My Hungarian Family

The day started at 6am with a coach journey to London. I actually found myself saying 'I must travel this way again'. Keep this in mind when you read the bottom of the blog. I met Laci, Timi and Dori at their hotel in Paddington with a huge bag of goodies, Hungarian sausage in abundance, sour cherry juice, turo rudi to last me until next year, a DVD of szeged, brocheres of Szeged, a box designed by Timi with bath pearls inside. Hungarian lesson number one from Dori, aged 3, the names of each of the animals.

Dori had her first experience on an underground train when we travelled to the British Museum. My Hungarian might not be too good but I can understand 'these seats are bouncy' and 'I really want to sit on that high seat'. What I forgot when being around very young children is that they copy what you do. So as we were going down the escalator holding hands, I stood in front of Dori facing her. Don't do this, what did she want to do? It resulted in us both walking off the escalator backwards, a first for me :)

OUr first stop was the British Museum. I stayed with Dori while Laci and Timi explored. I obviously didn't think about how Dori and I would communicate. The first fun part was finding out why she wouldn't play on the stairs, my translation was that she was missing her mum and dad. However, I had a brain wave, the gift shop. Half an hour of playing with toys, us both counting them in hungarian and then the best game...finding the colouring pencils! I know my colours in Hungarian and so I named them and she found them. Its amazing how you can communicare with a 3 year old who must think you are odd becuase you can't speak properly.

We had lunch in the Plough Inn on Museum Street, an old style pub. Each tried fish, chips and mushy peas washed down with a cider.

The next stop was to Madame Tussauds and an hour's wait. However, the look on all of their faces when they came out meant that it was worth the hour wait. Then it was back to the hotel to pick up presents and to the coach station.

This is where the strange times started. I had to run to the coach station but everything was fine and I sat back for a 2.5 hour journey. Well, until we were 10 minutes from the coach station and then sat on one road out of London for 2 hours. Accident Number one. 15 minutes after passing the accident, we met accident number 2 which happened a few cars in front of us. We sat and sat and sat. At the 4 hour mark people began to start to chat. This progressed onto a back of the coach social group with a communal crossword session. Water was being sent to the back of the coach becuase we had most of the children. Its amazing how in a situation like that humans help each other.

We sat for 7.5 hours. I listened to my seat partners boyfriend problems and we spoke to solutions. I read to them facts from the Szeged brochere and when asked why I seem Hungary obsession, I told them that a lot of my family live in Hungary. We all discussed Hungarian tourist attractions and Hungarian food. Then we shared the Hungarian food! Everybody was so hungry, it felt like I was handing our food parcels. I told them what Toro Rudi is after they ate it :) All loved it and so appreciative. As one lady was about to get her DVD player out to watch the Szeged DVD (I kid you not, the lady was doing a course in Russian and wanted to look at the architecture), the coach moved!