Budapest

Another busy week

. Monday night Harry spent three hours on his training course. I had an all day meeting on Tuesday at a big hotel outside Bristol. I thought it would be like a travel inn but it was an old building, with lots of high studs and huge garden beside a low security prison. I would have loved to have more time to look around it rather than sitting all day in a meeting but that is life!! (I am working with a relatively new team and so it was good to be together and get to know each other). The house is listed as a historic places trust and in one room there were floor to ceiling shelves (about 13 feet high) with teapots and other china. Then on Thursday I went down to Swansea for work. We enjoyed the sunshine as we sat in traffic (about 3 hours - a slight exaggeration but only slight) on the way home. I remember one sign we saw at on the way to Heathrow that said 'no hard verge for 4100 yards' - there were none of those. But there was a triangle with an upside down car - always a sobering prospect while you wait. It was too late to take any alternative routes. I have heard that it takes 3 hours to change one of the those interactive signs like we have in Ngauranga Gorge - how's that for up to date info! The colleague I went with had a 'Satnav' which told us we were in stationery traffic about 10 minutes after we started sitting. Wales is certainly a lovely country and I spent some time considering a tower in the distance, thinking if I could find it again I might go and explore, and studying the behaviour of a few horses in a near by field, and of course talked some work. We came back to an interesting announcement - government doesn't want any more embarrassing losses of personal data (there has been quite a few lately, with personal bank details etc on disk being lost and a few smacked hands at high and lower levels) and so a blanket stop to using laptops across Government outside buidings until they are encrypted. This covers not just laptops, but other portable media such as memory sticks, disks, PDAs and BlackBerries - you aren't even allowed to email work home. You can imagine the reaction from regular laptop workers. It will be interesting to see if it effects productivity over time and what it does to our carbon footprint for the next 4 months while we wait for appropriate software to be loaded onto all our laptops - back to using paper and pen - do they still make carbon paper? On Tuesday night we went around to a friends house for takeaways and Thursday night we dined out with Harry's workmates at an Italian restaurant. When Harry got home the other night he had a visit from the police. A little blue Volkswagen that visits a neighbour had been stolen sometime the evening before (between 4 and 6). I got home about 5.30 and can’t remember seeing it but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. I got distracted cos there was also a cute little morris minor ute parked close by which was a new visitor to our street. Harry couldn’t remember (it was after all a V dub rather than a Toyota). Sometimes I wonder if we will wake up one morning and find our car missing. Harry maintains that no one would want to steal a bright yellow citreon saxo – I don't see why not!! Other couple of interesting things that have happened - the ballots for children getting into primary school are just occurring and one guy at work has a little girl about to turn 5 and she didn't get into any of her 3 local schools - so, if their appeal isn't successful they face a long trip across their town to another. The ballot system is simply that and gives no preference to local children - again we wonder what that does to the carbon footprint? At work they are repairing the roof and there is scaffolding up to the fourth floor. Outside my window I can see an extension ladder placed between the third and fourth floor platforms and men go up and down it all day with wearing no safety gear securing them to the scaffolding. The ladder which also isn't attached shakes as I first see shoes, then legs and then bodies and helmets appear.
Friday night we left for Budapest. The flight over was entertaining and probably the cheapest part of the whole weekend. I stood for a while in the kitchen talking to some English people who worked in the travel industry. Interesting titbits about where to go next and they amusingly told me that 'Europe can't do service - but England knows how to do service'. Harry and my experience is actually the opposite - maybe our expectations and where we go are somewhat different. The plane was crowded with people enjoying the cheap flights, some slightly mischievous as the steward at one stage announced 'that the steward button was only for requesting assistance and if it was misused the passenger would be punished when we arrived on the ground'. Everyone laughed and many mentioned that perhaps the punishment was standing in the queues at the passport counter. When we arrived a trumpet played - heralding the 'ontime arrival of yet another Ryan air flight'!! We didn't hear the trumpet on the way back but that's another story for later.

Budapest - what a lovely city - only a few years (17 or so) after the communist regime it is not highly touristy but still offers the tourist plenty to see and experience. Saturday was a spectacular sunny day and we wandered over the Chain Bridge (built in 1849), one of 5 bridges over the Danube before touring the town on a 'Hop on hop off' bus. We took a bit of a tour around the town past the zoo, parliament, synagogues, down embassy street before visiting the Fisherman's Bastion. (designed and built between 1895 and 1902 - its seven towers represent the seven Magyar tribes that settled in the basin in 896. It is named after the guild of fishermen which was responsible for defending this stretch of the city walls in the Middle Ages. We enjoyed a coffee near the Matthias Church which is currently being restored (the guide kept saying it was being constructed) and wandered around the Castle quarter which is the core of the ancient town of Buda and has some important historical monuments back to about the 13th century (here we saw an unexpected medieval parade which someone was kind enough to explain what they were celebrating but we were too polite to ask when we didn't understand their strong Hungarian accent). Down in Pest was the Memorial to Heroes - a spectacular series of statues (full height is about 36 metres) - each leader from about 11th century and an engraving underneath to depict the leadership style ie aggressive, a war monger, a pacifist, an academic, a reconciler. We walked over to one of the many spas in the city (Szechenyi Spa Baths) managing to resist the smell of mulled wine from one of the many stands along the way. The Baths had many indoor and outdoor spa pools and it was an adventure getting to them. We eventually paid - and were waved in a direction - went through the door and waved along a corridor then waved up some stairs and then along some more corridors to the changing sheds. We went to shed 105 left our gear and then received a little bracelet with a different number on it. If we didn't remember 105 and what floor we were on we could have wandered for a long time trying to find our clothes. The outside pool was fairly busy and contained men playing chess in the pool (on special boards sitting on pedestals above the water) and a very amorous pair of women. Imagine the faces of the others in the pool when the women were joined by a male to make a threesome - it just got more amorous - it was so much fun looking at the faces in the crowd (and you couldn't resist looking at the 3). On the way back down Embassy Street we ducked into Burger King for a quick snack (no other places around) - its our first American takeaway since we came over even though they are in every city together with an Irish Pub and often an Australian Pub - not a bad record really but once we had sampled the food we knew why we weren't often tempted. In the evening we went for a Hungarian meal. We thought it would be quite fun (expected to be in a crowd but arrived at a very upmarket restaurant with few people in it - o.k. it is the off season). Had a cocktail, chicken pancakes, beautiful beef with tomatoes, chocolate dessert while listening and watching a quartet playing music, 2 opera singers and 2 dancers. One of the instruments was a cymbalom - never seen one before - we were told it is a Hungarian instrument and the web says it is a 'is a relation of the zither originated in 13th century Persia and became known in Hungary in the 16th century. The instrument is used to make dance music together with a violin and clarinet and was made by craftsmen for gypsy musicians'. It's a bit like a horizontal harp hit with soft drum sticks, and with a piano pedal. It was apparently designed by Jozsef V. Schunda music instrument manufacturer of Budapest in the 1870-s. Anyway, lovely instrument and we ended up buying the cd of the band so we could hear more (needless to say the cd is very disappointing and we can hear lots of violin but no cymbalom).

The Hungarian currency is the Forint and with about 350 forints to every £ we went over with our wallets stuffed. We felt like millionaires and expected it to go a long way. It didn't. At one stage we stood at a money machine contemplating whether we should get out 50000 or 100000 forints - my hand shook as I pressed the 6 digit figure. To get an idea of costs Burger King was 9000 forint, our tour on the bus was 14000 forint, visiting the synagogue was 12000 and so on. Somehow money seemed to lose its value. We did read somewhere that the Hungarians do accept euros but give change in forints - counting the change and converting to forints all in one go would have been a nightmare - anyway they were wrong most places wouldn't accept euros so the problem was solved by the visit to the money machine.

Sunday was wet - and so was spent mainly indoors in the morning visiting the Jewish sector of the city. Our hotel was in the middle of the Jewish sector and so we had walked past synagogues and lots of men with long beards and black hats the previous day (which was the Sabbath). We had a personalised tour of the world's second to biggest synagogue (largest is in New York) - a majestic building. In some ways the synagogue had been lucky - during the war the Germans had used it as a military radio station so although the lower parts were destroyed to make way for equipment the upper parts were generally untouched - unlike the other two we saw which are in various states of repair. Two interesting things (all synagogues have their services in Yiddish, not like Christianity who has no world wide language and there are no statues or idols in the churches). We had a sobering visit to the cemetery where many a Jewish family were buried after being forced to live in the ghetto. The reminder of the pain and suffering with the poignant 'weeping willow memorial' where every leaf has a name of a family or individual who died during the German occupation. A visit to the museum had some first hand photos of the despair and also many exhibits of the candelabra and torah. The trip was spoilt by our guide showing us a 'kosher' restaurant where we could eat and then without our knowledge ordering heaps of food we could not eat - and somehow we ended up paying for all of it including what she had ordered. Anyway, Harry loved the soup with Matzah ball (knaydelach) - just like Mum used to make - but the bean dish we could have both done without. In the afternoon we went back up to the Gillert Hill - climbed it in the wind and rain (our umbrella blew inside out - unheard of over here!!) and enjoyed a different view with clouds flying past as the evening came in.

Our trip to the airport was uneventful but we spent a long time in queues waiting for the plane and then were crowded into the bus for a 50 metre bus ride across the tarmac and then forced to stand out in the cold while people climbed one by one on to the plane (I heard a voice say - are we being punished for pushing the steward button - could he have been on our plane going over). We all felt colder as we watched a young man standing in the queue in a teeshirt. The plane was crowded and we were one of the last ones on - we walked to the back and had 3 seats each to ourselves as no one had gone down to the back for some reason - needless to say we took full advantage of that and watched the lights below us for a while before we snoozed our way back to Bristol.