Yesterday, after having a bit of a wrestle to get the bike and trailer through the doors, I took a train from Zalaegerszeg to Veszprém with Szu and Barbie (Szu’s Veszprém flatmate). With a little hand drawn map and a bit of borrowed female intuition I managed to find my way to their place from the station. I got a quick look at the town, with a rad old military base near the rail yard with about 20 old soviet radar trucks. When I got to the girl's place, I dumped my stuff and Szu and I went for a walk around the town. She pointed out her favourite parts and explained why it was 10x better than living in Zalaegerszeg. Great tourist I am, forgetting my camera at the house. We had a look at the main strip, ate at a really cheap place hidden at the back of an expensive clothing store, went to the castle and walked out onto a peninsular like outcrop of hill to get a closer look at the crucifix perched on the rock. As we turned to return to the castle, we ran into a couple of young guys. They had on suits, ties, backpacks, were clad in heavy black jackets and wore beanies. They said hello to me in English, so I struck up a conversation with them. On their jackets were badges, and even though they were written in Hungarian, I could tell these guys were Mormons. One of them was about to return to the States after living in Veszprém for the past 14 months and was giving his replacement the 20 cent tour of the town. We had a friendly chat about Hungary, bikes, Utah, the cold and what the JCLDS scene was like in Hungary. I usually feel quite hostile to overtly religious types, especially if they knock on my front door on a Saturday morning. But whether through increased tolerance of other’s beliefs, plain curiosity or lack of a front door, rather than chew their ear off in an attempt to sway them to my heathen ways, I just wanted to know if they were doing the bike thing. A couple of times they just said, “You do know who we are?”, and I just said “yeah” and continued talking to them about what we had in common rather than what we didn’t.
After the Mormons, Szu and I went and had hot white chocolate (my banana one was so sickly, I couldn’t finish it), and played Mastermind. We then went back, ate pizza and watched a movie. I fixed their wifi network for them, so from about 10pm till 12:30, each of us sat with our separate laptops on our errr.. laps, and did the net thing. Szu and Barbie’s flatmate and landlord is a disgusting pig. I think he inherited the house from a dead relative and refuses to clean anything. The toilet near his room stinks worse than any men’s room I’ve been in, minus the trough lollies, and the kitchen is a biological hazard. The girls don’t cook, keep all their food in their room, use a different bathroom and toilet and prefer not to interact with the beast.
I did a magic dance, clapped three times, pressed some more buttons and magically got my computer and video camera talking again. It seems Windows doesn’t perform that little bit of code which tells the camera what format the video is coming out as, therefore confusing the camera while it’s in auto switch mode. This does mean I’ve been able to put all the footage from Mongolia back onto tape and delete it from my drive. I also took my wifi detector apart and fixed things somewhat. I still need a soldering iron to make things kosher, but the little bit of silver paper from a cigarette packet is doing the job nicely currently. However, right now I hate technology. I’ve known it for a while, but now that I’m trying to access my photos from my trip I burnt onto a DVD about two months ago, there is a whole bunch that are missing. Arse. And trying to find the ASUS service centre in Budapest was a big shit, with multiple phone calls to an occasionally working telephone number only yielding a “yeah.. Call back tomorrow”, response from the company, several days running. I feel like punching a nerd right now. Ouch
this is cool
my new heroes
Hungarian girls the most violent?
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