Bratislava actually didn’t leave until 11, so we had a fair bit of time to kill. Feeling in need of a severe caffeine injection, we headed to a café in the train station and after downing an Espresso, I began to feel a lot more human. We sat talking for a while… actually I really enjoyed it, we had a lovely chat which merged into a very lovely chat indeed on the bus, and by the time we got to the airport I was feeling exceptionally happy :)

Eating opportunities in Bratislava airport are a little limited, but we managed to get hold of some sandwiches, and with the remains of our Hungarian jaffa cakes to enjoy we didn’t go hungry. The flight home was delayed for half an hour, but other than that everything went fine and all too soon we were landing in a dull and chilly Birmingham. The holiday mood lasted for a brief few hours, and then the horror of reality kicked back in…

Nah, that’s overly negative, because I had an absolutely amazing week and it’s definitely one of the most relaxed and least stressful holidays I’ve ever had. I almost felt like a different person whilst I was there – I was miles more confident than I thought I could be, I was wearing clothes which I wouldn’t dare to wear in England in front of my parents, and even ended up doing my hair in a different way. It was refreshing to be in an environment where there was no judgement being passed on me, where I didn’t constantly have to explain myself. It was almost like being normal for a week. There were low points, yes – but on the whole, I’m very glad I went and I think I gained a lot from it. This week at work I feel like I’ve been more confident dealing with people, both in real life and on the phone, and coped better when things have gone wrong. I did have a bit of an insecurity wobble mid-week, but I’d like to think that was more a result of the other things which have been going on since I got home. I won’t be telling my mother that I own a bikini/a pair of shorts, or that I’ve been drinking red wine or whatever, but I have kept my hair in the new style, telling her that Tim helped me do it like that to stop my scalp getting sunburned without my hat. She actually didn’t say anything negative about it, and it’s kinda growing on me, so I might wear it like that for a bit. I’m glad that I went anyways, and although, on reflection, most of what I’ve written doesn’t seem to bear much relation to Esperanto, it was a good opportunity to practise and I did learn a lot

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 :cry: 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 :cry:

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….

The excursion had been advertised on the listing of the day’s events as departing from outside one of the student homes at 10am. A small group of us gathered there, but nothing appeared to happen. Not too concerned, I took the opportunity to have a crafty coffee out of the machine. After about twenty minutes, one of the organisers turned up in a rather flustered state and explained that the local man who was supposed to be taking us to the museum had overslept on account of being hungover! Not to worry – his house was en route so we could collect him on the way.l

Right, okay. We set off on a quick march across Szombathely and before long had managed to locate our guide. He was a very friendly man, but I am unable to decide whether he is absolutely crazy, or whether I have just never seen him sober. Certainly, the guided tour which he proceeded to give us was a bit haphazard – the information boards inside the Saint Martin museum were displayed in a numerical order which indicated the order in which one should read them, yet on several occasions he had to be prevented from skipping from 6 to 13 or some such, just because the fancy took him. He spoke Esperanto, but in a rather frenetic sort of way and halfway through the experience he decided it would be easier just to speak in Hungarian. That was fine for the majority of the group, who by happy coincidence seemed to speak Hungarian, but slightly less interesting for me and one other German guy.

The Saint Martin church is very pretty, and allegedly built over the house where Saint Martin was born. Inside there is a museum which tells you a bit about his life history and various details about life in Szombathely through the ages. My slightly hazy grasp of Central European history, combined with the lack of an explanation from the tour guide in a language I stood a chance of understanding, meant that I didn’t quite grasp all the points, but apparently such importance was placed on Szombathely that under some empire or other in the Middle Ages, the inhabitants were exempt from paying tax

A treat was in store for us once we had finished with the museum. A friend of the guide had been standing outside the church, demonstrating to a group of children how to make Roman coins, and we were all told that we would be able to have a go too. There were various moulds on the table which we could pick from – some of them were coins, some of them were model soldiers, some of them were weird and wonderful things I couldn’t even begin to guess the purpose of. We were each allowed to pick one, and then watch whilst the man melted lead in a little saucepan and helped us to pour it into the mould. In no time at all, the items had set and after a quick dunk in a bucket of cold water were ours to take home.

Of course, I didn’t quite understand this process because it was explained to me in Hungarian, so I just sort of stood around in an aimless sort of manner and watched everyone else do it. The man with the lead didn’t speak any Esperanto, but at one point the guide took pity on my lack of Hungarian and they both started talking to me in English. It turned out that the guide had a brother in law who had come to the Black Country thirty years ago in order to work in a coal mine, and he was very excited to know whether I supported Aston Villa or Birmingham City. It was rather a bizarre conversation, and I feel profoundly sorry for anyone’s brother in law who has to leave somewhere so beautiful and go and live in the Black Country.

People started getting very carried away with all this metal business and asking if they could have second or third objects. After a while the German guy who I had been talking to, and who I must say was exceptionally nice, noticed that I hadn’t even made my first object yet. I wasn’t terribly bothered about making one, but he helped me to look at the moulds and in the end we chose a beautiful coin with a picture of Saint Martin and the beggar on. He then managed to interrupt the flow of Hungarian to indicate that it was my turn, and so finally I did indeed get a piece of lead to call my own As I was making it, everyone burst out in horrendous fits of laughter which I found a little disconcerting. It transpired that one of the men had said that I was very patient to have waited so long, and one of my friends had said that I had to be patient because I was Tim’s girlfriend

By this time it was gone midday and I’d really had enough of smiling inanely whilst people said things I couldn’t understand, so I was hoping we were going to head back to the town centre. Unfortunately the guide decided that it was time for another drink and led everybody else towards a rather seedy looking pub. I didn’t feel like a drink, I’m not sure I even had any money, so I asked for directions and went back on by myself. The directions I received were to walk straight on, so I did so for ten minutes or so, after which it occurred to me that my friend probably hadn’t meant “walk straight on forever” but more likely “walk straight on until you come to somewhere you recognise”. Spying the back of MacDonalds, I managed to make my way as far as the main square and felt a temporary sense of triumph that now knew where I was.

Pride comes before a fall, however, and it occurred to me a few seconds later that I didn’t actually know the way from the town centre to the student home. That must sound pretty ridiculous, especially taking into account that I’d been there six days now and must have made the journey multiple times. The problem was, I’d never done in on my own, and when I’m with another person I have an unfortunate habit of relinquishing all responsibility for directions. This actually came up in conversation on Saturday morning in Vienna, when we exited the Suedbahnhof and my boyfriend couldn’t quite remember the way to the bus station. He expressed surprise that I knew the way, given my general level of capability with navigation. I explained that the difference was that in that situation, I knew it was me who was responsible for where we were going. Similarly when I’m by myself, this morning I’ve quite successfully navigated myself 1.5m from the station in Hednesford to my client and recognised the route back again without reference to a map. But I absolutely hate the stress of navigating, and so when I can leave it up to someone else, I naturally fail to take any notice at all of my route.

I contemplated calling my boyfriend and asking him the way, but I knew he would have his phone switched off. I contemplated walking around in a circle until I saw another Esperantist, but then I figured they were probably all in bed or on their way to dinner. In the end I struck off in a direction that I recognised – I knew I’d been down the road before, I just wasn’t sure where I’d been going to or coming from at the time. It turned out not to be a very direct route to the university, but I got there in the end and promptly went to my room. Hmmm, Babel wasn’t there. He couldn’t have gone far though, because the door was left unlocked and all his stuff was still on the bed. I dumped my stuff on the bed, and went to the toilet to change my tampon.

Now, I may not be the world’s most skilled changer of tampons, but nevertheless I refuse to believe that this was a process which can have taken me more than three minutes. I returned to the room, placed my hand on the handle, pressed down to open it… and promptly discovered it was locked! Locked?! Wherever Babel had been , he had evidently returned, absentmindedly failed to notice that all my stuff had reappeared on the bed, and without wondering about where I might be, decided to go out for his dinner. Rather disgruntled, I began walking downstairs to retrieve the key from reception, and sure enough – I saw him walking down the road out of the landing window. When I caught up with him later, I think he was slightly surprised that my first greeting was to hit him

Hmmm. There was some sort of international cultural festival thingy going on in the afternoon, but coming from a country which doesn’t have a culture it didn’t interest me especially, and neither did the concert which was going on in the same room. We popped in briefly, but then together with a friend decided we could have more fun on our own and headed back to the boating lake This was a day I got to fulfil yet another one of my ambitions – I had never, ever, been in a rowing boat, and I had always thought that it looked rather cool.

Babel did a sterling job of hiring us one again, and then we set off on the lake. Our friend turned out to be rather skilled at rowing boats, but Babel didn’t do bad for a beginner, seemingly being gifted with some kind of weird masculine sixth sense which told him the direction the boat would go in if he did certain things. The expressions on his face indicated that rowing might be hard work though, and after a while he suggested that I should have a go. I wasn’t entirely convinced about this, as I thought the idea of being rowed was somewhat more attractive than the idea of rowing, and I was also worried that if we both stood up in the middle of the lake that the boat would capsize and I’d die from swallowing some sort of toxic water in the lake because I’d be too busy screaming to remember to close my mouth as I went under.. Our friend demonstrated though that it would be virtually impossible to overturn the boat without standing on the edge of it, and in the end I just about succeeded to swap sides with Babel.

Time for a crash course in rowing! Let’s just say it was exceptionally difficult For a start, the oars themselves were way heavier than I would have expected them to be, so that it was quite an exertion to lift them in the first place. My boyfriend tried to explain to me at which points I should be leaning forwards and backwards but it all seemed terribly complicated and I think I spent most of the time leaning in the wrong direction The boat hardly seemed to move at all, and when it did it was probably in the wrong direction, but nevertheless, it was an interesting experience.

We had a whole hour on the lake, during which time Babel decided to row us under a jet of water akin to the famous jet in Geneva, but not as big. Needless to say, this made us rather wet. There was also a sticky moment when we thought we saw someone we knew walking around the edge of the lake, but fortunately I had my binoculars with me and we ultimately decided that on the balance of probabilities it was probably someone else.

Returning from the lake, we went back to the town centre and I had one of the most delicious icecreams I’ve had for ages. I confess to not being much of an icecream sort of person – I probably only eat a couple every year and I’m not very brave with flavours – but this one was really rather good. I had three decent sized scoops in a bowl – one was chocolate, one strawberry and whereas I had assumed the third would be vanilla, it actually turned out to be lemon. This was a very pleasant surprise indeed as I generally find vanilla icecream is rather unpleasant and sickly. The lemon was wonderfully refreshing – I couldn’t eat it on its own in a cone, but in combination with the other flavours it was excellent.

What we did on Thursday evening, I’m not entirely sure. I know that we ended up going to the trinkejo and that I drank more red wine, because I can remember having a conversation with La Pingvino which culminated in him beating Tim up But what we did between dinner and going for a drink eludes me…

Oh, no it doesn’t! We sat in the dining room for as long as we could, talking about stuff. My boyfriend went through his PhD proposal in a very impressive manner, and then someone came and asked us to leave so that they could clear the tables. I picked up my tray to put it over on the side, and I really didn’t think I was in danger of dropping anything – I hadn’t been feeling well all day, but not in a serious sort of way because it certainly hadn’t hampered my enjoyment of anything. But somehow my hands must have been shakier than I thought, because next thing I knew my glass was rolling off my tray and onto the floor. It bounced a few times and there was a split second where I allowed myself to believe that it might actually be child-proof glass which would bounce and not break… But alas, that was not to be, and it smashed into a smithereens beneath the feet of a tonne of people who were all wearing flip flops and in danger of being cut by it :cry:

Babel was understandably rather annoyed with me, and I didn’t know the word for broom in Esperanto never mind Hungarian, and in the end it was all rather fraught and I just burst into tears. So yes, I think we must have gone back to the room for a bit to recover, and then come out again later in the evening to have a drink. The plan had been not to stay out too late on Thursday night because we’d cunningly stolen some bread from dinner in order to go feed the ducks before breakfast. I think, if I remember correctly, that it was about three when we got back to the room…

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

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

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.

I got very excited at Monday lunchtime because I noticed that there was a book stall where it was possible to buy Esperanto books. I had been contemplating making a purchase from the EAB bookshop for several months, but was always put off by the high level of the postage. Not that the postage is extortionate, just that I kept telling myself I’d do it next month when I would allegedly have more disposable income, and so on, and so on. After probably half an hour looking at the various novels on offer, something jumped out at me that I just had to have – ‘La lada tambureto’, the Esperanto translation of Gunther Grass’ masterpiece, ‘Die Blechtrommel/The Tin Drum’. I’ve wanted to read that book for absolutely ages – my sister has read the German version and said I could borrow it, but promptly buggered off to Germany with it. My mother is currently in the process of reading the English translation, but is complaining that it’s horribly Americanised, so it doesn’t really appeal to me. So, reading it in Esperanto seemed like a really cool idea. I grabbed onto it before anybody else was able to steal it, and started waving euros about in a desperate attempt to pay. Unfortunately, the man in charge of the stall couldn’t remember the price and said I would have to come back in the afternoon. He promised he would reserve the book for me, and put it under the table, but I was a little bit sceptical as to whether he would be true to his word, because he didn’t take my name or anything. I spent the rest of the week running back and forward to the university in an attempt to catch him there, but I always seemed to miss him until pretty much the last day I struck lucky and *finally* managed to make my purchase

Having seen the open air swimming pool the previous day, my boyfriend and I had resolved to visit it on Monday afternoon. I was rather excited, never having been in an open air swimming pool before, and a little apprehensive that the water might be terribly cold. It was actually fine though; there was one pool which was especially nice and warm, and even the colder pool which we tried later in the week wasn’t too bad. My boyfriend was a little cruel and decided it would be fun to try splashing me/dunking me in the water etc, but on the whole it was really good fun and the weather was so brilliantly sunny that we were able to sit on the grass reading for an hour or so afterwards whilst we dried off

Monday evening I fell asleep rather early and my boyfriend went out on his own. I can remember waking up after five hours and thinking that it must be nearly breakfast, only to discover it was just gone 4am and he was still out, which was quite amusing He came back some time after half four and proceeded to occupy 90% of the space in my bed, leaving me lying on my side, wedged in between him and a rather hard wall and unable to move for at least an hour until he decided the stop snoring on his back and roll over. That was slightly less amusing

Thinking about it though, I suppose that was the only time he was able to spend by himself with his friends and so now I feel terribly guilty. It hadn’t really struck me like that until some throwaway comment which was just made in the JEB forums. Funnily enough, yesterday I had decided to sign up for the IS because I suddenly felt it was very probable I would want to go, the IJK had been so fun. But now I’ve thought about it from this point of view, I actually don’t think I will go after all. Because if I try to analyse what made the week so special for me – and it was special – then it wouldn’t be the fact that I was speaking Esperanto, nor the fact that I was in Hungary, nor the fact that I learnt how to steer a pedal boat, but rather the fact that I was spending time with Babel. Don’t get me wrong – the rest of it was perfectly pleasant, and I did several things on my own; I discovered the lake and went to a museum and chose what excursion I was going on not expecting him to choose the same one – but if I’m honest with myself, I wouldn’t have attended the IJK were it not for him and even if I had, I wouldn’t particularly have enjoyed it. Yes, I coped with it better than I could have done, but every day was a challenge for me to survive, and left to my own devices I wouldn’t have the motivation to have tried. So nah, how I feel tonight I don’t think I will go to the IS; if I do I’ll be putting a dampener on someone else’s holiday and putting myself through unnecessary unhappiness.

I am, admittedly, very distressed tonight, so I’m not going to take my name off the list yet, but nevertheless…

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!

As I have noted already, attending the IJK was a prospect which worried me for several important reasons, but there were actually various less important factors which contrived to make me incredibly stressed during the day on which we set off. It just so happened that my mother was away from home the week before, having gone to Germany to help my sister with her move back home. My father had had to work during the week, but was scheduled to fly out to Stuttgart to join them on the Saturday morning, a couple of hours before my flight to Bratislava was booked. This was a momentous occasion indeed, because it was destined to be the first time my father, who is 54, would have travelled abroad on his own. There was, theoretically, no need to panic. My mother had not only packed his suitcase for him before he left, but also his hand luggage. I checked him in online, arranged his taxi for the correct hour and made him prove to me that he had set his alarm correctly. All he actually had to do was get up at 4am, and I even switched off the tv and ensured he went to bed at eleven. Nothing could possibly go wrong…

My journey, however, was one in which there was grave potential for something to go wrong. Having planned to travel for in excess of 12 hours through 3 different countries, two of which involved languages I didn’t speak and currencies I didn’t understand, and having the entire smooth running of the day reliant on a Ryanair flight being on time, it was no wonder that on Friday night I didn’t manage to relax enough to sleep until after one. I might not have been so bothered were it just myself who could be inconvenienced by a disaster en route, but having volunteered to arrange the transport for my boyfriend as well, I felt that there was an additional pressure for things to go according to plan, and if they didn’t I knew I was going to feel irrationally guilty, even if it was blatently outside of my control.

Four hours then into a rather fitful sleep, I was rudely awakened by frenzied bell-ringing and knocking at the door. My first thought was that someone must have died, and I lay in bed for a few minutes trying to think who it could be. I don’t know if I’m a terribly pessimistic person who always thinks the worst, but to me, knocking on the door in the middle of the night always implies a calamity. Once I had come to my senses, it became evident that this was indeed evidence of a calamity, although happily not one of a terminal nature. My father had managed to sleep through his alarm, and here was his taxi driver banging on the door in an attempt to take him to the airport.

I was perplexed how this could have happened, since I had forced him to show me that the alarm was set, and double checked myself that it was set for am rather than pm etc etc. It later transpired once I got home that in setting the alarm my father had accidentally knocked the volume control and thus the alarm had indeed gone off, but silently

In any case, he managed to get off to the airport and made his flight on time, but suddenly I was faced with a whole host of jobs to do which I hadn’t allowed time for in my schedule. Most notably, I had to empty the rubbish bin, which for me was a very traumatic experience. I’m the sort of person who retches at the very thought of a rubbish bin, and I hereby declare to Babel that it’s a condition of us moving in together that he looks after the bin

Having sustained a few haste-induced leg-shaving injuries, I set off for the city centre and happily was on time to meet my boyfriend at Birmingham New Street. I confess that I paid 50p extra to travel on a bus for which my monthly pass is not valid so as to avoid arriving 5 minutes after he did. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world in terms of our connection if I had done, but it would have been hugely embarrassing since I’d already text him to tell him to leave home at an appropriate time, as well as providing him with a detailed itinerary the day before

Having taken the train to Birmingham International, we made our way to Terminal Two or, as I prefer to call it, The Crap Terminal. I’m sorry, but I just infinitely prefer Terminal One I was surprised and horrified at how long we had to wait in line at check in, having innocently supposed that Bratislava would be a relatively unpopular destination with an almost empty aircraft. Not at all – the plane was full to bursting and we were lucky to get a seat next to each other. It was noticeable, however, that very many people on the plane were not speaking English and appeared to be going home for a visit rather than on holiday.

I had been nervous that my boyfriend’s rather heavy looking bag would exceed the maximum 15kg baggage allowance, but luckily it didn’t and we were swiftly through security and on a mission to eat the biggest possible meal before the flight was called for boarding. The nature of the connections meant that there potentially wasn’t going to be time to eat at any other point during the day, and for this reason we were also obliged to shell out nearly £4 in WH Smiths for two 1.5 litre bottles of Buxton water. Out of the three eating establishments in the terminal, Wetherspoons seemed like the best bet for breakfast and my boyfriend very kindly agreed to cover the cost. He probably hadn’t expected the cost to exceed £16 when he made the offer, but it was indeed a very nice breakfast and I discovered to my complete surprise that I like hash browns

We ended up sitting in the seats by the emergency exits, which was annoying because some legal requirement or other meant that I wasn’t allowed to have so much as my jumper on my lap during the flight, never mind my bag. It was a beautiful sunny day and so I had been looking forward to an exciting view out of the window, but it was not to be. The man sitting next to me was peculiarly nervous about flying, to the extent that he kept covering his face with his hands and emitting weird groaning noises. Despite the best efforts of the air hostesses to stop him, he persisted in closing the window shutter at inappropriate moments, and so I was denied an exciting view of central Europe

The flight was 2.5 hours which I actually found a bit too long – I’m not scared of flying but I find it kind of claustrophobic. The pilot made a complete mess of the landing, but I was nevertheless pretty chuffed because he had got us into Bratislava ten minutes ahead of schedule and that would make all the difference for the rest of the journey

I had been worried that Bratislava airport would be a huge affair and that passing through passport control and baggage reclaim would take ages. It turned out to be a tiny place, but happily efficient and we were literally able to walk out of the front door and see our bus

I’d opted for us to travel to Vienna with Slovaklines at the very reasonable price of £10 return. Buying the tickets online was slightly tricky as the translation of their site into English is rather shaky and haphazard, but nevertheless I was glad I had gone to the effort as the driver proved not only to speak no English but also next to know German. We were confronted with a typical example of English arrogance abroad when a fellow passenger from our flight walked up to the driver and started addressing him in English without, I think, it even occurring to him that he might not understand.

The journey was scheduled to take two hours and I had, to be honest, been a little perplexed by that, because I was sure the two cities weren’t so terribly far apart. The reason soon became clear, when after a ten minute jaunt down the road to the chief bus station in Bratislava we halted for what must have been half an hour for the driver to have his lunch break. It was a little frustrating to sit on a hot airless coach for so long, but next time I guess we’d be better prepared and know we could go for a walk around.

Our journey didn’t take us through the centre of Bratislava, but what I saw confirmed my impression that it is a rather industrial sort of place. That said, I would greatly love to go back there sometime for a cheap weekend and explore the old town because I believe there are many beautiful buildings. From the coach window we were able to catch a glimpse of a very spectactular castle perched on the top of the hill – I don’t know enough about Bratislava to know what it was, but it seemed very impressive indeed.

I had been talking to a guy from Bratislava the week before, through pure coincidence, and he had explained to me that the city was so close to the border of Slovakia that after the first world war there had actually been considerable discussion about which country the city should belong to. For a reason I can’t remember, because I was halfway up a hill and out of breath at the time, it was considered strategically important that the river Danube, which runs through the city, should not form the national border. Thus, as you drive out of Bratislava you cross the Danube (which is amazingly enormous here!) and then you traverse a bizarre strip of land which surely can’t be more than a kilometre before you find yourself abruptly at the Austrian border.

As my friend had told me, all the watchtowers and so forth have now been dismantled and the border is nothing more than a formality and a pleasant relief that the road signs are now in a comprehensible language. It must have been such a strange city to live in in the past though – to literally be able to see Austria every single day, and yet have no way of visiting this other world.

I had never been to Niederoesterreich before, nor ever particularly aspired to go there, but nevertheless I found the journey quite exciting. The initial part passed along the side of the Danube and through a couple of very pictureseque little villages. There were fields and fields of beautiful sunflowers, and also row upon row of wind turbines, which personally I find a magnificent sight and not at all ugly. My feelings towards Austria are a bit confused; it fascinates me, there are all sorts of things I would like to see there, and yet I would never want to live there. It is not good to make sweeping generalisations, but whenever I have been to Austria I have been disturbed by something in the national psyche. And that is not (just) because of certain right wing tendencies which certain Austrian politicians might have. Switzerland is potentially more right wing, certainly more insular, and yet it is not a place which makes me uncomfortable…

Anyhow, I was rather excited by the prospect of getting to Vienna. Vienna is somewhere I have spent my whole life wanting to go; I can’t imagine that it is more magical than Salzburg (which has truly got to be the most beautiful city in the world), but nevertheless I think there is something special about Vienna. It was thus a disappointment to find that our bus approached the city by means of a main road from the airport reminiscent of the Aston Expressway coming out of Birmingham. Think not just business parks and industrial estates but water towers, gas installations, huge chimneys pumping out black smoke. The outskirts of Vienna are an industrial wasteland, and because our bus stopped near one of the minor stations on a busy ring road, we didn’t get to see anything which was worthy of excitement.

Nevertheless, we found our way to the correct station without problems and even had enough time to grab a much needed slice of pizza before catching our first train. We only had to travel for half an hour on this one, to a town called Wiener Neustadt, but I became a bit panicky when the train was delayed by four minutes on account of us allegedly having a transfer time of only seven. The information I had printed off the internet informed me that I needed to disembark from one train at platform three and locate the other train on platform twenty one, and so I envisaged a mad dash across an enormous railway terminus rather akin to Munich Hbf. No fear; for reasons which ellude me, the town planners had chosen to skip platforms 5 – 20, and all we had to do was descend one staircase and ascend another

Happily seated in a train to Hungary, I felt I could finally relax… until I remembered that every minute was bringing me closer to a destination I actually wasn’t terribly anxious to reach. After passing through a row of small Austrian towns we quietly slipped across the border and wow, here we were, in a country where I was incapable even of saying hello. Believe me, after ten minutes of exposure to Hungarian, Slovak began to seem a very unexotic sort of language; I could look at billboards in Bratislava and pick out the words I understood – beer, help, love – but Hungarian is about as intuitive as Chinese. During the entire week I only managed to guess the meaning of one word, and that was the fairly obvious “Kemping”.

We sat on the train for about two hours, and during that time I scarcely saw any sign of human habitation. We stopped at Hungarian train station after Hungarian train station and sat for a minute or two next to a run-down railway building before moving on again, but none of these stations had a visible town attached to them. As far as the eye could see, vast arable fields stretched out across a flat landscape, scarcely even broken by the odd tree. Bizarrely, as twilight fell, I began to be able to make out the shapes of little deer, skipping through the crop fields in search of something to eat. They were the only sign of life.

Arriving in Szombathely at 20.32, I was instantly impressed by the sheer grandeur of the train station. The domed painted ceiling was reminiscent of almost of a cathedral. Armed with the directions we had been emailed, we set off on a half hour walk, for the most part following a column of confused Esperantists who were also searching for the kongresejo. About halfway they appeared to get fed up of walking in a straight line and began to mill about aimlessly, but having read our instructions more diligently we knew we had to get as far as the bus station, so took the opportunity to strike out ahead. We were soon rewarded with arrival at the university

And then the trauma began We all had to join a queue in order to be registered for the congress and the experience soon proved to be a baptism of fire into the world of Esperantist disorganisation. A line of volunteers sat at a long table in the akceptejo, and all new arrivals were supposed to pass through each one of them in turn. Being honest, I’m not sure what all the commotion was about because it was a fairly simple process, but a combination of bad organisation on the part of those in charge and dim wittedness on the part of those trying to sign up contrived to make the experience last in excess of forty minutes. I was particularly annoyed to have to queue to have my name badge laminated because the person in charge of laminating would only process eight at a time, or some such nonsense…

I don’t know, perhaps I wouldn’t have been so irritable had it not been so unbearably hot in the room. It was truly suffocating though, and by the time we had managed to extricate ourselves from the admin, all my boyfriend and I really wanted was to have a shower. I speak as a person who doesn’t even take showers! I warmed up to them, however, during the week because the showers in the university hall of residence where we were staying had been cleverly designed without screens or curtains so you could see the girl in the shower next to you. Unfortunately Esperantists don’t seem to wash a lot, so sometimes I went in and found the showers empty, but nevertheless I had quite a few enjoyable views over the course of a week

I was relieved to find that not only were my boyfriend and I in a two-person room, but we were in the same two-person room, and it was actually fairly pleasant. It was large at any rate, so at no point during the week did I end up feeling claustrophobic, and whilst it wasn’t perfectly clean in terms of dust and dirt, there were absolutely no bugs or insects. Added to that, there were some excellent shelving units and so we were able to arrange our stuff in a very efficient manner. Over the course of the week, I grew to like the place, despite the fact that it was unbearably hot and only one of the windows was capable of being put in the proper gekippt position. It would have helped if the organisers had indicated where the bathrooms were and which ones were male and female, but other than that, no complaints

By the time we had sufficiently cooled down, we had well and truly missed the interkona vespero, but we headed to the trinkejo to say hello to a few people anyway, and I drank several glasses of a rather delicious apple juice As well as a few people from JEB, it was nice to talk to a Serbian Esperantist who I had previously briefly met whilst he was in the UK attending the wedding of two people I had never met but in whose house I happened to be in order to have a one-night-stand with the person who is now by boyfriend but back then wasn’t intending to be. As should be evident, I had other things on my mind at that first meeting which pretty much robbed me of the power of speech, so I was fairly surprised that he recognised me at all

By 1am, however, I had really had enough. I’m not someone who excels at socialising with other people at the best of times, and so I decided I couldn’t cope with it any more and needed to get back to the room to be by myself. My boyfriend had no intention of having an early night, and so I asked him for directions back to the room. He gave me some, but me being me, by the time I had left the university and crossed the bridge, I couldn’t remember if he had said to turn left or turn right. I was too proud to go back and ask him again, so I began randomly wandering around in circles. It occurred to me that it was a little foolish to be wandering round a strange Hungarian town in the early hours of the morning, being unable to speak a word of the language and not even knowing the name of the building I was looking for, what road it was on, or indeed what it looked like. It was indeed a miracle that within half an hour I had managed to find the correct place, but that was not before I had managed to stand on a twig and bruise my foot, and been severely frightened by a demented-looking man on a park bench who later turned out to be a statue

I returned to my room for a much needed cry, and by the time my boyfriend returned I was happily asleep. A slightly strange start to the week, but from there it all went uphill