Letter 7

CHAPTER 7


This is chapter um….7 I think it was? It’s so confusing writing a book. You have to remember where you filed things and what you called them and what you wrote about in the last chapter. It’s so stressful and your short-term memory suffers. Then you…. um…….. you……… Oh shit, I think I’ve developed a writer’s block. I can’t think of a single thing to write about….. Did I tell you the one about the two electrons who walked into a bar and the bar tender said there’s no charge for you and one of them said are you positive? …. No, that’s not how it went. There were two horses who walked into a bar and one said to the other “that hurt didn’t it?”…. no, I think I already told you about that in chapter three – or was that in the other book I’m writing, the one about porcupine taxidermy for fun and profit and how to stop your fingertips from bleeding? Truth is, I just can’t remember.

But wait, wait….Oooh! I can feel that old creative spark tingling in me gum boots right now, slowly oozing up me legs, past me nether regions, up through me spleen, around by me bile duct and now a sort of fizzing sensation mounting up to a creative explosion at the end of me typing digits – BOOM! God, that’s good, I needed that! Clears the old system out like a good sneeze it does.

This here is chapter 7 folks and we’re still in Hungary although we’ve left the Danube bend and all those fucking yurts. Yurt this, yurt that, every bloody thing was yurtypoos. I’m beginning to look like a fucking yurt, losing hair and the top of my head rounding off like that. It’s a good job I’ve grown a beard I suppose. Mind you, being bald headed with a beard may not be the safe way to go. I was at the bowling alley in downtown Budapest a couple of nights ago and I saw a man up at the refreshment counter who was completely bald apart from this great big beard. It looked as if he had his head stuck on upside down. I felt sorry for him when he sat down though. Somebody walked up to him, stuck two fingers up his nostrils and threw him down one of the lanes.

We’ve moved up to the north east to a town called Eger. For the last 30 kilometres on the way into the town we drove past fields of tobacco, sweet corn and sunflowers and on past countless small vineyards and plots of opium poppies. The city of Eger has turned out to be rather unique in that it seems to be permanently out of focus or, at least, fuzzy around the edges. We’ve been here for 5 days now and it seems to become progressively more blurred with each passing hour. I’ve worked out why it is. Eger has, according to the guidebook, two thousand private wine cellars. We’ve only covered about forty of them to date but we’re sleeping well when we can locate the van. Most of the wine cellars we’ve visited so far are small and under private houses or in root cellars in farmyards but what they lack in décor and professionalism is more than made up for by the hospitality of their proprietors. They don’t seem to do any work and just want to hang around drinking their wine at our expense.

No matter which winery we choose to visit the pattern is almost invariably the same. We arrive at the farmhouse gate and wait until the barking of the dog attracts the owners. They come to the gate, smile at us in between a tirade of curses aimed at the said dog, open the gate and motion to us to drive around to the house door. Then we disembark whilst the owner chases the dog around the van to stop it attacking us and we run the gauntlet from the van to the farmhouse door.

Once inside they take us to the cellar to see the bottles and discuss the finer points of their contents. They probably talk about botrytus and acid content and bouquets and such and we nod and pick the bottle with the most dust on it and ask how much. It’s always cheap, always fair to good in quality and ever undrinkable although we did have a bottle of white with a shriveled looking caterpillar in it. It just lay there belly up and flopped from side to side after each filling of the glasses but we were so drunk at the time that it didn’t seem to matter. We discussed it the next morning when we woke up but neither of us could remember who drank it or what happened to it.

Much more enjoyable than the wine is the company and the atmosphere. They feed us slices of salami and stuffed peppers and help us drink our wine as they show us black and white photographs of deceased relatives, World War II partisans and members of the lumpen proletariat who probably fall into both categories. They point out who these various people were killed or imprisoned by and we nod knowingly and roundly denounce the Russians or the Germans or whoever we think they’re telling us about. Quite a few of these farmer/ winemakers have relatives in Transylvanian Romania where they tell us that the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu treats them badly. I’ve found that after a couple of glasses of red, if one calls out the name of Mr. Ceausescu, turns sideways on the chair and spits on the kitchen floor, it meets with a very good reception and sometimes can even get one a free bottle for the road.

Anyway, this all works very well for a couple of visits but it becomes progressively more difficult as the day wears on and we’ve spent the last four nights sleeping in the van in the gardens and courtyards of farmhouses. At one place the farmer had a magnificent field of sunflowers in full bloom and I admired them and indicated that I wanted to take a photograph of him and his wife standing amid the sea of yellow. Both the farmer and I were three parts pissed and I don’t know what went wrong but he got a tarpaulin out of the barn and laid it in the field under the sunflowers and invited us to sleep on it. I barely remember him staggering off in the direction of the house as we collapsed on the tarpaulin. We awoke an hour before dusk with mosquito bites all over us and dragged the tarpaulin back to the house where he was asleep in a chair but his wife had cooked us a huge meal of pork shanks and some delicious dumplingy things which were so laden with paprika that I had cause to feel their heat again the next day. I think I could do this for quite a long period of time. In fact I never want to leave here. At the very next post office I’m going to apply to be a Hungarian.

Apart from its two thousand private wine cellars Eger, amongst other attractions, has some quaint old buildings and a fantastic collection of doors. Yes, doors; all carved in different patterns as though there’s a door competition going on in town. A number of very large double doors, which would admirably befit small English castles, are to be encountered on the city sidewalks which open up to reveal shady courtyards where families sit and eat their midday and evening meals. There's the mandatory castle and cathedral of course, and lots of little boutiques and beer houses with outside tables where you can sit and watch the German tourists huffing on their tea spoons and cleaning them with Kleenex tissues before they’ll stir their coffee with them.

It was in Eger that we bought a product that has changed our lives. It's an electric hotplate and it cost $8.00. Now we can save our gas by using the electricity in caravan parks and cook outside when the weather allows because cooking makes the van unpleasantly hot even on cool days when the sun is shining. Another bonus is that we use it as a heater at night. Back in West Germany we bought a good quality pressure cooker which cut our gas consumption down by about half and we wouldn’t now want to be without it.

After spending a week in Eger it took two more weeks to decide to leave the place. When we finally left at around 5am one warm sultry morning we took the back roads and headed for Aggtelek to see what the guidebooks described as possibly the most beautiful cave complex in Europe. We didn’t care how long it took us to get there; we’d stocked up on food, wine and fruit juice and we were carrying our accommodation with us like tortoises. We found the smallest roads on the map and then took every road we came to that didn’t appear on the map as long as it headed in what we thought was the right direction. Now we felt that we were seeing the real Hungary. We were used to kids waving at us as we went through villages but now we were in territory where the adults waved at us too.

We drove along mile after mile of lush green valley floors with mountains rising on either side of us and through small villages which would suddenly happen upon us at fifteen-minute intervals. As if taken straight out of postcards the tiny houses invariably had bowed rooflines and doors that were leaning over at an angle. All were newly whitewashed or painted in an orangey colour with window surrounds in contrasting colours and grapes growing over them. Geese and chickens wandered across the roads and the sheds and barns with thatched roofs looked as though they were a hundred years old. I pondered the parallelogram shaped doors in their parallelogram shaped doorframes. They looked great and I wondered how they came to be like that. Did the door and the frame gradually lean over together during the course of decades? If they did the occupants must have put up with years of sticking doors before both door and frame settled into their out-of-square shapes. Or were they just lousy carpenters who couldn’t cut straight? To my Anglo Saxon way of thinking everything must be dead square but it obviously isn’t that important. Nevertheless, if you build an out-of-square house it must be a real hassle when you come to put the roof on.

Funny what goes through the mind of a tourist isn’t it? I mean, I’m on holiday for God’s sake. Why am I spending time thinking about out-of-square Hungarian peasant’s doors? Only yesterday I was in a farmer’s kitchen enjoying a white knuckle drinking session and railing about president Ceau–bloody-sescu.

Almost every house had a well and these wells were covered by little house come dog kennel constructions in different styles, some of them were thatched and they covered the winding mechanisms used to lift the buckets. Some villages had four or five storks nests atop chimneys and lamp posts. I really like the look of storks because, like seagulls, they’re so clean looking with never a feather out of place. Australian kookaburras, by contrast, are unkempt, and to my mind, raggedy looking things always in need of a feathercut. Storks nests though, are a mess. Big round shambolic looking cylindrical constructions over a meter across and up to about a meter high with great big sticks poking out of them. If I was a stork and I made friends with a wren or an oriole, for example, I could never take them home to show them where I was born. I’d be so ashamed, worried that they’d tell everyone I came from a slum.

Villagers consider themselves lucky if a stork chooses their village in which to nest and every effort is made to induce the birds to stay and build. Some families place large wire platforms on top of chimneys for them to build on and others put car tires on platforms atop lamp posts and make artificial nests hoping to fool the storks into thinking they’ve come across a “renovators dream”. Storks quite like all this attention and have adapted to village life so well that you'd be hard pressed to find a storks nest in a tree anymore.

In two villages we saw purveyors of LPG bottled gas doing their deliveries in horse drawn carts. The houses had fridges and cookers powered by bottled gas. It was kind of surreal to me to see these two technologies placed so incongruously. (Shit that’s a good word isn’t it, incongruously? surreal wasn’t bad either). The automobile came about 50 years before the good Lord gave us bottled gas so I could only imagine bottled gas being delivered by mechanized transport. If God had have meant us to have bottled gas he wouldn’t have given us the horse would he?

In one village where we stopped to take photographs we were followed up the street by about 30 giggling kids. If I’d have had a penny whistle and a multi colored jump suit I’m sure I could have led them all up into the hills. I checked the street sign to see we weren’t in Hamlyn and I may go back and see if I can get the rat catcher’s contract next year. The house at the end of the only street belonged to a beekeeper and he had his hives right next to the house in a sort of pigeon loft. The hives were all made of straw, which had been twisted into rope and then wound round into a conical Chelsea bun shape. I remember as a kid in England seeing a honey jar with a picture of the same type of hive on it.

We arrived in Aggtelek camping ground in the early evening and from a distance it looked quite attractive with a little lake in the middle. It was only as we drew closer that we saw the tents in the middle of the lake. They’d had a flood. There were people sitting in their cars with their bedding on the roof looking awfully miserable and in the morning when I went to the toilet block I saw some of them sleeping out in the open with just a piece of foam rubber underneath them and a wet blanket on top.

Talking about toilet blocks, the shorts which are fashionable these days seldom have a zip fly in them and, depending on how long they are, it can be a difficult decision to make when it comes to whether to pee over the top of the waistband or lift them up and pee out of the bottom of the leg. Well, I was in a toilet block the other evening when a man came and stood next to me at the urinal and he had his toothbrush and toothpaste in his left hand and decided to pee "over the top" with his right hand. I don't mean he peed with his hand of course, Hungarians aren't that different. Anyway, when you pee over the top with your right hand, it means that you have to hold the top of your shorts down with the left hand. He let go of the waistband, which sprang up, and he peed all over his toothbrush. I looked at him with a half smile, half smirk and he felt like a real idiot. I got outside and burst out laughing it was just like one of those Mr. Bean sketches.

We were up bright and early next morning to go down the caves. The Lets Go Europe book said that the sights were stupendous and another book said that there is a 14 kilometre long cave down there and a gigantic lake measuring something like 2 kilometres if my memory serves me correctly. The whole area is riddled with caves stretching into Czechoslovakia and at some times of the year you can go on a 6 hour guided tour around them.

Our tour lasted for one hour and even that was 50 minutes too long. I found, as Alicja had already told me, that caves are not the most exciting places to be in. The guide only spoke Hungarian anyway which didn't help any. It was damp and dark and there were things hanging from the roof which looked like cheese that had been left in the microwave for 10 seconds too long and lots of German tourists taking photo's with compact flash cameras. I guess that cave buffs would find it all fascinating but once I’d seen one piece of over-microwaved cheese I’d pretty well seen them all.

When we emerged into the sunlight, it was a relief, and we went down the hill to the cafe for coffee. It wasn't a very plush looking establishment and although they had a coffee machine the coffee was pre made, cold in a jug, and as it was ordered they poured it into a cup and heated it with one of those electric elements which are sold to travelers to use in hotel rooms. I asked for milk and couldn't make myself understood too well but eventually the waiter produced a bottle with "Milky" printed on the label. " Yes" I said "that's the stuff". And great stuff it turned out to be. It was a kind of milk/coffee flavored liqueur and when stirred into the coffee the result was at least the equal of any coffee I’ve ever tasted. We were instantaneously hooked on the stuff, we had another coffee each to celebrate, and then bought all the bottles of Milky he could spare us. Twenty-three bottles of Milky took a bit of storing in our over-provisioned campervan and those which touched jingled on bumpy roads through another three countries.

The food here is superb, that's the only word I can think of to describe it, and it's so affordable for us. The cold meats especially are available in great variety and we've been trying everything we can lay our hands on. We met a retired Austrian couple in Eger who earn a modest living by visiting Hungary every weekend, filling their car boot up with Hungarian sausages, fruit and vegetables and selling them to their neighbors back in Austria. Practically every day we buy a kilo of peaches and kilo of apricots and we've had peach pancakes, peach fruit salad, peach juice and peach flavored yogurt. In fact we're publishing a book called 1001 Things To Do With a Spare Peach and it should be in your bookstores shortly. For those of you who are into kinky sex I'd recommend No 27 but first make sure that your peach isn't over ripe and that the chandelier is secured firmly to the ceiling.

Next we thought we'd check out Lake Balaton which is a large body of warmish water (over 100 km long) which serves as Hungary's seaside. Balaton is probably the biggest attraction in the country and pretty well all of its shoreline has been developed into resorts and caravan parks. It was school holiday time and we couldn't get in anywhere. A long day’s drive all the way along the north shore of the lake looking for a campsite found us exhausted and it seemed pointless to carry on looking. Receptionists at camping sites told us that people from all over Europe book their summer holidays on Balaton a year in advance. Sun ripened looking Germans, Swedes and Danes were to be seen in every nook and cranny of the lakeshore and could be heard every time we wound the windows down. These are the nationalities I class collectively as the YaYa people. All conversations with Germans, Swedes and Danes seem to be peppered with YA Ya and Ya Ya Ya.

I was very impressed with the everyday architecture in Hungary. Resorts restaurants, hotels, snack bars, swimming pools and even town halls displayed the most imaginative designs that either of us have seen for a long time. They build such incredibly tasteful and well-designed houses that sometimes you just have to stop and say "look at that". I don’t know why Anglo Saxon architects seem so tied and constricted when it comes to house design. Here they have fantastic rooflines in different shapes covered in thatch or shingles with whitewashed walls and brown Tudor type beams and everywhere are these big carved doors.

Despite communism the West Germans and Austrians have been coming here for years, and it's easy to see why. The whole country is exceptionally clean, which for a German is a prime consideration, but apart from that the Hungarians cater to them so well. At every restaurant, museum or place of interest, they address all foreigners in German and the restaurant menu's are in German as well. There is even a radio station called Radio Danubis which broadcasts all day and probably all night too in the German language. It plays pop music most of the time but gives out tourist information at regular intervals and the German news. Well, I suppose it’s German but I guess it could be another language that sounds like German. It could be like that Austrian Bayerish or whatever they call it. Anyway, they say things like “untflashendenbanguntminefingerburnen” which I think is German for some sort of electrical appliance.

Compared with other socialist/communist countries in the region Hungary’s public buildings are in good condition. In Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany churches, town halls and the like are in a shocking state of disrepair. We were walking around Pecs, another beautiful city, this time in the South, and I was saying to Alicja that it's a pity that the Poles just can't seem to restore and look after their old buildings like the Hungarians who most obviously have the craftsmen.

We stopped to admire an old Turkish built theatre in Pecs when we saw a gang of workmen restoring some of the gargoyles on the ground and I tried to strike up a conversation with them. I wasn't getting anywhere when one of them asked if I spoke Polish. They told us that most of the guys who do building restorations in Hungary and Czechoslovakia are Polish. The Polish government doesn't have the desire or the money to spend on the restoration of its own buildings and they hire out their tradesmen to other countries and take a cut from their wages. Looking up at the building they were working on, one of them said "yes, the Turks built it, the Poles restored it and the Hungarians will earn money out of German tourists with it". It’s not at all uncommon to come across Hungarian churches that began life as mosques and have been converted. Minarets and other relics of the Turkish occupation make the countryside just that little bit more interesting than in, say Czechoslovakia.

Hungary also abounds in thermal springs and there are thermal pools all over the place which are said to cure various ailments (I was going to say rheumatism but I can't spell it) and make you live longer. We booked into a camping site which had a thermal pool right next door so we thought we'd give it a shot. I had visions of a hot spring bubbling out of the ground into a natural rock pool, all clear and sparkling with little seats around the edge, rather like a giant hot tub I guess.

I’d conjured up the wrong vision. It was a regular sized full-blown swimming pool, the water was a murky brown color, it stunk of sulfur or some such farty smelling element from the bowels of the Hungarian earth and was considerably hotter than I like to take my baths. It was full up with people; chock a block full of wild thrashing Hungarians and the water was bubbling like it was full of Piranhas during a feeding frenzy. There were kids leaping off the sides into spaces the size of a teacup between other people. Central and Eastern Europeans have a much closer personal space than us Anglo types and it often bothers Westerners having people so close to them, invading their space so closely that they can smell the other person’s breath. Not so with me, I got used to it years ago. Or so I thought.

In this thermal pool people were so close that they were touching, rubbing bodies against each other. I could see a couple of women on the other side of the pool I would have paid money to have rubbed my body against but the place was so packed that I had no hope of maneuvering myself into position without exiting the pool and getting back in again which would have looked a bit too obvious. Instead, I continued to stand next to the Russian woman with the artificial leg, two gold teeth and shabby underwear. She was so big that I looked like her lunch. By that time I’d been pushed further towards the center of the pool and I had to battle to get back to the edge where I could get out. We ran away back to the van and drank coffee with Milky in it. I guess that if you live in a country with no coastline a thermal pool is a good place to take you kids for the day as they were catered for with playground equipment and there were a couple of reasonable restaurants around the pool.

I'm listening to the German language Hungarian radio station as I'm typing the words you see before you and I've just realized that all day it's been playing English language pop music. Have you ever noticed that English is the language of both pop music and T-shirts? There are tourists from all over Europe and the Soviet bloc here and their T-shirts, almost without exception, are in English. Most of the people wearing them I'm sure don't have a clue what's written on them.

I can't understand why Esperanto never took off. Wouldn't it be great for travelers if we could all communicate because we'd learned Esperanto at school? We've had some rather surprising meals just because we couldn't speak the language. That leads me quite seamlessly into spelling. You may have been wondering how come I'm such a good speller? Well it's easy. This word processing program I’m using has a dictionary of 80,000 words in it. Once you've typed your letter, you tell it to check the spelling and if it and it comes across a word it doesn't have in its dickshonree, it suggests half a dozen words for you to choose from. It was in this way that I found that the words wank and fuck were in it.

It must be someone's job somewhere in a programming development office to decide which swearwords go into the program and which ones don't. I bet they have fun. I can just imagine some of the inter-office correspondence:


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Inter Office Memo

Memo To: Tony Lanfranschi Manager. Program Development

From: Chuck Martin Programmer Dictionary Dep't


Dear Tony,
Can I have Bollocks?

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Reply: Yeah Chuck, fine with me as long as you don't charge the cost of the operation to the company.

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We went into a restaurant in Pecs which offered Kangaroo tail soup and Forgs legs. We’re not quite sure what a forg is but if they’re native to Hungary we hope they don’t bite. And today we heard on the short wave radio that East Germany is going to limit the number of people that it allows to travel to Hungary because too many of them are escaping through Hungary to Austria and then on to West Germany. It made us think of the guy we met when we first entered the country who asked us if we could take him across. I hope he made it.

We never cease to be amazed that Hungarians, Czechs and Poles just can't seem to put a slope on a concrete floor that will drain the water away in the shower and toilet blocks. We've seen the ultimate now, it was here in Hungary and both the Men’s and Women's shower blocks had drains in the middle of the floor at the highest point. The whole floor sloped upwards to the drain and there was stagnant water all around the edges.

We’re leaving Hungary tomorrow to go to Jugoslavia and we were a little sorry.