Upside down flowers and Horilka with Breakfast

 This past weekend, my landlady and her husband invited me to their lovely cottage in a small town called Sur in the Hungarian countryside.  Boroka and Janos are both very nice and they have the sweetest one-month-old little girl named Malna, which means Raspberry.  The first evening, we read and relaxed and had a lovely dinner in the garden.  Saturday was the village festival, and I was very excited to see what this 1000 person village was planning for the event.  Before we even finished our breakfast, though, some neighbors came by to say hello—especially to Malna.  Janos offered everyone some Ukrainian vodka, horilka, to go with our yogurt and toast.  Before I knew it, we were drinking horilka with our breakfast, which—while not particularly unpleasant—was quite bizarre.  After that, we set out to the village festival.  There was folk dancing and singing, but most fascinating to me was the baton twirling.  There were seven separate groups of little girls and young women doing baton twirling.  Most of my knowledge about the metal rod laden dance comes from the American Girls and Miss Congeniality, but apparently in Hungary it is still quite popular.  

Some of the baton twirlers

This brings me to our first edition of:Things Amy thinks are bizarre about Hungary.

1) The strange preponderance of baton twirlers as mentioned above. 
2) Eggs come in cartons of 10. What is this madness?!

3)  More than anywhere else I have ever been, shop owners seem to hate tourists.  Also, extend tourists to everyone who doesn’t speak Hungarian.  Whenever I ask one a question in English—which s/he speaks fluently—s/he breathes a heavy sigh and begrudgingly answers me.  Why do you hate me so?!

4) They carry bouquets of flowers upside down.  They hold the stems upright with the buds facing down.  This not only seems strange to me, but also impractical. The petals will fall out more easily if you hold the flowers in such a manner, no?

5) My washing machine takes a full two hours to wash five kilos of laundry. I honestly don’t know what it does the whole time, but there you have it.

6) Ambulances are not given much reverence. Cars and people will move out of the way, sure, but in a “because I have to” sort of way, and only if the cars are directly in its path.  When I drive, I take it as a duty and a responsibility to ease the path of an ambulance, but maybe I’m just weird. 

7) The commitment to accurate inventory is very limited in the grocery markets.  When I was buying shampoo a little while ago, the bottle wouldn’t scan at the checkout.  Where I’m from, they would call for a price check, or if they are feeling particularly trusting and/or lazy just ask me for the price.  My cashier conferred briefly with her fellow worker, and then just scanned my bread again.  I didn’t mind this—not least because it meant my shampoo cost 80 cents—but it was quite peculiar. 

My landfamily

After the baton-twirling heavy village festival, we walked around in the forest and watched the sunset atop a lovely hill.  We saw beautiful trees and interesting animals, of which I knew embarrassingly little.  He would point to a tree and ask me if I knew the English name.  He knew the Hungarian name and the Latin name, but I was usually unable to tell him the name in English.  That was moderately embarrassing.  Later in the evening, we saw a badger scurrying in the woods, and he identified it quickly.  Once we returned to the little cottage, he showed me a picture of the badger with its Hungarian name and asked me what it was.  It took me an absurdly long time to come up with badger, and he showed me a picture of another common animal, which I recognized but was unable to identify.  That was quite embarrassing.  I guess we can cross field biology off my list of future careers. 

Sunday morning, we packed backpacks and headed on a common Roma pilgrimage trail.  It was beautiful, but very hot.  We passed hills and different types of forests, a well that was at least a century old, and fields of many different crops.  Once we finally arrived, we drank some holy water and rested for a little while. We also helped a little boy find his family. He was only a little bit lost, and when he found them he yelled “YES!” and pumped his fist in the air, which I suppose he might have learned from American cartoons.  It was pretty funny.  We walked back home, had a leisurely lunch, and then I took a bus back to Budapest.  It was a lovely and relaxing weekend, but I’m glad to be back in the city.

Really old well

Holy water tastes delicious