Visiting with Luke and Michelle in Budapest

Hungarians do not have long term fond feelings for the Russians. That lack of fondness has its roots in history that goes back a long time and has been reinforced over the recent past. 

But first where are we? This is a typical, I am assuming, suburban home in Budapest. We stayed here as guests of Luke and Michelle.

We met Luke and Michelle last summer while in Colorado and went hiking with them a time or two and enjoyed their company. Unwittingly they said i"f ever in Hungary…. " well here we are. Surprised 'em. Teach 'em to say that again.

Back to the Russian thing. After the Russians left Hungary and the rest of eastern Europe in 1989, the Hungarians quickly moved the Soviet era statues to "Memento Park" in order to Never Forget. Luke and Michell took us to Memento Park.

There are a lot of statues and some of them are very large and somewhat grotesque and amazing. Take for example this energetic worker celebrating the completion of a Five Year Plan or something. He is big.

See what I mean. Look closely, that is Luke and me on the base mocking his pose. Seriously, there was no explanation of what he was originally doing but he was big.

Now this victorious Soviet Russian soldier carrying his machine gun was also large, grim faced and tight fisted.  

Lenin and others of the Communist era were of course present in Memento Park.

I think I mentioned that the Soviet soldier statues were large. Luke and I barely come up to the bottom of this one's trench coat.

Over the years of reading about Russia and East Europe in spy novels, I saw frequent mention of the Trabant automobile and how much exhaust it produced, how poor it performed, how uncomfortable

it was - in general a sorry example of communist economic policy. I was glad to finally see one in person.

On Sunday we went to the Cornerstone Hungarian Missionary Baptist Church. It was a contemporary worship service and the music was quite good. Since Patt and I have been studying Hungarian for about 36 hours we were quite at home.

Note the words on the screen. A pronunciation guide for Hungarian is to ignore all the letters you see in a Hungarian word and use other non-seen letters when you pronounce the word. The trick is which other random non-seen letters to use. The spelling of the word is of absolutely no use.

Luke translated most of the service for us. It was a very good service or Luke preached a good sermon.

After church we rode around a bit going to a small village that sells crafts and Michelle led Patt into sin. This linen shop was more than Patt was prepared to resist despite hearing a good sermon.

The man on the left is the proprietor of the shop, he is sad, he sold a lot of stuff to Patt but he thinks he could have sold a lot more and that he sold it too cheaply. Patt is smiling but is wondering if she should have bought more stuff, I am trying my best not to cry. The shop is full of people watching us load up sacks of stuff.

We enjoyed our visit with Luke and Michelle and hope to visit again and did say to them "If ever in North Carolina, please …."  We hope they do.