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  Kö-Ki part 2

Man, the other day when I was talking about the Kö-Ki metro stop and all the cool things in there, I only told you about the stores inside. I completely forgot about all the stuff outside. So in addition to everything I listed earlier, you can also find 2 magazine shops, 2 clothes stores, 2 florists, 2 bars, a toiletry and bathroom item store, a bag and backpack store, and 2 burger and fried stuff stands. There's also a small train station and a major bus stop with about 12 bus lines.

Posted by neal on Nov 28, 2001 at 07:23 AM | Comments (0)

  Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I hope you all had a great holiday. It's important to take time to be grateful for all the blessings we have in life. I don't have room here to list all the things I am thankful for, but suffice it to say that God has blessed me richly with his love, with the love of my family, and the love of my friends. Without these things, I would be much less.

ESI did a wonderful thing for us - in the contracts they wrote up with our schools, they specified that we get a 4 day weekend for Thanksgiving. So even though no one else in this country celebrates Thanksgiving, we can still hold on to this little bit of our culture. For the long weekend, the whole ESI team in Hungary went to Nagy Szállo (Big Hotel) in Galyatetö. Galyatetö is a very small town about 2 hours north east of Budapest in the Matra mountains. It was beautiful there. The hotel is a wonderful old stone building on top of a mountain (a Hungarian mountain that is - which is kinda like a Michigan mountain). There was snow on the ground there and the trees were bare, so it looked more like Thanksgiving is supposed to look. We had a wonderful time hanging out, talking, eating, singing, eating, worshiping, eating, hiking, dancing, and eating. To make sure we got the correct food for Thanksgiving dinner, we gave the cooks our American recipes. We also had to import a few things - there are no cranberries in this country. It was delicious though, and the Hungarian cooks did a great job with our "weird" recipes. We also had a talent show one night that was spectacular! This group has talent. The show included: singing, dancing, humor, an international pop sensation, juggling flaming torches, professional wrestling, and more guitar players than you can count (It's crazy, about half the ESIers here can play guitar).

OK, It's bed time for me, but I just looked outside and it's snowing. I love it. Good night.

Posted by neal on Nov 26, 2001 at 11:25 PM | Comments (0)

  The Kö-Ki

For several weeks now I have had several stories that I wanted to share with you , but I could never think of them when I had a chance to put them out here. So here goes.

I work near the best metro stop in the world. The Köbánya Kispest metro/bus/train station (affectionately called "The Kö-Ki" (pronounced like co - key (like the newscaster Kokie Roberts (or however you spell it (this is a lot of parenthesis)))) is near Trefort, and I have to go through it every day commuting to and from work. This place has everything. Here's the short list: 1 pharmacy, 1 grocery store, 2 vegetable and fruit stands, 1 book stand, 2 magazine stands, 3 gyro stands, 3 pizza places, 3 bakeries, 1 butcher shop, 1 donut shop, 1 baked-tube-of-dough-coated-in-sugar-thingie stand, 2 convenience stores, 1 Chinese restaurant, 3 bars, 1 casino, 1 liquor store, 1 store that sells fishing tackle and watches, 2 stores that sell random, assorted stuff, 10 stands that sell clothes, toys, underwear and shoes, 10 or 15 farmers selling assorted bundles of vegetables, 10 or 15 old ladies selling flowers and fresh herbs, 10 gypsies selling underwear and toys, and 1 blind man who "plays" the demo song on his keyboard every morning. I can get almost everything I need while I'm waiting for the metro, it's great.

Speaking of shopping, Hungarians have different ideas for building/opening stores than Americans. In the US, I did most of my shopping at big stores. In Hungary, small stores haven't yet been ravaged by capitalism. Small stores are everywhere. Most shopping takes place in small stores. When I say small, I really mean small. It's pretty common for stores to be less than 10' by 10'. Some are so small you can't go in - you just stand at the door and tell the clerk what you want. I live on a small residential street. It's only about 150 meters long, but there are 2 ABCs (convenience stores here are called ABCs because your ABCs are the basics of education, and these stores sell the basics you need to live) and a vegetable store on it. I can get almost everything I need from these places. They are great because I can get to the store, buy my stuff, and be back in less than 5 minutes.

Hungarians are weird about exact change in small stores. Hungary is almost completely cash-based. Hardly anyone has credit cards. It's almost impossible to get a loan, so if you want to buy a car or house, you need cash. Seriously, people buy these big items with bags of cash! Until recently the biggest bill in Hungary was the 10,000 HUF (Hungarian Forint) bill. This is only worth about $35, so you can imagine the size of the stack of cash needed to buy a 22,000,000 HUF ($80,000) house. Recently, the guvernment introduced a 20,000 HUF bill, but it's still silly. I earn about 60,000 HUF a month, so on the first of the month I go to the Posta (because EVERYTHING happens at the Posta (but that's a story for another time)) and collect my 6 -10,000 HUF bills. Now you'd think that in a cash-based society, stores would be prepared to handle lots of bills and coins. Nope. I can only use those 10,000 HUF bills at the big supermarkets. Small stores simply will not take them. Often, having 10,000HUF is the same as having no money at all because you can buy the same amount - nothing. The other day I wanted to get some stuff for breakfast. So I ran down to the store at about 8:00 am and got 6 eggs and 2 rolls. It cost 178 forint (about 64 cents). I tried to pay for it with a 500 forint bill (worth about $1.80) and the clerk didn't have change! She didn't have $1 worth of change!! What the heck! At first she said that she couldn't take my money, and I coundn't buy anything. I wasn't quite sure what to do, I really wanted those eggs, and it was all the money I had, so I just looked at her with a helpless, confused look on my face, and eventually, sighing loudly and talking really fast under her breath, she went into the back of the store, got her purse and made change for me. Come on people, it's called a cash drawer - get one!

Posted by neal on Nov 26, 2001 at 07:26 AM | Comments (0)

  Steak!

It still blows my mind that I am living in Budapest. I am feeling more at home here, and that just makes it all the more outlandish. I'm getting used to living in Budapest! Crazy. Each day is going faster too. The first few weeks seemed to stretch out forever, now each day seems to be over as soon as it starts. I don't feel like I've been here very long, but it's almost Thanksgiving. I guess it's good - time flies when you're having fun. But it goes by so fast, that I get to the end of the day and often can't recall what I just spent my last 24 hours doing.

The Hungarian school system seems to be scheduled by an incommunicative child with ADD. Class schedules change on a whim, and we only learn about significant events (like all-school convocations, or national standardized tests) the day before they happen. I am supposed to see the advanced 9D class twice a week, but I think I have only seen them three times since the middle of October. I still don't know why we didn't have class one of the times. On Monday, someone just told me not to come to school on Tuesday, so I didn't. I don't really try to understand. I just accept and move on.

I finally got some steak last week. You may think this is a small thing, but I love red meat, and I haven't had a steak since I came here. You can't throw a rock in this country without hitting a butcher shop, so I'm sure steaks are around, but I hadn't been able to get one yet. Last week though, I visited a friend in a small town called Vác (pronounced Vats (with a long a (like "open up and say ah"))) about an hour north of Budapest. I love train travel by the way, a round-trip ticket to Vác costs about $1.80. Anyway, we went to a sweet restaurant shaped like a boat and I ate a gigantic steak! Finom! (That's Hungarian for delicious) It made me so happy.

Posted by neal on Nov 16, 2001 at 07:29 AM | Comments (0)

  nealkolohic

Whew, it's been a while since I put anything here. Let's see what good stories I can share with you...

Here's a fun short one. Last week we had no school in Hungary for fall break, so several of us Budapest-ians here went to Prague to visit some friends. Prague is a beautiful city by the way, and when you come to visit me (hint, hint), you should be sure to spend some time there. The Czech prefix for "non" (as in non-sequiter or non-negotiable) is "ne" and the Czech word for "alcohol" is "alkohol". So on every menu in every restaurant is a section for "nealkolohic" items. Perhaps the correct pronunciation is "ne-alkoholic", but I'd rather hear about "neal-koholics".

The trip from Budapest to Prague was exciting for us too. If you are lazy, smart, or have lots of money to spend, you can buy a round-trip ticket on the fast, nice train for around $60 and the trip will only take about 7 hours. If you seek adventure, aren't very smart, or want desprately to save money, you can do something we call the "Bratislava Hop". Hungary and Slovakia have an agreement to make train travel between the two countries fairly inexpensive. Slovakia and The Czech Republic also have a similar agreement. Hungary and the Czech Republic do not have this useful and beneficial arrangement. So tickets from Hungary to Slovakia are cheap and tickets from Slovakia to The Czech Republic are cheap, but tickets from Hungary to The Czech Republic are kinda expensive. Luckily, the Prague-Budapest train route travels through Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. So we bought round trip tickets from Budapest to Bratislava. At Bratislava, the train makes a 10 minute stop, so 2 people ran off to buy our tickets from Bratislava to Prague. 2 of us unloaded all the luggage just in case the tickets didn't get back in time, and 1 person stayed on the train (ready to jump off if the train started moving) to guard an empty compartment for us. With about a minute to spare, the ticket buyers came running back, so we madly threw all the luggage back through the door and hopped into our waiting, "reserved", compartment. Whew! It was a great display of team work. Then all we had to do to come back was buy a ticket from Prague to Bratislava (because that's cheaper than buying a round trip ticket in Bratislava), and use the second leg of the Budapest-Bratislava ticket. Now it is a slow train, so it takes about 10 hours, but it only costs about 30 bucks this way.

Posted by neal on Nov 6, 2001 at 07:31 AM | Comments (0)