Summer and Siófok

Summer is never long enough-the sheep are in their summer haircuts and the people are at their festivals. Here is a daunting Basque modality of bowling. The people on the other side were playing toka.

Baby donk and pottoka

The annual Rocio procession.

I stumbled upon some patches of bee orchids.

When you go to Hungary, you change your euros for Hungarian Forints. 1 euro=~305 forints, so exchanging 50 or 100 euros gets you a fistful of bills with a mafia-esque number of zeros. It reminds me when people around our parts talk about prices in pesatas-the currency of the Spanish state prior to the euro-people will say 'hey, how much did you spend on your apartment?' 'Oh, a hillion bajillion pillion pesetas.' There was an actual supermarket in the Budapest airport where I purchased a bagful of some kind of wicked butter pastry filled with spinach and cheese for 0.99 forints, or practically no money, as it were.

I visited Siófok, Hungary for a work conference. It is a town on Lake Balaton, the largest lake in central Europe, and as the website delightfully says, is located in "Transdanubia", which clearly neighbors Westeros and is down the road from Middle Earth. Because Hungary is land-locked, this is a very popular place for summer vacations, and people come down from Germany to stay. I have not seen as flat a place as Hungary since Michigan.

I think this means for rent. Hungarian is one of those rare non-Indo European European languages, which is to say, not in the least understandable to people who speak Germanic/Latinate languages. If you don't speak a Finno-Ugric language already, it makes for outstanding insomnia t.v. watching because it is like spoken music, with an ever-so-occasional Latin loan word to jolt you awake. 

As you get further away from Siófok proper, the pretty summer homes give way to concrete apartment blocks and abandoned-looking, old curtain-strewn shoebox cabins that are somehow inhabited, largely by young people visiting from parts European, all of whom are listening to American pop music and electronica. The mid 20th century was apparently a rough time for the country (what with its 'salami tactics' and all), and you can still see its influence in the summer resorts, which oddly resemble U.S. engineering schools. When I arrived it was rainy and cool, and there were crows everywhere, making it one of the more gothic places I've been. Everything everywhere was remarkably clean, and the stocky people were all covertly watchful of me. None of this stops people from wanting to have a good time, though, and you can go to this advertised cell block resort to enjoy that Ibiza Feeling.

There were new-looking but not especially well-attended monuments all over, of people I didn't recognize. I live in a foreign country all the time, and yet I felt even more foreign and unknowing than usual.

Perhaps madame would like a Dish of Waterworld? And you sir, Dishes of wildworld? No? Well perhaps some Beef Meat Food. Ah, very good. All the Hungarians I interacted with were stunningly fluent in English and often poly poly polyglot, though this did not necessarily extend to the dining establishments. An Irish colleague ordered some pizza, only to be brought kebabs, which were apparently good, anyway.

Alas, my sojourn meant that I missed a great deal of Lasarteko Festak.

Naturally, this horse is appalled.