12 May 2007

We were amazed this morning when we awoke and saw that it was 11:00. Some storms were supposed to come through last night but ended up going north of here. The weather so far has been dry, sunny and quite warm.
We ate another feast of a breakfast as quickly as we could and took the bus to the city market. It is inside a huge building that we called the corn palace. There were many stalls with people selling produce, meats, baked goods, souvenirs and clothing. We wandered through fairly quickly and bought a delicious pastry filled with white and chocolate cream on the way out.
Next we stopped at an internet cafe to email some pictures of Mrs. Oszkay's round window to Csaba. The young man who worked there spoke English and was very helpful. It did take us a while to figure out the keyboard, though, because some of the keys are in different positions than we are used to. Also, all of the prompts are in Hungarian, but we were able to figure out which buttons to push just based on their position on the screen. Windows is Windows, I guess, no matter what country you're in.
There was a camping store that we saw the other day that we wanted to try to find again because we figured they would have the butane cannisters we need to use with our new camping stove. We wandered some more and actually found the store, but it closed at 2:00 and it was 2:30. So we crossed back over the river and took the cable car up to Castle Hill. It's like a city in itself up there filled with shops, restaurants and hotels. We saw the Fisherman's Bastion, Matthias Church and wandered around the Buda Castle Royal Palace. We enjoyed a "Hungarian style" pizza which is sauce, cheese, onions, paprika peppers and Hungarian sausage. This isn't what we consider an authentic Hungarian meal, but it was just the size we were looking for. Mrs. Oszkay has been feeding us so well that we haven't really been hungry since we arrived here! Before we ordered our food we asked the waiter if they took credit cards. He said, "Visa only". No problem. But when we were paying the b!
ill, the hostess said they only take credit cards for orders of a minimum of 5,000 forints. Ours was only 3,750, but John insisted since he was told earlier by the waiter that it would be accepted, so they did eventually take it. We believe that in general businesses here don't like to take credit cards because of the extra cost to them. We've had two different places tell us that they take credit cards but their machine wasn't working. A Canadian at the table across from ours said he had the same experience. So we'll have to be more careful about this in the future. Live and learn!
We walked back to the mall close to the house and picked up some last minute food for the road tomorrow and a mother's day bouquet for Mrs. Oszkay. We were going to get a greeting card, too, but we couldn't read any of them, so we passed.
When we arrived home we were immediately served some food, of course. Tonight our host made us a sort of sweet dish in a small bread bowl with a pudding-like filling made from cream cheese, egg and raisins. They were delicious like all the food we've been served so far.
After dinner we watched a Cary Grant, Jimmy Stuart, Catherine Hepburn movie on TCM and then tried to get to sleep with visions of tomorrow's potentially scary ride dancing in our heads.