Bad news

Mike passed away yesterday and Roy is off to Cornwall to be with Sheila for a few weeks. We are both very happy that he could make the wedding in May and as the pictures show he had a good time. He was a real, oldie worldie gentleman, a real Navy man, a great father and grandfather. We will remember him with fond memories.

Chutney, family history and other disasters

Back in Ber we had to get back to country type pursuits, like cutting grass, harvesting produce etc. The tomato plants are still going barmy, so this time (having filled both freezers with tons of lecso before) I opted for making chutney. It finally filled 10 1 litre bottles. Roy busied himself with putting up the lovely pottery we got from our Budapest neighbour (see piccies!) and I carried on with correspondence etc. on the computer.

I wrote to our Transylvanian friends apologising for the extreme bad manners of our so called friends in abandoning their event. They seemed pleased about this. The bombshell came in the middle of the week when our WTOC2009 mapmaker resigned leaving us high and dry without a map on which to plan. It is my lady-like upbringing which is stopping me to comment on this one. Dick's visit next week will be fun and games, but be devoid of courses, obviously.

We went to Paszto to do some shopping and visit the market. I have never tasted peaches like I got there, in my life. Nice to see that there are still some Hungarian farmers who grow nice fruit. Considering that the entire apple growing community of Szabolcs county is blockading apple processing plants at the dumping of Chinese apple concentrate, the state of Hungarian fruit growing is in a bad way.

Yesterday we went to photograph some old family graves in the Jewish cemeteries of Abony and Cegled, which went quite well. We found two quite neglected, old cemeteries, where most of the graves were overgrown with ivy and we could have done with a machete to get about. We only found two Czettel graves on our list, but found a load more that were not. I fastidiously took photographs of all of them, wich I managed to accidentally erase from the chip in my camera this morning. Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!! No further comment due to good manners.

We are off to the Gigasprint this morning, which should cheer me up, I hope. This is one of those events where you have lots of very technical controls in close proximity on sandy ground with no contour detail. Like forested sand dunes, but with indistinct vegetation and not a lot of forest. Get it? Fun!!!! I think I have 33 controls in about 3.6km. Mind you, my O shoes have given up, so the list of disasters is continuing. I tried to mend them with tape this morning, but if they fall apart mid-course, this is not going to be a good day either.

Finally, just to finish on a good note: yesterday on our way back to BP we discovered an absolutely delightful restaurant/cafe called Zila Kavehaz. They have a gorgeous menu, including interesting vegetarian dishes, oldie worldie atmosphere and manners, great food and fantastic service. Not every day you find one of these in Hungary, so I suppose the week was not a total right off after all.

Transylvania

The trip to Transylvania was a mixed affair. Some parts of it were magical, some very depressing and the orienteering a bit fraught.

Family history research could not be done as we had no time and very little to go on anyway. I visited Nagyvarad (Oradea) where my grandparents lived at the time of my father's birth and found it nice in the middle and soulless everywhere else. Poverty, neglect and a sensless rape of the environment is still evident and daily added to by capitalist exploitation. The multinationals moved in and now the drab Stalinist ugliness is mixed with large hoardings advertising Coca Cola and deodorant. The roads have greatly improved, but in parts are still awful. Racial and national discrimination is still rife: one symptom being that in the Hungarian areas the roads are at least twice as bad as anywhere else. Another being the state financed building of hundreds of orthodox catholic churches, mostly in areas of Hungarian population, just to dominate where there are practically no worshippers in them anyway. Religion has its reactionary aspects the world over, but this was the first time I saw it used to intimidate and oppress a national minority.

Having said all that, there was real beauty as well, as you can see from the photographs. We went through the Torda Ravine twice: once down and once up. It is only about a mile long, but the rock walls are awsome and the walkways quite scary. I frequently thought of Meaghan's Croatian experience of the lack of railings, which were certainly the case here as well.

The top two pictures are Roy and me at a tight walkway through some rocks by the ravine, the next two at the bottom are some ethnic pots with religious pictures and a typical Transilvanian church tower. Finally, in the ancient Hungarian village of Torocko, Roy, Jozsi and Gitta having a beer in one of the old inns.

The orienteering turned out very frustrating. I was doing quite well for the first two days and accumulated a lead of over 3 minutes for Day 3 and the chasing start. At this point our friends, who gave us a lift, told us that they are fed up with the forest, didn't like it and anyway, the weather forecast is bad, so they are leaving on Sunday morning. The implication being, that I either give up my last day or find my own way home. As we didn't fancy walking 250 miles we left with them. Some English people in our hostel were absolutely outraged at such rudeness and lack of consideration, but as we've known them for a good while, we were not surprised. Needless to say, we will never accept a lift from them again. There were however a few upsides to my missing the last day: 1. I managed to get home in time to watch the European Grand Prix repeated in the evening and 2. My absence, in all probability, gifted the win to a very nice English lady from Yorkshire.

Stopgap

We are off to Transsylvania tomorrow, so I thought I would write a few lines to stop the gap getting too big. I have taken no photographs since last time, so I posted yet another of my lovely roses and an excellent portrait of Andras, taking the video during the wedding, as snapped by Evi. Most pictures are in, and hopefully those posted to Canada are winging their way there as I write.

We have been watching a small amount of Olympics, being somewhat schizophrenic in our fervour to see both Hungary and GB do well. Laci and Koxi have arrived home yesterday and I went to return the gear and report on Sunday's Trail-O in Kecskemet. 8 competitors have hardly made the tremendous amount of work we put into the event worthwhile. We have discussed a good few points relating to the work, but I gave early warning of my intention to drop right out of Trail-O fairly soon. I am now firmer, than ever before that after the Bratislava event I will never again, REPEAT: NEVER AGAIN, control another event and will not be involved with anything other than WTOC next year, after which I am out of it altogether!! I like planning, but I might not even do any of that after 13th September, other than WTOC, because all the other crap that comes with it. It is now so much hassle that the only way to cope is to get right out. I can't desert them over WTOC, but I fully intend to drop everything else to do with Trail-O. That includes committee membership as well, although I have not yet hit Laci with that bombshell. Drip-feed, I think the best policy, even though he does not believe it yet. He can talk the hind legs off a donkey, that man, but he will get a nasty surprise when he realises how stubborn I can be.

Rant over! I am really looking forward to the Transsylvanian trip. We will travel to Nagyvarad, Torda, Torocko and finally to Kolozsvar. There is a 3-day orienteering event in and around the latter, the rest is being a tourist.

Next blog after we got back.

A week later

More than a week since my last entry - doesn't time fly when you are enjoying yourself? Well, not quite. The last week has gone past in a whirl. We had a Trail-O Committee meeting on Monday evening, which was useful from the point of view of sorting out an EU financed project, starting this September and ending next summer. There are 5 or 6 Trail-O events in it, spread across Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia and possibly even Austria and Croatia. The less enjoyable part was the reluctance of the committee to support my ideas on how to deal with interference in next year's WTOC by someone who is not even a member of the IOF Trail-O Comission, but more about this later.

We came back to Ber on Tuesday and started sorting the garden etc. - the usual tasks we are always faced with when returning after being away. See a couple more of my glorious roses above! There was a plan to go to Bratislava to do the planning for the Slovakian Trail-O event on Friday, but a friend and his cousin announced that they are coming to stay for a couple of days, so we put that off to the following Monday. Andor appeared with Agi, who lives in France, brought his laptop with nearly 400 beautifully edited wedding photographs, which were a joy to watch. See a group photo and myself making my speech during dinner, as a sample above! Apropos wedding: the Sulyan family were busy putting together the DVD and I had to assist with English translation, choosing music, layout and a fair number of other details, so that it could be posted to Canada soon. When they delivered the first half, all of us watched it on Andor's laptop and enjoyed it a lot. We also had a couple of hikes (without Roy, of course): one to the andesite rocks the other just around the village visiting the increasingly ruinous watermill and the row of ancient wine cellars up the other side of the valley.

I waited all week for the Committee to produce a response to our "friend" who chose to interfere in WTOC2009 without having been asked, but nothing arrived. Then I responded on a personal basis, which produced a flurry of correspondence in the following few days. Will not bore anyone with detail, but suffice to say I stood my ground, refused to be bullied and therefore I am now definitely not flavour of the month with the powers that are the leadership of the IOF Trail-O Commission.

After Andor and Agi left I felt quite ill, which turned out to be a summer cold/flu doing the rounds in the village, so I spent the whole of Saturday in bed watching the 3rd series of House on DVD. Well, about 10 hours of it, which was great. This was the long lost birthday present from Stephen that finally arrived just at the right time. Sulyan Andras came over on Sunday afternoon with the second half of the wedding DVD and the copies we asked them to cut, after which we departed for BP. The first thing we did after our arrival in BP was to watch the second half, which turned out to be an absolute hoot. The first part, which has the ceremony and the taking of the photographs mostly, did drag a bit, but the second half was pure entertainment. It included all the speeches and the dancing to the gypsy band. The star was Komar ldi, who was the life and soul of the party, as usual. The way she got the entire Canadian contingent try the csardas and other Hungarian dances was definitely a joy to watch.

Monday was spent in Bratislava, doing the planning for the Trail-O event on 13th September. It is held in a very interesting park, which was expertly mapped by a Ukranian. It only needed minimal tweaking, so we finished in about 3 and half hours. With a round trip of 400km to drive it was a long day and now I have to draw the course and do all the things necessary to prepare the event.

On Tuesday we took the car in for its 1000 km service, posted the CD's and DVD's to Canada, did some food shopping and returned to Ber. By the way, the discs did not go by DHL, as originally planned as a fee of about 80+ quid for a smallish envelope with some discs in it seemed exhorbitant to me. There is still 10-11 days for them to get to Toronto, so let us hope they make it. If not, I am positive the party will go off just as well without them. It would be a shame, but definitely not the end of the world.

Must go now as Roy is looking hungry and it is well past breakfast time.

Sweden

I am back. This was a marathon session which, while really nice, makes me realise that I don't like being away, especially on my own for 15 days. The extra day on the fortnight was WizzAir's doing due to a schedule change, which was especially unwelcome, but that's a risk you run using bucket airlines.

The first week was spent doing Trail-O (or to be more precise Pre-O) at the O-Ringen in Dalarna. (see the flag signalling my presence!!) Owe, Eva and Martin were the perfect hosts, I was made so welcome as if they have known me for years. The trip up to Salen was beautiful as we didn't take the main road, but went through lots of small villages, lakes and real backroads. The Pre-O is mind blowing, the field is 10 times more quality than at the World Championships and I had a very steep learning curve. The first 4 days I was really struggling with the timed controls, but was getting really good otherwise. On the last day I managed to lick the timed controls (all 5 of them!) and went to pieces on the course. That's life, but the real purpose of the trip - learning about elite Trail-O planning - was more than achieved, while I also had a lovely week in the company of very good friends. The picture of the 4 of us was taken at an eatery where we consumed delicious Swedish pancakes with cloudberry sauce. Yum, yum!!!

After my return to Uppsala I stayed one night and then proceeded to take the bus to Jonkoping to meet up with Gun (long lost Swedish friend from years ago). She took me to lovely places too and after a couple days there we went to her summer house by the sea West of Gothenburg to spend the rest of the week. The setting sun picture was taken at about 8.30pm from the top of the rock face above their house looking out to sea. That was magic.

Final couple of days was spent in Stockholm. I spent the first night at that sailing ship in the picture as it has been converted to a Youth Hostel. Gorgeous place with special atmosphere and all modern comforts as well. On Saturday the weather changed which somewhat spoilt the visit to the Skansen, but I still managed to walk all over Stockholm and take a peep at Europride which brought tens of thousands to the city.

Now to the mountain of post and e-mails and messages etc., etc. Next post when I have surfaced out of that lot.