A busy, if somewhat lonely week (for both of us)

On Monday we saw that the cefre barrels were gone, so Roy was expecting his moonshine to turn up any day. The other major event of Monday was having to ring Nationwide again as nothing arrived in the post as promised.  Another helpful little fellow had to own up that nothing was sent.  At least according to his computer. So he faithfully assured me that this time he personally had a word with the department responsible and they promised to expedite the matter at once. Is this human or computer negligence and inefficiency?

Fenyő László

On Tuesday I was off back to town due to yet another concert.  My favourite chellist did us proud again. His concert had been hit by a serious mishap, just on the morning of the day of the performance. One of the foreign soloists called in sick and he had only a few hours to find others to take his place. He managed it and even the program only had to be changed in one respect. Kristóf was one of the fill-ins, and superb he was too.

The other big event of Tuesday was the arrival of Roy's pálinka. He suspected that there would be quite a lot of it, due to the size and plumpness of the bought plums, but even he didn't imagine that 56 litres of the heavenly brew would arrive in 12 five litre containers.  Considering he only sent 10, good job the distiller had some spare. He spent the following days cleaning, drying and then filling a large number of glass bottles, as pálinka is not very happy in plastic for any length of time.  Even my friend Klári has got involved by supplying some of the bottles. As the excise duty is going back on homegrown booze from 1st January 2015, good job this got done now.  However, the sum, which is rumoured to be a full £4.50 per litre, is a bit of a blow. Not so much as an extra expense, although that is not welcome either, but the fact that this is so steep that the vast majority of the citizens will most probably go back to distilling it illegally at home, thus endangering the survival of the legal stills.  The one we use now is such a good, reliable and skillful distillery, that I would be heartbroken to lose him.

About half of this year's pálinka

On Wednesday I was back in the baths. I was going down with a cold, so I went inside a lot sooner than normal, where I still couldn't find Imre (still staying at home on doctor's orders after his accident), but Annie was there and we had a good chinwag. Afterwards I went and paid Roy's speeding fine, met up with Cedrick to hand over the T-shirts and paid a visit to a ticket office to try and get one of my stolen concert tickets reprinted.  Needless to say they couldn't. When I got home I rang the office of the orchestra performing and they promised to do something about it. As the concert is in next May, the matter is not urgent.  While there I bought a ticket to one of their plays.

One of the lovely building in the Castle District

On Thursday I went geocaching with Klári. We spent most of our time, prior to getting dark up in the Castle District. The sun shone and it was a very pleasant and easy multi. Unfortunately I couldn't say the same about the next cache. The clues were pathetic, the GPS reception minimal, and with the sun setting the air was getting totally freezing. So we gave up, had a cup of tea in a cafe and went home.

Mathias Church in the Castle District

On Friday I was supposed to go to the baths again, but really didn't feel like it. I felt full of cold and spent most of the morning in bed watching TV. Later I pootled off to the West End shopping mall to buy a mouse and keyboard to go with my laptop.  As it often happens I ended up buying myself a Samsung Galaxy Tab S tablet too. It is very sweet, fits in my pocket and having just started to acqaint myself with it I can already tell that it will be a lot of fun having it. I had to go back to the concert ticket office as I realised that the theatre ticket I bought two days before clashed with a concert.  She was very helpful and changed it to the following week. I also popped along to my favourite cheese shop in a local market. I bought half a kilo this time of my favourite hard goat cheese. And then for the sensation of the day: about 15 minutes after I got home a DHL man rang my doorbell and delivered my new passport.  Yipppeeee!

Leaving the village en route to the forest

Botond and Ancsa hanging on for dear life

A steep descent on a wooded hillside

Posing for a group picture below the stages of the cross

 And then we come to Saturday, when I had to get up at 6am, catch a lift at 7.15am and then go on a 12.5km hike with friends on an overcast, pretty cold day when the sun wouldn't show itself, whatever we did. At the end my knees were in agony, and not just me, some of our party was hobbling just as much as I was.

Within the stages of the cross

The plan was that we first go to the Eagle's Top and then come back down to Buják to see the stages of the cross there. Needless to say that we got involved with a very steep ravine, wasted a lot of time and then ran out of daylight to get up the mountain as far as where the lookout tower was. We did, however have a fun hike, even I saw some glorious bits of the forest I have never been to. We discovered a spring with a little building next to it and that was pretty close to Virágos. After a short pálinka stop at Virágos we got home by 3pm.

After a quick rest we were all off to the Sandos Restaurant, which was pretty good again. The food was quite quickly prepared, due to my efficient organisation of sending in our orders in advance.  Unfortunately there was only 9 of us at dinner and 11 of us on the hike.  The numbers were originally higher, but the current flu epidemic and a few family commitments put paid to many people's plans for the weekend.

Lewis winning his second F1 world championship title

And finally on the Sunday we watched the final, double points decider in the 2014 F1 season.  And what an event that was. First fantastic joy for both of us happened in the first few seconds of the race when Lewis Hamilton sped past Nico Rosberg to get into the lead, a lead he never relinquished for the rest of the race, other than being second or third when those ahead had less pit stops than him. About half way through the race Rosberg discovered that he lost ERS which made him really slow and finally quite a lot of electric problems, but he still finished the race. This took out the main opposition, but Massa's Williams was also after Lewis in the final stages, as he also suffered from a slow down, plus he nursed his engine, fearing a Rosberg style failure, which thankfully never happened. At the end Lewis held his lead and poor old Rosberg finished out of the points.  This way (and due to the double points) Lewis won by nearly 70 points. A well deserved victory for him in 2014.  He had just as many (if not more) mechanical failures as Rosberg, 11 wins, but less poles than his rival. 

Lewis doing doughnuts to celebrate his win

A couple of hours after the Grand Prix we came back into town, where we have quite a few jobs to do before we depart for Hassocks on Thursday.