Trippin’ – 20th-22nd June

Stop 3 - Velka Domasa, Slovakia & Stop 4 – Lublin, Poland

Slovakia had some of the most beautiful and dramatic scenery which mesmerised me as a gazed at it out of the car window (no, I have no photos – I was mesmerised, I told you). Mountains, forest, dramatic dark clouds and sunshine breaking through. Spectacular. The scene we were confronted with next however, was gut wrenching.

I was shocked by the poverty I saw in the village in Hungary where Gábor uses to work; poverty that I had never seen in Europe before but even that was paled by the full on shanty town we drove though when we left the mountains in Slovakia. It was comparable to those that I saw in India – but this is Europe! This is Schengen area! This is the bloody Euro zone which supposedly has strict economic criteria for joining! We had to stop the car; I couldn’t breath.  I made a note of the name of the town so that I will remember the people, remember the place and remember that poverty and suffering is not something that happens somewhere else or that you can take a break from. It is here in my home and here in the middle of my holiday.

One I had collected myself we drove on. We were heading to Velka Domasa, to the lakeside, to relax. We just spent the last week in Szeged, packing up our apartment, carrying all our stuff downstairs and loading it onto the truck, doing the moving out clean (Gábor spent 3 years as a cleaner, often cleaning apartments that had not been cleaned properly when people move out – he has very high standards), preparing for the trip and saying goodbye. We were exhausted and were looking forward to spending a couple of days by the lake recuperating.

We had checked out the area and it looked fairly nice (although our Slovak is pretty poor so we were just gauging by the pictures) and there were quite a few campsites marked on our map so we didn’t bother with finding a specific place we would just see when we got there...Well when we got there we found that he lake was a reservoir, the beach was clay and that the campsites were non-existent. Oh yeah, and it started raining as soon as we stopped the car. We found a little patch of grass with a view of the water, although we may have been trespassing but everywhere was closed so there was no one around to complain. We got our water canister filled at the bar a little way around the lake and Gábor stet off to find an ATM in the village to buy some milk for Ernest. There was no ATM (the closest one was 20km away) but a friendly bar tender gave us a couple of cartons of milk and some chocolate too. There is nothing ike the kindness of strangers to brighten your day. The sun coming out helps to brighten thing too.

Things went right back to being sucky though when I realised that the trusty little digital camera was no more(Farewell you were a good friend) and suckier still when I found that my SLR was broken too. The part that the lens screws into had broken off from the main body. I was completely cameraless. My photo challenge plan was utterly screwed. Oh, and it started to rain again.

Not the R&R we were hoping for so we decided to move on to Lubin in Poland in the morning.

Lubin we really had planed. We had found a perfect little campsite; lakeside again, forest, nature walks, just south of the city. Great for our resting place, one day chilling in the campsite and take a little walk and one day to explore the city. Great plan – but for some reason our great plans weren’t going to...well...plan. The campsite so longer existed. It had been turned into a car park. After a little bit of enquiring we found out there was another campsite on the other side of the lake but were told “it’s really bad”. We took this with a pinch of salt; we like simple sites (all we need is a spot where the nature is cared for and we can get clean water) and know that many people want a bit more than we do. But this place was really bad, it was dirty and dangerous. The grounds were set up for caravans but the only place they had to empty their “black water” tanks was the same place ay you got the drinking  water from. We had to sleep there that night though as it was too late in the day to find somewhere else.

We were getting more and more tired with each day that passed and we still hadn’t stopped to recover from the moving. We were too tired to drive on another stretch the next day so decided to stay in Lublin but sleep in the hostel in town and eat out rather than cook. We had a lovely day in Lublin, the old town is charming. It is a contender for the European culture capital for 2016 and they really are making a lot of effort to win it. And after sleeping in a bed we were a bit more rested and ready to move on to Bialowieska where we planed to stay in this perfect little forest campsite...



Gábor's posts about these days:


20th June -  Hungary to Slovakia
21st June - Crappy Campsite
22nd June - Lublin
22nd June - Lublin revised


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Trippin' - 20th June

Aggtelek to...some lake in Eastern Slovakia that I can't remember the name of right now

We were in no rush to leave Aggtelek, we were only planning on driving a few hours to a lakeside in Slovakia and although the weather had improved it wasn't exactly swimming weather, so we had a relaxed morning and took a walk over the hills (rather than into them like the day before).

I don't know if the trail had a name but surely it should be called "Butterfly walk" (or something more imaginative but butterfly related). I have never seen so many butterflies in their natural habitat before; we had to watch where we stepped - they where everywhere. The photos don't show it so well, like I said yesterday, the zoom was playing up.

The abundance of butterflies probably had something to do with the abundance of wild flowers.

Gábor tends to avoid using the camera, but sensing that it was coming to the end of its life, he took up the challenge and took up the camera (meaning that for once I feature in the pictures...my friend Gail has a fear that if something were to happen to her there would be no pictures of her with her son, as time passes and I have so few pictures of me with my kids I start to understand her fear...maybe I told this before...I have a very bad memory and tend to repeat myself...or ramble; I ramble a lot too, like now for example...sorry).

Frankly I think he did great.

Perhaps he could do with a little praise from people to encourage him to do it more often...well maybe it will take more than praise, a new camera might be necessary since later that day the camera gave up on us.  

Before we set out I made Lily an explorers utility belt, complete with, sketch book, crayon (for rubbing), pencil, magnifying glass, pocket knife, matches (yes, I put a knife and matches in the hand of my 7 year old) and colour scavenger hunt cards (might do a crafty post on the bely and cards at some point).

After our walk it was time to leave Hungary after spending a year there and head to Slovakia, adding a new country to the list of countries I've visited. I will save the tales of Slovakia for tomorrows installment and leave you with one image of the lake there...one of the very last taken with our camera.

From this point on all pictures are from Gábor's phone or Lily's mp4 player.

Gábor's blog of the day as always has more pictures, more videos and more languages (his blog is in booth English and Hungarian).

Trippin' - 19th June

Stop 2 - Aggtelek, Hungary

After the beautiful sunshine of the day before, the sudden change to cold drizzle was a bit of a shock. So...on our fist day of our camping road trip we cheated and opted for a wooden hut rather than a tent pitch. To be fair it really was a BIG drop in temperature; we had had weeks of well over 30^oC it went down to about 12^oC.

Our little hut was in Aggtelek, still within Hungary (but only just), a national park with some spectacular caves. Gábor and the kids had gone to some caves in the Buda hills (I missed out because I had been left behind in Szeged for the weekend to study). Lily loved them; Ernest however, was not so keen. So we decided that only Lily and I would take the tour of the caves while Gábor and Ernest did their own thing. There was one small flaw in this plan though; the tour was of course in Hungarian. Normally on these kinds of tours kids might need a little bit of a simplified (or elabourated) explanation from their parents to accompany that of the guide but (even after a year of studying Hungarian) my language skills were not quite up to. In fact I had to use Lily as a translator but she wasn’t able to translate most of it. - Well how many 7 year old do you know that can translate the history of cave exploration and the scientific explanations of the formation of stalagmites and stalactites.

We bought a book but with having a new adventure every day we haven’t had time to give it a proper read. We will.

But anyway, I can’t tell you an awful lot about them. Big caves, fairly impressive, smell kind of musty.

It was on this day that the first signs of the coming disaster arose. The zoom on the digital camera was having “issues”.

Gábor has a post about this day too, with more pictures and video of what him and Ernest got up to when we were in the caves.

Trippin' - June 18th

 Stop 1 - Budapest Pride

Photos courtesy of Marianna Kiss

Since we were spending our last day in Budapest at the Pride March, we invited each of Gábor’s family members if they wanted to join us and take one last opportunity to spend time with the kids before we leave Hungary. Each politely (well…) offered their excuse and passed; “I don’t like crowds”, “Marches remind me of the old communist days”, “I just don’t think it is the right way to go about things”. Each of them however suggested, indirectly (or even directly), that we best not take the children (“I can look after the kids while you go though”). None of them understand that  the main reasons we go is FOR our children.

In Hungary today racist and homophobic sentiment has become as much a feature in small talk as the weather. Support for Hitler, advocating genocide; it all slips of the tongue as easily as “It’s a lovely day for it”. But what I found even worse than people making these kinds of statements was how rare it is that people stand up and speak out against them. Perhaps it is a legacy of Hungary’s history of dictatorial rule, but it seems that when hate and violence is being promoted you either join in or keep you head down so you can live a comfortable life. For us, Gay Pride is one of the best ways of demonstrating to our children that it is not OK just to keep quiet, rather we should stand up and make ourselves heard. But unlike them we will not shout in anger, hate and aggression, but with joy, love and celebration.

Photos courtesy of ontd-political

The idea of SOLIDARITY is important to Gábor and I and we hope that what ever our children grow up to believe in, I want them see the importance of showing solidarity for our fellow humans. 

There are some who claim that LGBT have equal rights and what they ask for is “special right”. Frankly I find this insulting and clearly untrue. Consider my life:

·         I was able to marry the person I loved,

·         I was could start a family without having to justify my decision to any one,

·         I can raise my children without public scrutiny,

·         I have the security of knowing that if anything were to happen to me my children will be taken care of by my partner,

·         I moved country and got my resident permit on “family ties”,

·         I can contemplate increasing my family some day by adopting or fostering.

There are so many more aspects of my life that would be more difficult or impossible, even in Europe, if Gábor had been a woman.

Some than argue that these are not rights, rather they are “privileges”.  I don’t care what you call them “rights” or “privileges”, if they are granted by  the state then in a fair and democratic society they need to be granted to all. So, until they are, then my children (until they are old enough to make the decision for themselves) and I will march right alongside LGBTA at pride marches wherever we happen to be.

But besides lessons about Justice and Solidarity I want to give them the opportunity to learn about themselves. Our society today offers such a narrow definition of “girl” and “boy”, I would argue that, despite the best efforts of feminists, it is even worse than when I was growing up 25 years ago. Participating in Gay Pride is one that I see we can counter this and give my children a broader concept of “girl” and “boy”. There are so may different types of “men” and “women” that hopefully Ernest and Lily will understand that there is nothing they need to conform to they just need to be themselves and that they will be loved and supported by us no matter who they are.

There was a beautiful scene towards the end of the parade. Ernest started playing with and chasing his balloon down the long rainbow silk; so joyful, so oblivious to the looks or judgement from others (including the mass of photographers who also spotted this perfect photo moment).  

This scene (and the pride march in general) epitomises my greatest wishes for my children’s life:

Be Happy. Be Free. Be Colourful.

 Csanádi Márton - Photo Journalist

Click the link for some more spectaculat pictures of the parade.

Look at the Pretty Kitty

This is Kitty, isn’t it pretty (not “she” or “he”, I don’t agree with binary gender assignment with people so I am most certainly not going to do it with my car). Kitty is going to take us home (well with some help from Gábor).

Kitty is a 1979 (yep, 3 years older than me) Lada 2103 and it runs like a…well it runs ok, it is a Lada after all but it is in pretty damn good condition for its age. I suspect you may some questions…the name perhaps, where did it come from? And then of course there is the question that we are most frequently asked “Why the f*** do you want to drive across Europe in a LADA!?”

I'll answer the first question with the help of these visual aids:

all 3 pictures from wikipedia

1.  One of my all-time favourite albums by one of my all-time favourite artists, and really the title matches with the lada perfectly. The Lada has a bit of a reputation for being…well, junk but it is fantastically retro so it certainly has the KITSCH part in the bag. The SOVIET is obvious, inside Kitty there are little reminders everywhere, under the bonnet and over the dashboard all the text is Cyrillic.
2. I don’t think I need to comment – this is a car with personality.
3. Ernö has 2 great loves in his life at the moment; cats (kitties) and our car (Kitty). We saw 10 cats, including 3 little kittens in the synagogue garden today and was squealing and giggling with joy.

As for the “why a Lada?”, well there are so many reasons why:

We borrowed a big people carrier type car to drive to Hungary in, it was fairly new (at least relative to our car) but before we even started, the air conditioning broke. I am not precious, I can live without air conditioning, however the air conditioning was connected to the built in fridge-cooler-thingy in the dashboard, which was connected to the water in other parts of the car. As a result of all this interconnectedness, water was leaking out of the cooler all over the car floor. We had to get it fixed which cost us 200€ before we had even left Oulu. Ladas don’t have fancy gadgets – fewer bits means fewer things to break. Actually I don’t think Kitty has any air conditioning (besides winding the window down).

Ladas have a bit of a bad rep (in the UK at least) for being rubbish, breaking down and falling apart. I remember when I was 13 in our English class we had to give a presentation; (the topic was free but we had to include visual aids) one of my classmates gave her presentation on her mum’s Lada, the visual being the door that had fallen off on the way to school that morning. Yet despite the reputation, there are still hundreds (thousands even) of Ladas still on the roads here in Hungary. The new car we drove here in on the other hand is unfit for another trip across Europe. Ladas were built to last - not with planned obsolescence like newer cars. On top of this because they are sturdy and simple, if it does break down Ladas are easy to fix.

Gábor and I were pretty uncertain about taking the step to become car owners, we have been pretty critical of car users and producers in the past and both agreed that new cars are not for us, no matter how “eco” they claim to be. There is very little that is eco about manufacturing processes of the ever increasingly gadgety cars. Ladas have already paid their dues when it comes to carbon footprint from manufacturing.

I guess there may also be some people wondering about our route but I will write about that later…the plan still needs a little more planning.