A Hungarian BBQ

Last night was amazing.  Amanda and I were invited to dinner by my music teacher, Zoli.  I went a bit earlier and  helped them set up so I was cutting potatoes, onions and garlic.  It seemed to be a typical Hungarian style event, I got there at three and by the time I went to pick Amanda up at 7pm nothing much had happened other than drinking, cooking and eating (which I couldn't complain too much about except that I couldn't drink until I went home to pick up Amanda).  

So Amanda and I got there just as it got dark and the citeras were coming out.  The palinka started to flow in shots to shots and our music started to dominate the park that we were in.  I think I saw at least a few people were sitting in the darkness listening.  It was awesome fun.  Then a bit later a friend of Zoli's turned up, who was an amazing violin player and joined us.  I didn't really catch his name but he is a famous Hungarian player, and even I've heard of a few of his songs as some of the kids had sung them at the school ball in March.  (Sorry about the video quality)

Unfortunately, we had to leave a little early as we've got another week at a camp.  This time in Pecs.  So we might be out of contact yet again for another week!  Anyway, we've got to get on the road so I've got to stop blogging and help Amanda pack!

- Daniel.

Csillebérc Summer Camp

This week has been the hardest that Amanda and I have endured since we first arrived in Hungary... and not solely because we have been bereft of internet access.   We were working in a camp in a small outer suburb of Budapest called Csillebérc, which seems to be the place that Budapestian's go when they want to experience nature.  It's also only 20 minutes up the hill from Buda so it's nice and handy for parents to drop their kids off in the morning, go to work then pick them up again in the afternoon.

The camp where we were staying was rather large with a variety of fields, play grounds and wooded areas to explore.  It was really good for the kids as, although Amanda and I were pretty paranoid about losing any of them, it gave us plenty of different areas to take advantage of.   Amanda, Iago and I were sleeping in a small wood and concrete bungalow less than 50 meters from the school that had been hired out for our camp so it was nice and easy to wake up in the morning and have everything open by 7am for the parents to arrive.  We were technically supposed to open at 7:30am but opening earlier gave us time to prepare the classrooms and set up fruit and such for breakfast for the kids if they so wished.  The parents then picked them up at around 4pm but some didn't arrive until 5pm.

There were 20 kids in all, ranging from ages 7  to 14 with English abilities that ranged from barely anything to quite fluent.  Amanda took the eight youngest kids and I took the twelve oldest kids.  Which in retrospect might have been a mistake on my part.  I mean, I've dealt with 7-10 year olds fighting, swearing, refusing to work, sulking, having tantrums, making too much noise etc.  I can handle that now.  I can also handle 18-adult  ages having reasonable objections and dealing with them not doing homework, or inciting mini-rebellions when Amanda and I want them to actually speak English was well as do the grammar.  We've stumbled over that hurdle and now it's behind us.  We can deal with these kinds of issues.

But I've never, and maybe never want to again, had to deal with 10 boys ages 11 to 14 (and four girls around the same age but they weren't the trouble).  These kids weren't childish as our kids at school are, or objectionable as our weekend class students can be, they were simply... "difficult".  They are too young to grab by the collar and teach some manners as they are basically adults now, but as they've only been adults for a year or so at most they are pretty bloody piss poor at the whole maturity thing.  I understand that they are new at being treated like adults but really, all that they wanted to do was play basketball, talk in class, and tease the more vulnerable (and most likely significantly younger) members of the class.  The whole concept of the camp is that is a fun, voluntary event that shouldn't be as strict as school so even our basic mechanics of discipline was difficult.  There could be no sending the kids out of the room, no calling the parents, no beating them with a stick... nothing!  Even today, when one of the kids gave our colleague, Miki, the middle finger because Miki decided to play football instead of basketball all that we really could do is stare him down a little then take them all to the cleaners once the game had started.  (Miki is a 7ft Hungarian water polo player whose philosophy is "If you are nice to me, I'll play nice.  If you are rude, be prepared to lose."  I like his style.)

Anyway, so while I am battling with these kids, Amanda is up the hall playing with her kids.  They are singing songs, playing games, and doing art activities.  She had an issue with one kid pushing another over, so she sent the little boy in question into the corner for a bit.  I was sick with jealously.

The first day went really well for Amanda as she pulled out all the best material that we'd thought up over the last year and her kids left really excited.  The owner of the company that organizes these camps actually received a number of really good emails.  My class was a disaster as I realised that the 14 year olds didn't really want to sing "Head, shoulders, knees and toes" while the 11 year old didn't even know how to ask to go the toilet.  The older in my class wanted to write sentences and do grammar, the younger didn't have any clue what was going on.  If I set an activity for one, the other suffered.  The day just dragged as a result.

As the week progressed it got a little better and I learnt a few lessons here and there, but it was still really tiring and stressful way to spend a week.  Amanda's class had it's own dramas midweek as a number of her kids were getting a little rough with each other, but she sorted them out pretty quickly and they all had a lot of fun.  During the week, we went on a 3 km walk up a hill to lunch every day (which in the 35 degree heat didn't help our temper), we got the kids to write in their diaries, we played with water balloons, did a fair bit of vocab and conversational English and organised a play which the kids performed for their parents on Friday.

The play was actually pretty good (although a lot of my kids decided that they were too cool to get involved). The kids painted a cityscape backdrop and made their costumes.  My kids did a quiz show that had various celebrities like Darth Vader, GLaDOS (which basically meant that the kid was carrying around a potato with a couple of crocodile clips hanging out of it) and cat woman.  Amanda's kids did a play about zombie frogs that jumped from a building in defiance of a policewoman's orders and scared a couple of dragons, a fish and a princess.  It was pretty epic.

Every night after work, Amanda I would hobble the 50 metres to our shack and slowly lower ourselves into bed and groan in pain until we went to sleep.  Even Iago would collapse to the floor as the kids were paying him liberal amounts of attention.  A few of the younger kids decided that his name is "rágo"  (which means "chewing" in Hungarian) and they'd scream that they ran towards him to poke him, hug him and fight over who got to lead him to lunch.  I think that we are all happy to be home but as hard as it was, it was a little sad to see them go at the end of the week.  Amanda actually cried.

- Daniel.

The report on the reports

Even though the kids officially finished school two weeks ago, there was still plenty of action happening at work this week. Starting on Tuesday, the various classes each went on day long excursions to different parts of Hungary. Bizarrely, our Grade 2 class went to Tokaj on Wednesday...as far as I know, there's not much in Tokaj except for wine cellars, so I'm not really sure why anyone would want to take a bunch of nine year olds there, but the kids really seemed to enjoy it (hmmmmmm).

Daniel and I didn't get to go along on any of the day trips. Instead we stayed behind in Máriapócs to work on the end of year school reports. We both approached the task with a mixture of trepidation and confidence. The trepidation stemmed from our experiences with the mid-year reports. My god, it was torturous. Many hours spent with our colleague Ili translating, transcribing grades into the teachers' books, creating spreadsheets, etc only to have her handwrite each and every report for all of our students. Twice. Well, technically four times (twice each in Hungarian and English).

Naturally, Daniel and I were confident that we could improve this process significantly for the end of year reports. Afterall, we figured that we had already done the translation and we could just substitute the new grades into our existing spreadsheets, then print them (thus saving Ili a lot of work). Unfortunately, like many processes in Hungary, it didn't work out to be quite as simple as all that.

At first, things looked promising. We discovered that the end of year reports were always printed, rather than handwritten. So we quickly whipped off some spreadsheets with all of our students' grades on them. Not good enough. We needed the Hungarian translations as well. Luckily we had them from the mid-year process. So we painstakingly copied those over. Then we found out that they wanted the grades presented in a table. So we created the table and inserted the grades. Then we learned that they no longer wanted numerical grades, they wanted words (like outstanding, good, below standard) etc, instead. So we redid all the tables. Then the principal wanted some changes. And on and on it went. Finally, by Wednesday afternoon, the reports for our Grade 2s and 3s were finished.

By Thursday morning I was also feeling pretty confident about the Grade 1 reports. Most of the assessment was complete, but my progress was halted by the fact that I needed the teacher's book to copy across some of their Physical Education grades. All of the marks were contained in the teacher's book and there was only one copy. So if you wanted it and it was in use, you just had to wait. How inefficient! Anyway, I eventually got the book and Daniel and I spent the best part of an hour copying across eight separate marking criteria for P.E. (in English and Hungarian) for each of the twenty students. Phew, finished. So we took the completed spreadsheet with all of the Grade 1 marks typed in English and Hungarian sentences (in all 4 subjects that they studied in English) to the office to have them tranferred onto the report template. Uh oh. Turns out that we also needed to translate every other subject into English as well. Wait, what? For some reason we also needed to give them a report in English of how they performed in subjects that they didn't even take in English. That's when Ili remembered that they'd also done the same thing last year! She still had the previous translation on her flash drive, but when we looked at it she realised that the marking criteria had changed significantly. Also, the translation wasn't much use on its own anyway - we still needed to input each student's performance against the subject criteria. So suddenly we had anther 40 or so criteria for each student that needed to be translated into English sentences.

Considering that Daniel and I had just spent an hour completing this task for only 8 criteria, tackling 40 more seemed like a massive ask. By now Daniel and I were both getting pretty fed up with the moving goalposts and decided to seek absolute clarification from the principal on what he wanted before we began. Of course, this question sparked a half-hour debate which culminated in the principal deciding that the English version of the report should match the Hungarian version - this meant that he didn't want the Grade 1 reports in sentences - each criteria could be summaried with a single word instead. So all of the previous translation work was unnecessary and the lovely spreadsheet that I'd spent three days working on was suddenly useless. Aaaaaaargh!

Ili and I then spent two hours hurriedly translating the marking criteria for every subject again, then I spent all of Thursday evening typing up reports for the Grade 1s. It was awful. Each student had about 65 criteria that they were graded on (40 in Hungarian subjects, plus 25 in English subjects) and it was incredibly time-consuming moving the marks from teacher's book to the report templates. I couldn't help but feel that it was all a waste of time as most of the parents can't read English anyway. Also, the one word answers weren't as informative as whole sentences. Oh well. 

Thankfully, the principal seemed happy enough with the results on Friday morning and the reports were printed without further incident. Hooray!

On Friday afternoon all the students were back at school to collect their report cards and awards for academic achievement. There was a nice ceremony held in the school's outdoor courtyard and all of the kids were dressed in their formal best to collect their prizes. Afterwards, Daniel and I were bombarded by many of our students who wanted to give us flowers, wine, chocolates and other trinkets as thanks for our work this year. I think we came home with about a dozen bunches of flowers and individual roses. It was pretty overwhelming. 

During the ceremony I couldn't help but think about how different things will be next year. The awards ceremony is basically the last time we see the kids before their Summer vacation and next year it will be the last time we ever see the kids. It's going to be pretty tough, I think. We got to experience about a hundredth of the next year's emotional impact on Friday when one of our Grade 1 students turned up at our house after the ceremony to say goodbye. His parents are moving to Balaton and he won't be back next year, so he wanted to come over and see us for the last time. It was a pretty special moment as he basically constructed his own English sentence (without prompting from anyone) to explain why he wanted to say goodbye. At first I was a bit confused that he was calling me a bitch, but then I realised he was saying "me go to beach". Awwww, isn't that cute? We'll miss you, Krisztián!

- Amanda

One Hundred and First Post!

Our last post was officially our one hundredth, we're in triple figures now baby!

It's been an eventful couple of days really.  Amanda is attempting to finish off her final international law assignment, so when we headed down to Lake Balaton on Wednesday to meet up with Mum and Derek, she was unfortunately forced to spend a lot of Thursday and Friday at the hotel working.  It didn't seem too bad however, as the place where we were staying was right on the lake with a nice terrace on which she could set up her laptop and connect to the wireless internet while the wait staff served her drinks and food.  If I had to choose a location in which to decide whether a foreign despot is protected by sovereign immunity or not, then that would have been the place.  Ah, there is nothing like the soft wind blowing through the trees and the faint sounds of the cuckoo birds calling to each other to weigh up against the guilt that one must feel when writing an essay that expunges a mass murderer.

We arrived at Balaton at around 4pm on Wednesday to find that Mum and Derek had already arrived. I had dropped them off at the train station on Tuesday morning so they could experience the Hungarian rail system.  Which, although there were a few hiccoughs, was relatively painless as far as I could see (i.e. only delayed overall by an hour or so).  We sat down together on the terrace and they told us how they'd hired a car in Budapest and had only just arrived an hour before us.  The rest of the afternoon was mostly lazy with plenty of laptoping, a short walk and much hilarity when we gave Iago a solid shove into the lake.  Although he didn't seem to be so pleased at first, and definitely avoided Amanda (as the instigator of the said sharp shove), Iago quickly entertained himself by chasing some ducklings into the reeds.

On Thursday after breakfast, Mum, Derek and I went on a drive to Szigliget castle, which was not too far away.  I always love wandering around castles, but today it was a touch rainy.   The castle was ordered to be destroyed by the Austrians at some point, so it a bit of a ruin.  Nevertheless, it was recreated by the Hungarians in the modern age with a lot of creative woodwork.  There were a lot of wooden stairs and walkways that helped us make our way throughout the castle.  It was a lot of fun, especially considering the pouring rain.  It really felt like we were trying to attempt a bourjois assault on this ancient ruined bastion in our polycarbonate raincoats and waterproof boots. It was exciting in a removed kind of fashion.

After we had conquered all that Szigilet had to offer us, we headed to Keszthely, which is another small town off Balaton.  There were a number of school groups in the area that seemed  to be visiting the puppet shows and palace.  We had a quick lunch in the main street then made our way to the palace.  I've noticed that all palaces and second rate antique shops look the same.  It might be my complete ignorance of all that is good and classy, but seriously, I can't really tell the difference between a piece of furniture that is behind a red rope and that which is behind a $10 price tag.  I'm sure there are people out there that can tell you the difference, I'm just not one of them. Nevertheless, the tour through the Keszthely was quite good.

We started Friday morning at a slow pace, Amanda had finished the first section of her essay and was onto the second.  After breakfast, we noticed that the weather was a lot more clement so we headed off for Badacsony whereupon we went for a bit of a hike. It was around 4km in all, each step upwards in hope of a view that would give us a panorma of the lake.  Within 200 meters we found a fairly good view, but we continued upwards with an ever increasing optimism.  Unfortunately, the peak was only signified by a broken wooden tower that was only climable by the unwary, of which we were not. 

Regardless, it was a great walk, with a number of interesting surprises along the way.  Once we got back to the hotel, Amanda and I went for a swim with Iago in the lake.  We splashed about for a bit gaining a few scratches from Iago's attempts to hang onto us while we swam.  We had to make a quick retreat however when Iago swam too close to the swans and they took afront.   The swans quickly chased us all out of the lake.

Today was quite sad as we said goodbye to Mum and Derek as they headed off on the next stage of their journey.  It's been really good to have them stay with us, it's been like having a slice of home come to us in Hungary and stay.  I've really missed everyone at home, especially my family so it was quite hard to see Mum go.  I'm sure they'll have a great trip, we'll catch up on skype soon!

- Daniel.

Hortobágy

After getting back from Miskolc, Amanda, Mum, Derek and I headed off to the Hortobágy national park. Hortobágy was the first national park in Hungary, established in 1973 and is thought to be the largest natural grassland in Europe (or so the guide said).

  

The drive down to the steppe was fairly uneventful other than it was fairly well signed (which is unusual for Hungarian attractions). Amanda and I had gotten back to Máriapócs in the early afternoon so we were rushing to make the 4pm tour. Once there, we met up with a number of other tourists (the majority of whom spoke English so the multi-lingual guide spent most of her time on the tour talking English). So soon enough, we entered a horse drawn cart and took off on our way through the steppes.

The tour was absolutely awesome, we saw the native sheep, horses, cattle, water buffalo and furry pigs.

- Daniel.

The Lock of Love

On Sunday it was our first wedding anniversary, so Daniel and I left Gaye and Derek at our place to dogsit Iago and spent Saturday night at a hotel in Miskolc. The reason we chose Miskolc to celebrate our first year together as a married couple is because it has a well-known bridge on Kandia Utca that features many hundreds, and possibly even thousands of "love padlocks".

Basically the idea is that couples engrave their names on a padlock, attach the padlock to a public fixture (such as a bridge, fence, gate or railing), then throw away the keys as a symbol of their enduring love and commitment to one another. Pretty romantic, huh?

And doesn't Daniel look spiffy in his new hat?

- Amanda

Lillafüred and Tokaj

Well, life has been pretty busy in Máriapócs lately. With Gaye and Derek being here, Daniel and I have been trying to be good hosts by taking them out to see a variety of Hungary's tourist locations. Last Thursday it was my turn to play tour guide and I decided to take Gaye and Derek to a few spots around Miskolc.

Our first destination was the picturesque mountain village of Lillafüred which is about 12 kilometres out of town. Our original plan was to catch a small train from the base of the mountain through the forest to the village, but things became unstuck when our GPS unit was unable to locate the train station. After spending some time searching the backstreets of Miskolc in vain, we eventually gave up and decided to drive instead.

We slowly zigzagged our way up the mountain and then suddenly we turned a corner in the road and were greeted with an absolutely beautiful sight - the majestic Palace Hotel building overlooking the tranquil green waters of Lake Hámori. We quickly parked the car and spent some time wandering around taking in the view and enjoying the lovely Summer sunshine.

After enjoying a quiet lunch at a local restaurant - interrupted only by a loud splash caused by an elderly man accidentally falling into the lake - we all piled back into the car and made our way back into Miskolc. Our destination was the awesome cave bath complex (check out Gaye and Derek's blog for some cool pictures). It's one of my favourite places in Hungary.

Yet more adventuring followed on Saturday when we all set off for the famous Tokaj wine region. Both Gaye and Derek are major wine buffs so I knew that they were really looking forward to seeing Tokaj and, more importantly, to tasting some of the white wines that the town is known for. It's really a bit sad that Daniel and I hadn't been to to Tokaj before Saturday because it's actually quite close to Máriapócs, perhaps just over an hour's drive from our house.

Tokaj is a really pretty little town, nestled at the bottom of a small mountain (or more like a hill?) and situated alongside a river. When we arrived we wandered leisurely down the town's main street, chose a place for lunch and managed to score some directions from the waitress to a nearby borospince (wine cellar). While Daniel and I weren't able to drink because we were driving, Gaye and Derek both sampled several different wine varieties and chatted enthusiastically with the cellar's owner about the local grape varieties. They were obviously suitably impressed as we walked out fifteen minutes later with about half a dozen bottles of local wine between us!

From there we continued to explore the town for awhile, then just as we started to make our way back to the car we encountered a rather lively character who invited us all to check out his own wine cellar. It turned out to be a massive 200 year old tunnel network that had been carved into the side of the mountain (hill?). I was pretty horrified by it at first as it seemed pretty grungy, but Gaye and Derek assured me that all of the cobwebs and mouldiness was necessary to make the best wine. Hmmm.

Anyway, they seemed to like the samples that were provided as we walked away with several more bottles of white wine for the ever-growing collection. Looks like we're in for boozy week!

- Amanda

Debrecen

Yesterday afternoon we (Daniel, Gaye, Derek and I) headed into the nearby town of Debrecen to check out the sights. Debrecen is Hungary's second largest town, but only about 200,000 people live there (plus a lot of part time university students). Whenever Daniel and I have visited Debrecen previously, we've always just gone straight to the big, modern shopping mall and the KFC outlet in its foodcourt, so it was a pleasant change to be able to take in some of the more touristly areas. 

After some initial confusion involving the inadvertent discovery of a totally awesome watertower-like thingy, and a harrowing drive down a pedestrian only mall, we eventually found ourselves in Kossuth tér. This square is in the very centre of town and was rather picturesque on such a lovely almost-Summer day. 

We walked around for a little while, ate some delicious ice cream, then made our way to the square's focal point, the Great Reformed Church (also known as the Great Calvinist Church or Nagytemplom in Hungarian). While I'm not terribly into churches, this one is quite historic so it's worth a mention. From what I understand, it served briefly as Hungary's parliament during 1848-49 and still displays the exact chair from which Kossuth Lajos declared Hungary's independence.

Inside the church, our little party of four split up. Derek and I decided to head up to the bell tower, while Gaye and Daniel checked out the museum in the other tower. Personally, I think that the bell tower was the more exciting choice. Derek and I climbed many, many, many narrow wooden steps and eventually came to a massive bell. But far from being over, the little wooden steps just kept on going. Up and up and up and up we climbed. Eventually we reached the top of the tower (a little less than 61 metres high) and were rewarded with a fantastic view of Kossuth tér and the city of Debrecen.

Going down the steps was a little less fun and a little more scary, but thankfully I survived the experience unscathed. Derek took it all in stride and didn't seem phased at all by the steep and seemingly neverending descent.

Daniel and I definitely plan on checking out some more of Debrecen's sights next time we're in town for a KFC fix.

- Amanda