Another busy week

On Friday we came into town and since then life had been one never ending bit of fun. First, however, we managed to finally order and pay for my clubcard for the baths which will entitle me to half price entry. The queue seemed a bit long when we arrived, but it was dealt with quite quickly eventually. Hopefully it should be done in two weeks, as promised, but who knows? During the weekend the weather was not particularly nice, so we stayed indoors catching up with stuff.

On Sunday I went to one of my piano recitals at the National Concert Hall in the Palace of Arts for a concert given by a phenomenal young pianist by the name of David Fray. He - in spite of the sound of his name being ever so English - is French. He played Bach: two toccatas and two partitas, both of which he rendered with mastery belying his tender age of about 25. That was indeed magical and in the interval the girls and I tried to finalise the date and program of the next country weekend for ourselves to be spent with eating, drinking, hiking and listening to classical music. It is now fixed for 15th-17th February and the attendees are: Klari, Jutka, Bozsa, Annus and Jozsi. The latter friend being of the male persuasion it won't be a girls only weekend, like last time, but it will still be fun.

Monday was an arduous, long, but very productive day. Roy and I have been involved with an orienteering friend's attempts at researching the life and art of the father of Hungarian orienteering, Henrik Ripszam, who was an exciting painter, sculptor and all round artistic, as well as sporty, bod. He lived from the early 1930's until his death in 1976 in England and Roy's family history research skills have unearthed plenty of detail on his life for the coming publication. On Monday the writer of the book, Roy and myself travelled to visit Henrik Ripszam's great nephew to interview him and perhaps view a few pieces of art he still has. The old man was a really lovely person with a memory which flitted here and there, got slightly confused in places, but was also coming up with gems now and again. Like when the writer of the book showed him some old photos of Henrik Ripszam's life from a different source and he pointed to the young man at the piano: "That's me tickling the ivories there!"

We saw and took photographs of a few artefacts, one of which - a self portrait - is likely to end up on the front cover of the book. Roy made up a folder of all his researches and gave him a copy, which he was quite pleased with. After returning to town I managed to visit my doctor for some repeat prescriptions, which were long overdue, threatening to making me run right out of my pills. On Tuesday we visited the City Archives to submit requests for the sight of quite a few documents. The bureacracy in these parts is still horrendous, but at least they let you see them. The process included: 1.put the details, fond numbers, date and anything else relevant on a form and then 2.fill out a long piece of card with the same details, so when they remove the file from the shelf they can replace it with the card. I appreciate that that must have been the method of marking where files have been removed from for decades, if not centuries, but why is it my job to write up the gap card? Why can't they do that? So filling in these forms and cards took hours, but finally we could get on the computer to see those which they told us not to bother to request, because they are on the computer. Well, they might be, but they could only be viewed if they could find them. So, we will have to request them next time. We are due back there next Monday to receive the files, view and/or copy them and then put in more requests for further ones. Fun, isn't it? Especially this toing and froing, due to them taking 3 days to produce any document requested.

Yesterday I went geocaching with Andor. Provided we are credited the one cache we couldn't find, we would have increased our tally by 8 caches yesterday. And even if they don't, a total of 7 caches is quite respectable, not to mention the fact that we had a lot of fun while doing it. We forgot to set the GPS's total distance funcion, so we don't know how much we walked, but it was quite a few miles I think. You might be interested about these two dogs in the photo: well they had nothing to do with the caching, but I took the picture due to my fascination with the sculptures while waiting for Andor who was quite uncharacteristically late. The dogs are made of pieces of wood about 2 inches, by 2 inches, by a foot approximately. I loved them. They were supposed to be the guards to the gate to hell a la Dante and they were quite sinister in the bad light of the morning.

Later the sun came out and it was getting warmer, but even that didn't help when we couldn't find our very first cache amongst a thousand padlocks as seen in the picture. I rang the owner and she kindly told me the password and I think she ought to go and sort her padlocks out because judging by the comments on the cache web page, nobody had found it for quite a while.

The next one was a 5 part virtual which gave us a pleasant downtown amble, followed by a 4 part multi, which gave me a lot of pleasure. It was put out by a friend of mine who is ill at the moment, so I will have to congratulate him on how clever it was and how many interesting places it took us to. It might cheer him up in his sickbed. The two photos above represent the two parts of a brilliant piece of street sculpture, representing the characters in a book whose writer was the subject of the cache. The three kids are playing marbles and the two standing ones are plotting to pinch their marbles. They are made of bronze and are absolutely spot on. That is exactly how I ever imagined these characters from this particular book. If you can lay your hands on a copy the title is "The Boys from Pal Street" by Ferenc Molnar. Worth a read!

In the evening I went to see The Sunshine Boys with my friends and enjoyed it tremendously. One of the leads was played by the husband of one of my old university friends (the guy on the right) and he was jolly good. Fighting each other and the onset of old age gave both of the lead actors a chance to shine. Very funny but poignant too. Today we are staying indoors again. Lots of correspondence, catching up with e-mails and other stuff is on the cards.