Getting Out of Town

I left my flat about 8:30 this morning to walk to my office where the language classes are held. When I turned to lock the door I was surprised to find a "Christmas tree." I taped it up on the cupboard door that covers the washing machine in the flat.

I spoke with the class about university life in the United States. One aspect that is very different is the cost. Students here receive governement support to attend universities. One of the students observed, "This [meaning the cost] must cause stress." Under recreation, since this is a class that is to have students of recreation management, I also discussed Binge Drinking.

When done I walked quickly back to my neighborhood and grabbed a sandwich at McDonald's. Then I walked down to the end of Kiraly, turned right a couple of blocks, and used my mobile phone to call Thomas and Carol and let them know I was at their flat. Their buzzer doesn't work, so they don't know when someone is standing outside on the street trying to get in.

We quickly left for Mohacs. A large Winter Festival is held here for several days, but as we discovered, not much on Monday. We noticed the building above held the tourist information office, so went in. Carol quickly discovered that the woman at the desk spoke German so they had a great conversation that way. We were directed to the 2nd floor to see a photography display of the costumes used for the winter festival. They are truly amazing. I bought a small button, like we sell in St. Paul for the Winter Carnival, so that I have a visual reminder of the great costumes from Mohacs.

We wandered around some. I took the above picture to add more evidence to my claim that Central Europe is not gray and drab. The colors of the buildings in Mohacs are amazing.

I noticed this monument. The woman in the toursit office explained the three women symbolize the coming together of the Hungarian, Croation, and Serbian people in this part of the world. Elsewhere in Mohacs there is a similar monument of three men. As you can from this picture and the one above, buildings in this area have domes that make  you think you are indeed entering a Serbian area. Behind this monument was a very large, quite newly constructed, church. It also had a very round dome top. We noticed even churches in very small villages had the rounded tops.

Mohacs is on the banks of the Danube. In fact, one of the brochues I brough home, says that Mohacs acts a water border station on the Danube. We walked up some very snowy and icy steps to get to the top of the levee to see the river. And we found a much safer way to get down! The area on the other side is called New Mohacs. Most of the structures were very small, and caused us to wonder if these were summer cottages along the river.

On the way back we took a side trip into the small village of Barbarc. Just outside this village is the area in which Thomas led an excavation project. We decided to go to Villany, too, so that route took us through another somewhat larger village in which he was the best customer of the hardware store while this excavation was going on. In Villany we just drove around. The afternoon was getting late, and also it looked like things were quite closed up, perhaps since it was Monday. Villany was quite a surprise to me, not at all what I expected.

This rural area of Hungary is very, very flat, and out of the city we found there was a good bit more snow. Yet there were times when I thought I might be driving on a road in rural Minnesota.

It was a very pleasant way to spend an afteroon.