Gratitude 10

I am thankful for this amazing ceiling at a monastery we visited. This ceiling makes the acoustics phenomenal, and I was given the privilege of testing them out with a few lines of song.

It has been a few days since I last posted, and I have been awful in keeping up with my journals this week. All week, we were on the go with our orientation day trips around the country.


Wednesday was spent in the little village of Hollőkő. It is a little town of about 350 people near the Slovakian border filled with uneven, winding cobblestone streets and tiny cottage-like dwellings. It reminded me of a little town in Holland or the Swiss Alps. There, we tasted palinka (blech!), a traditional Hungarian brandy. Personally, I found it disgusting. Far too strong for my tastes. Our guide was a little old lady who is like the nagymama (grandma) of the village.



She was so cute. She spoke only Hungarian, but Agi was there to translate. She was very funny. She led us around the town and showed us all the little stores and museums. We gave weaving a go and had lunch at a cute little open-air restaurant. The traditional Hungarian soup we had was delicious. Mmm! After we ate, though, Agi made us hike up this mountain pretty much to see a fortress, which was really cool but was killer getting to it. However, my camera was dropped upon a bunch of rocks in front the fortress and is now a little banged up and scratched! Boo! :( Not very happy about that. What can you do, though. The afternoon was spent at a castle in Gödöllö...yet another of Sissy's palaces. I did not find it nearly as impressive as the other palaces and castles I have seen.




Thursday, we took off for a two-day excursion to Lake Balaton. We made our first stop in Veszprem, which I did not really care for at all. Plus, our walking tour was far too detailed. (Even Agi said that the guide went too indepth on the history of the town.) We ate lunch there and had the most delectible chocolate something or other for dessert...chocolate goo just oozed out of it! It was like eating warm brownie batter! Yum! Before actually heading to the lake, we made a stop at a monastery (see picture above), which was super cool. I really enjoyed that, although I was very disappointed we didn't see any monks. hehe! The monastery dates back to medieval times and still is a working monastery. In the church, we were told the acoustics were incredible. Our guide asked if anyone wanted to sing, but nobody would go for it, so I did. I opened my mouth, and the entire space was filled with the sound of the few lines of "Amazing Grace" that I let lightly soar. It was amazing! We should have voice lessons in there! hehe! Our accomodations for the night were at a hotel in Tihany, which is right beside the lake. When we pulled up to the hotel, I was a little hesitant because it looked a little sketchy. Inside, however, was awesome. It was a really nice place. You felt like magic, too, because the lights came on as you walked into the halls. We went to a little csarda (restaurant) across the street and had fish soup for dinner. Blech! I don't recommend it! Good thing they had bread, some nice white wine, and an apple pie-like dessert! It was alright, though, because I was still pretty full from our gargantuous lunch. We spent the evening playing some card game on the pool deck, and Agi taught us Hungarian swear words as well as fun sayings/phrases...like "Let's see the bear!" haha! (That's their version of "Let's give it a go!")

Friday morning, we explored the lake area for a couple of hours. We saw the non-working monastery and looked at the lake. There is a place where a statue of a girl shouting stands, and it is called Echo Point or something. If you stand there and shout or sing, your voice will echo back from across the lake, so we tried that out. It was weird because it takes a few seconds for it to come back, but it was pretty cool. We went down to the lake before we headed out of town and saw lots of not-so-small men in not-so-much clothing, so that was a little more than our eyes bargained for! Our driver, this nice old guy, took us to another stop along our way as we headed to the number one porcelain maker in Hungary, Herend's. It was a natural spring where the water just continuously flows, and the water is said to have healing powers. We all tried it...it wasn't bad, but it was bubbly. Herend's was cool...very intricate work! I have done a lot of pottery in my time, but certainly not that intense! We got to see some people at work on the pieces. Crazy! And they are super expensive...a set of dinnerware costs $30,000!!! Ouch! Lunch was at the restaurant there. Even though none of us could afford the plates, we at least got to eat off of them! Then, we headed to wine tasting at a private family vineyard by the lake. Lake Balaton is known mostly for its white wines, so all the wines we tasted were white. They were all pretty good, but I definitely didn't like the last one. Unfortunately, not very many in our group was in to it, but the rest of us enjoyed ourselves!

That brought our orientation week to a close. It was fun but definitely exhausting. Today, I got up and went to the open market for some fruit. It was cool, and everything looked so much fresher than in the supermarket. However, everything is so much harder when you don't speak Hungarian! We made a trip to Tesco later in the morning, which you have to ride the bus to get to. We experienced buying bus tickets, but then we were told by this man that we paid too much for them. It was quite complex talking to him. He was talking to us in Hungarian until I used the little Hungarian I know to tell him we don't speak Hungarian. Then he asked a few minutes later if I spoke German, and I told him only a little. So our conversation was in a combination of Hungarian, German, and English. I luckily got the gist of what he was saying...there is a red ticket that costs less and can be used twice in an hour's time, whereas the blue tickets can only be used once and cost more. However, we were going to be gone more than an hour and only paid the equivalent of maybe thirty cents too much, so we were going to worry about it. It was nice of him to try and help us, though. Tesco is kind of like Walmart, but it was ridiculous shopping for food! It drives me crazy that it takes the better part of three hours to figure out what you are looking for, what you are going to get, purchase it, and go back home. Argh! Needless to say, I couldn't find most of the things on my list but certainly made lots of impulse buys and am now extremely frustrated that that was most of my day. It just irritates me. AND...I will have to do it again in a few days! AAAAHHH! Too much! Now, I have to practice and figure out my pictures because they aren't working on the disk I put them on, and I don't want to delete them from my camera until I know they are backed up. Oy! What a day! I really just want to do nothing and be around no one, but that probably isn't going to happen. Ever.