Concerts, caching and a funeral

The first two days back in town were spent resting after my little funny turn over the weekend.  On Wednesday we went to visit Ros to see her new kitchen. It is really lovely.  Those two have such style, anything they buy is put together with such good taste and artistic good sense. Unfortunately their oven makes a horrible noise, which I promised to investigate for them.

Iván Fischer, principal conductor of the BFO

In the early evening Jutka came up for a chat and to pick up the bag of apples we brought in for her.  I also had to pay for my entry fees to the events I couldn't attend and for the theatre tickets she picked up for me while we were in the village. In the meantime I found out that there is going to be a music marathon again in the Palace of the Arts, this time the composers being Mendelssohn and Schumann. I managed to get onto the website 4 minutes after the tickets went on sale and there were already large patches of the auditorium marked in bright red. However, I still managed to get 4 tickets to 4 out of the 8 performances, where the tickets for the 4th oncert were free.  Great value and great musicians, like Baráti Kristóf amongst the performers.  The last concert is that of Midsummer Night's Dream by Mendelssohn, with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, directed by Iván Fischer, so it should be a good day.

On Wednesday, when Ros cried off our intended visit to the Jelen for lunch, we suddenly decided to go to the nearby Indian restaurant instead. That was a good choice, as we had a really good meal, again. I started with my usual mango lassi, followed by a large garlic nan and a mild veg curry. Roy had beer and a lamb curry and we shared one portion of boiled rice. Simple, but well cooked!

On Thursday I went geocaching with Gizi to an area just outside town that I suspected having old and neglected caches.  I was right, but we still had a good time. It was really annoying that after several bright sunny days, Thursday morning dawned very misty and overcast.  Thankfully it didn't rain, but visibility hardly improved all day, although the sun came out later. The first cache was by a seriously overgrown lake, which we couldn't see in the murk and which tore my coat to bits on approach. Gizi was so worried about me, that she followed, just in case I collapsed in the jungle.

The bridge we didn't take

This was followed by another jungle approach to the next 2 parter, which also included several stream crossings. We were making our way to an abandoned old railway embankment through wilderness. We first went to the second part and without having to cross the stream. Then at the first part I made a crossing from fallen tree trunks, so we didn't get our feet wet.  Later I realised that I was really silly not crossing on the bridge, which in this case was still intact.

The home made stream crossing

The third one led us to a nice old chateau which currently operates as a children's home with its second part being near an old observatory which looked so ruinous that we felt it could fall down any minute. My clothing suffered a few more bits of damage in the thick forest round the cache which was full of water and completely neglected and unmaintained. My feelings about today's caches were proving to have beenspot on.

The observatory on the verge of collapse

However, the next one rescued the day somewhat as it was just at the back of one of the most magnificent avenue of plane trees I have ever seen in my life. It was dead easy to find the cache and we took lots of lovely photos of the trees.

The next was also a multi with 3 parts.  The first two (a lovey old and very large church and the grave of a fallen firefighter in the nearby cemetery) were in the middle of a village and easy to find.  The third part was a few miles outside the village, in the trunk of a tree by an old thatched cottage where some writer spent his childhood.  I have never heard of him, but I'll look him up on Google when I get a minute.

The magnificent avenue of planes

Next we had a slight hiccup with the directions, as a brand new railway line obliterated (or so we thought) a sideroad that my TomTom suggested we drive down on. So we had to go round and only found out that the road was there, just you had to turn away from it and then cross under the railway  in a tunnel.  Thankfully we found this route quite by accident on the way back and avoided doing the detour twice. The cache was by an old watermill, which was quite nice and the rough earth road was in very good nick, so this became a drive-in cache.  We did make an attempt at another one, but we couldn't really find it and as the light was going, we gave up.  The only other one that we did get was one in the area that I have already got, but by the setting sun and approaching darkness Gizi managed to find it just in time by the road near a nice old inn and lake.It was a very good day, even though the light went too quickly, but that is only to be expected in November. I got 6 and Gizi got 7 caches for the day, which is not bad considering the short daylight hours now.

Another avenue, this time of hazelnuts with Gizi

In the evening I had a fantastic concert where one of my most favourite chellists, Miklós Perényi played 3 Bach chello suites superbly, as usual.  The second half of this concert was on Saturday, when he played the other 3, much to the delight of an extatic audience.  He gave us two encores on both occasions and we went home very happy.

The old, large classicistic church

On Friday we attended the funeral of Árpád Göncz, who was the first President of Hungary after the fall of communism, and who was probaby the only post 1990 politician who brought credit to the term "politician", rather than shame, as most, if not all, of them do nowadays. It was very moving, as the family insisted on it being a private funeral and interestingly the most radical speech was made by his grandson. We queued for an hour to place the rose, that we brought, on his grave, by which time it got dark. I am glad I was there, he was probably the only prominent person since 1990 whom I respected.

Árpád Göncz's casket

As we were quite close to one of my own caches which was reportedly having a broken lid, we drove there, replaced the lid and put a few more gifts inside.  All this was done in pitch darkness, but I could just about see by the headlights of the car.

And now we are off to the village tomorrow.  I hope everything is OK there. We hope to stay at least a week, or possibly longer.