04-VII-2015.
Woke up kind of early, packed and drove to Szeged, which is not far, perhaps 30km. This being saturday, the parking is free and many shops are closed, or open only until 14. Went straight to the shop and bought a new lens, the old one lost some of the protective coating and dang I have the money and I want a good lens. Filled all the paperwork for VAT return. Bought a bag of groceries - milk, salami, cheese, pastry, a small bottle of curry, some pašteta of goose liver.
If I was disgusted by all kinds of engrbian influence at home, having an english title on the university building is just way overboard. I really wish the natives pronounced it as „univershitch“ (s is always pronounced sh; sz is s; ty is soft tch).
(... 2 words...)
She developed a sore from her footwear, turning into a wound, so she bought a pair of flipflops, which helped a lot. This pair lasted for years, good quality.
I tried to speak hungarian here and there but no, nowadays it takes a few drinks to loosen that rusty tap. Or it just suddenly works, not when I want it to, but just when it happens by itself. Not that I have forgotten much of the grammar, or a way to build a sentence, it's that the dictionary had gone sparse, there are so many walled up back corridors or unlit rooms in it.
The Döm/University compound is reworked again, they even exhibited this model of how it will be once again as it once was... I guess yet another generation of architects will learn the ways of the 19th century, don't you even go into making something today's. And the portable auditorium in the atrium is now facing the opposite from what it did in 1990.
Had lunch in one of those nondescript places where the whole restaurant is a door below floor level, a couple of tables on the outside and a bar inside. Don't know if they have six tables altogether, but the cook is a real champ. The wiener schnitzel was great and damn large. And I understood when waiter asked "savanyos vagy nem savanyos víz" - fizzy or not water - my hungarian is not that rusty.
At the border the VAT return works only at the rightmost queue, which you don't see until you're near enough, and by then we were two queues to the left. Maneuvering was out of the question, and then there's the story that they just phone our side so they charge you customs - the 30% that ours may charge would be far more than the 18% or whatever the hungarian VAT, so we just ignored it and went to have some coffee in our room at Palić. We were back by 13.
Saw the first batch of syrian migrants, all young dicks without any women or children with them. Saw them at the supermarket too (went to buy milk and coffee and some tobacco, having not brought enough with us). They tried to pay in euros, but were sent to the nearest exchange (which are on almost every corner), we can't accept any other money but RSD.
Had coffee on the balcony, then packed stuff into the room and went for a swim. The landlady said there's some business hassling going on, the water in the lake is declared not safe for swimming because of all the algae, but it's actually to push tourists towards nearby Ludoško lake, where it seems some guys made an investment and want it returned. The places around Palić lake are owned by locals, which those guys don't like. We went and swam all the same. Not much, the concrete coast being rather slippery, but the water was just fine. Had an icecream on the way to the lake, and a couple of sodas on the way back. The place ("Log cabin") looked like it saw better days, and the kid who worked there seemed like someone's cousin helping out until the tourist season really takes off. Just for kicks, we asked whether he knew a place where we can have a good fish stew (actually, čorba). Right here, he said, just come in the evening.
So we went to the room to dry and take a nap, went for another short walk, came to the place. The kid turned out to be a very professional waiter, the čorba first class (the recipe somewhat different from our local one, lighter red and has noodles on the side, ours is noodleless), and the local wine made a perfect špricer - the soda from a bottlery in the next village (and I thought the soda bottles are extinct), and the guy mixed it up expertly. Made lots of good pics, also during the long walk at sunset.
Mentions: čorba, engrbian, pašteta, špricer, in serbian
22-XI-2021 - 12-I-2026