A week in town

Monday was spent watching TV, fetching my medicines, getting some theatre tickets and starting the re-moderation process for one of my own geocaches which became broken, possibly vandalised and in need of a revamp. In the evening I went to the theatre with Jutka, to see part 1 of Székely Csaba's Transylvanian trilogy, Bányavirág. That translates to Mineflower. It's set in a poor, deprived area of closed mines and often closed minds too. It was put on in the Cellar Theatre which was new to me  and it really was down a cellar. I liked it and look forward to parts 2 and 3, which we will see later on this week.

Mineflower

Tuesday was the day I went to see Son of Saul, which turned out to be a very powerful film, but which didn't seem to really go anywhere.  Perhaps that is also a message from Nemes Jeles László, that tragedy doesn't always come with a message, it just happens.  Inevitably, like in Auschwitz.

The dummy birdbox to hide the cache in

On Wednesday the moderation went through with flying colours and we caught the train to Piliscsaba to place the two new caches, as I changed it to a multi cache with two new parts. The trip on the brand new line was quite fun, taking about an hour. The first part of the cache was by the Nagybaczoni villa, the other roughly at the same place where it has always been (only about 7.5m adrift), but in a new, phoney bird box 6 foot high up.  Nobody has so far found it, but I hope it'll be successful and while now it is harder to find, it should also be safer.

The Nagybaczoni villa

The best and most fantastic event of that day (and possibly the entire week) was that as we were heading towards the place where I was planning to put part 1, a very nice looking lady came along the street towards us with some post in her hand. I asked her if she knew for sure where the Nagybaczoni villa was and with a bright smile she just told us to follow her. She turned out to be one of the grandchildren of Nagybaczoni Nagy Vilmos, and she invited us in, showed us around the villa and we stayed with her for about an hour. With all the effort I put in 18 months ago, when I first placed the cache, trying to find any friendly, co-operating descendants of the great man or at least anyone with any information about the villa, and found nothing. Now, just in the last possible minute we ran into Hajnalka, who is absolutely delightful, full of real insider's stories from her childhood with her grandfather and the rest of the family.

Portrait of Zelma Nagybaczoni in oils

She invited us to visit them in the summer, when they live out there in the villa and the garden is lovely. I hope that will happen, as I would love to meet all of them.

Thursday I went to the Urania cinema to watch Judy Dench and Kenneth Branagh in A Winter's Tale.  It was pretty good, although I have just realised that I have never seen A Winter's Tale before on stage or in the cinema. While there, I bought myself a ticket for Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch, which will be on on the 20th, so we will have to come back to town a bit earlier than planned prior to the trip to Hassocks on the 23rd.

Judy Dench and Kenneth Branagh

Friday had a full program with a book launch/conference in the afternoon and then a clash of Falstaff at the Opera with a concert at the Music Academy in the evening.  I gave the Opera tickets to Ros and Ian and went to Dénes Várjon's concert, which was superb.  As it happens, Ros and Ian had a fantastic time too, partly because the production was excellent, but also because they had an offer of swapping their seats up in the gods with the front stalls. The Opera management do this sometimes, when having failed to sell those expensive tickets they want to fill them to avoid embarrassment vis a vis the guest singers who see nothing but empty seats in front of them. I asked if Nata and Colin turned up, but as they were worried about Colin's health being endangered by being up at ceiling level, passed their tickets to some friends from the Brit Club, who then followed Ros and Ian to the front stalls. That called for a quiet giggle from me, wicked old woman I am.

Excellent cover for the book

Earlier in the day I attended the book launch, presenting the history of Hungarian Orienteering part 1. Most of the book was about Henrik Ripszám, who introduced the sport to Hungary in the 1920's and who then departed to England where he married a rich heiress and lived happily ever after until his death in 1976. Roy and I did most of the research for his life in England and the conference itself was really enjoyable. I had a copy of the book, which turned out really nice, with lots of interesting facts about the early days of Hungarian orienteering.

On Saturday I thought it was time to pick up correspondence with a guy who is organising an exhibition of pictures by 15 Hungarian artists in Harrogate in 2018. Henrik Ripszám is one of them and he is coming to visit Hungary in April, so we should be able to meet up with him. Hopefully, he had more luck in tracking down some of Henrik's art work, as we had very little success in that department.

Roy and I agreed the dates of our visit to Toronto and St. Catharines in September/October and now I have to buy the tickets, assuming they are available. Alex reckons that they might drop in price later, but I am not sure, so I think I will buy them this week.

Kelemen Barnabás, Kokas Judit and Fenyő László

And now we come to the highlight of the week.  On Sunday there was the Mendelssohn/Schumann Marathon in the Palace of the Arts and stupendous it was too. I bought 4 tickets for 4 of the 11 concerts, mostly going by not what was on, but on who was playing.  I love both composers, so I didn't care about the pieces, but I definitely did about the artists. We started with Kristóf in the morning, followed by Kelemen, Kokas, Fenyő, then in the later afternoon we had Dénes Várjon and his wife playing superb piano, mostly from Mendelssohn.  The last concert was the real culmination of the whole day, with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, conducted by Iván Fischer playing The Midsummer Night's Dream with singers and players and with lots of fun and games and superb musical artistry, as always. I was trying to get rid of the 4th ticket, that was not needed, and didn't manage it in the first two concerts, but did in the third and then I bought 3 extra tickets for Ian, Ros and me for the 4th one, and thus freeing up another ticket to go with the superfluous 4th one, which was bought by Rabies and his missus, who seemed a very nice lady. Ros and Ian brought Roy's suet, but the pummice stone is still in the post. They had a fantastic time both at the Opera and in the Palace of the Arts, so this was a really superb artistic weekend for them.

Várjon Dénes és Simon Izabella

And finally we came back down to the village today after a mammoth Tesco shop where we not only bought food, but yet another jumper for Roy as well as a few T-shirts for the grandchildren. The weather is quite mild, but today there was brilliant sunshine in the morning and early afternoon.  If it stays mild and sunny, we might go caching one day this week.  On Thursday I will be back in town for a couple of nights of heavy social drama, parts 2 and 3 of the Transylvanian trilogy, part 1 of which we saw on Monday.

The best thing, however, was the phonecall I got from a neighbour when she noticed that we were back. She had a little parcel delivered to her in our absence and I went to fetch it.  It was my new (old) Flip camera which only took about a week to arrive from Canada. This is a long story, but the short version is that ever since October 2014, when we were robbed, I had no Flip camera.  I loved it and missed it probably the most of the things that were stolen. Unfortunately they don't make them any more and the few I have seen advertised on Amazon or Ebay were far too expensive, even though some were second hand.  Last summer somebody mentioned Kijiji in Ottawa, which is a bit like Ebay, but friendlier. Roy recently helped somebody in Ottawa searching her family history and the lady was so grateful that she was anxious to return the compliment.  I mentioned Kijiji and Flip - the end result being that now I have one again. I am very pleased and in a few weeks, when we are staying with the little monsters in Hassocks, I will certainly try it out.

My old Flip camera was black, the new one is white with a picture

Must go now to check on the stove, followed by getting everything done on the computer as we are having two days without electricity, starting tomorrow.  Why can't they do maintenance without turning the damn thing off, that's what I want to know!!