August 27, 2006

Hungary Trip--Day 3


We were able to sleep until about 9 a.m. on Friday, August 18, though we had a spell of wakefulness in the middle of the night, so we weren't quite as rested perhaps as we could have been. We had a long, leisurely breakfast and chatted with Anita, the middle F daughter, and her fiance, Paul, who was visiting for the weekend. He is a musician and lives in Austria, where they will live after they are married in October. You can see a picture of them here. They both speak English quite well, and Ted and I really enjoyed the chance to visit with them and get to know Paul. They seem like a well-matched couple, and I could tell that their families are pleased with their engagement. There was much flurry and wedding talk as they worked on invitation lists and other details over the weekend. :-)

At lunch time my dear friend Anita V, along with her daughters Fanni and Greta, picked Ted and me up to go to their house for lunch. When I first met Anita, Fanni was only a couple of years old, and Greta was born just a few days after our first meeting. Anita is an English teacher and has done much translating for the Americans who have been involved with the ministry program, and we had a delightful visit over the course of the afternoon. We met her son, Simon, who is about 5 years old, I believe. The girls are (I think) 13 and 11 now. We had a yummy lunch of fruit soup, mashed potatoes, and chicken with cream and cheese.


Later in the afternoon Kornel, Anita's husband, returned home from work, so we were able to visit with him as well. Ted and I had printed off a number of recent family photos to take with us, so we showed off our children to the V family and just about everyone else who was patient enough to go through our stack with us. ;-) You can see a picture of the V family here, taken in back of the Kecskemet Baptist Church on the afternoon of the wedding.

As a side note, Paul, Anita F's fiance, is a cousin of Anita V.


Anita drove us back to the F house late in the afternoon, and we freshened up a bit in preparation for our next meal, which was hosted by Csaba (pronounced CHA-bah) and Edit (Eh-DEET). Csaba and Edit were in my first evening English class in 1996 and stayed all 7 weeks of the course. They were perfectly delightful students and soon became good friends of mine. Csaba is a cardiologist, and Edit works for a pharmaceutical company. They were neighbors when I first met them and are now living together. When I left Hungary in 1996, I was so sad to leave them...they had become so dear to me. I was delighted when we were reunited in 1999, though we were not able to spend as much time together as we had the first summer I was there.


We had another wonderful dinner--cantaloupe with ham slices, followed by potatoes, steamed fish with tomatoes, and Swedish mushroom salad, the latter of which I had never tasted before, so it was fun to try something new. It sort of tastes like mushrooms in pizza sauce, but a notch fancier. Ice cream was a perfect dessert. We again went through our photos with Csaba and Edit and visited for a long while. I think it was close to 11 p.m. when we returned to the F house, ready for a good night of sleep.

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