In Délkút.
Sitting with Ileš in the makeshift office at his wife's business, which is landscaping and general gardening. It is the privatized city parks utility, which she doesn't own, only manages. So we're in a sort of a larger shed/greenhouse, surrounded with potted plants and a flower garden. There's an old East-German, smoky engined 2-cycle, 3-cylinder van (that we took a few times), mowers and other machinery. He contemplates a possibility of retroactively introducing capital punishment for the moron whose bright idea it was to put a two cycle engine in a vehicle of this size.
There was beer and coffee and some of his friends dropping by and there was chat and gossip and big talk about politics. We may be neighbors for eleven centuries, but they still don't understand what's happening on our side of the borders. If it's any condolence, most of the time neither do we. I still haven't forgot much of Hungarian.
We go eat somewhere downtown, not in the same old pizzeria - he avoids the place since the day somebody rearended his Fiat Tippo in front of it.
Looking at file tags for the day, we were working on one of his billing apps - now was it the cable TV, or the heating which he loosely based on it. In the morning we generated one form, and then must have been abuzz for most of the day elsewhere. Aaaah yes, building a Novell server in some ancient austrohungarian building near the railway station, a high or slightly higher school. The machine is a Compaq, which means special hardware and some of the drivers just won't. We fiddled with it all afternoon and, well, it did work in the end, after we both wasted a kilometer of neural tissue. The files start cropping up at 17:27, all the way to 21:20, which was his place then.
It's a funny feeling to be working in Hungary again, but this time with no Szoftex to worry about, just helping a friend. Yes, I got paid, but then I guess as he was using my tools all the way, and didn't know all the tricks (except my guys in Avai), well, it was worth it to both of us.
His apartment is still cramped, not enough surface for that furniture, and smells of heating gas, which they use for cooking and water heater. The heater is capricious, one of those where the valve has its own opinion about the proper time to open. For the time it takes you to adjust the temperature (again), you're already done.
Funny little event, one of these days, before hitting the road to go home, near midnight, we went downtown, to an old cobbled square facing the river. The only time I went there - didn't even know the river is so near. He had to meet someone about something. There wasn't much light, but there were almost a hundred people and several buses. That's where serbian and croatian buses exchanged passengers. The straight highway crossing to Croatia would be open several years later, so this was the way, perhaps four hours longer plus this wait, but still the only way.