An insanely busy fortnight

I think I left the last post off at having been to Arpi and Bozsa's house on the Saturday.  That really was a very nice day. On Sunday I went to the theatre with Jutka, this time to a modern take on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. I enjoyed it, as the words were Shakespeare's with slight alterations at times, but always adding humour.

The wrought iron staircase rail in the clinic

Tuesday was Roy's checkup which took about 4 hours, during which they tested, examined, investigated and prodded him with kindness and efficiency.  The place was situated in an old posh villa and it really felt like a sanatorium with soft voices, permanent politeness and know how.  We have not yet seen the final results in writing, but the upshot was (thank goodness!!) that for his age he is great, although needs to lose weight and exercise more. What's new? Perhaps now that somebody else told him, he might do something about it. Since then his lab results came through attached to an e-mail and those are also pretty good for someone approaching 75. In a page and half there were only three results that were slightly off target.  His uric acid was a bit high (I knew that from his gout attacks), his good cholesterol was just slightly under the required level and another long code, which apparently has something with kidney function, was also a bit low.  Hopefully we will go and see the doctor, once the results are in writing, to interpret and explain it all and hopefully suggest treatments, medicines and/or activities to remedy anything that we might worry about.

Roy busy mowing

After all this we decided that we must pop down to the village to mow the grass and pick up our post. We chose to go by bus and as we caught the early one, we were there by 8.45am. We both worked on the garden: Roy using the tractor to mow the largest bit, I was using the push/pull petrol mower to do those bits that the tractor doesn't get to plus did a bit of weeding.  We watered everything in the evening and Roy even did a bit of strimming on the edges to finish it all off.  We went straight back to town the following morning on the 9.05am bus.

That evening I was due at a Kristóf Baráti concert where he was playing Mozart with the Mozarteum Orchestra from Salzburg, and it was absolutely heavenly. I was sitting in the last row of the gallery on the right which provided me with perfect view of Kristóf and the delightful conductor, who was also brilliant. All for the princely figure of £5.

Lunchtime on top of a big rockface

Saturday was the day of the Judi hike, which is walked every year on this Saturday in memory of the sister of a good friend near the anniversary of her death. Andor, her brother, planned the hike and in the 12km of pootle in gorgeous weather (the weather forecast was awful, but obviously wrong!!!) we went past glorious views and had good chats with friends we have not seen for a year.  The dinner of green bean soup and cottage cheese pasta went down very well indeed.  As we both used public transport we could drink as much as we felt like.

The weather turned awful on the Sunday (the forecast was obviously right, just with the wrong timescale!), so neither Ian nor I wanted to go to the Hash.  So we decided to have dinner together instead.  We took him to the Kiskakukk, which is a bit on the dear side, but that didn't bother any of us there. We went back to his place afterwards for coffee and had a good chat.

Grigory Sokolov

Monday was mostly spent packing and preparing the list of caches to get during our trip to Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county starting on Tuesday. But before that I went to a concert given by Grigory Sokolov, who was not only breathtakingly brilliant, but gave us 7 encores!!

Robi, Zsuzsi and Roy - my partners in crime

And then we left to slowly pootle down to Nyíregyháza, where we were staying in a small hotel for 4 days. Zsuzsi and Robi were to join us, but they were going to commute daily from Robi's mum's place about an hour's drive away.

The general idea of this trip was to go and see as many as we could manage of the dozens of medieaval painted churches which have been renovated recently with EU money.  These little churches were absolutely amazing. Practically none of them had towers, as after the ban was taken off Calvinists building churches, they still forbade them to build them with towers.  Later on, they all built belfries made of wood right next to the churches, but not being integral to the church building, as that was allowed.

The particularly picturesque church in Csaroda

The most attractive feature of these churches was the painting of the furniture, the pews, the galleries, the pulpit and especially of the ceiling.  In some cases, when they set about repairing the damage done by the 2001 big flood by the river Tisza, they ended up finding truly medieaval wall frescoes too. In the meantime I was also geocaching, as practically all the nice, interesting and unusual sights that we went to look at, somebody had already placed a cache nearby.

Robi at the door of the church in Csengersima

On Wednesday and Thursday Robi came with Zsuzsi, but he stayed behind on Friday. The first day was exclusively put aside for churches.  I think we went to see about a dozen, although not all were open and some even had the keyholders doing a bunk. Never mind! We took lots of lovely pictures of them on the  outside. On the second day we had not only churches, but mills, horse gins and a couple of museums.  The second museum was in an old synagogue. That was very good indeed and the building itself was almost the biggest attraction.

 The bell tower in Lónya

En route there I managed to collect a moving cache, which I placed near my first find there.  It was moved on almost immediately and then found by lots of other people too. On our last full day, I went and collected the same moving cache from a different part of Nyíregyháza and decided to return with it to Bér when leaving to go home. More about this later!

The Forgách Chateau in Tuzsér

We have seen so many glorious sights that it would take a post of about 10,000 words or more to do them justice.  Interestingly, if I had to one attraction visited in those 3 days, I would have to choose a chateau which had no cache near it. I vaguely remembered reading in one of Travellina's posts that she visited the Forgách Chateau in Tuzsér near the Ukrainian border in the extreme NE of the country and that it was a superb, if somewhat expensive renovation.  It now operates as a 5* hotel with 12 rooms/apartments, costing between £75 and £375 a night. As we arrived in front of a very expensive looking wrought iron gate, the security man told us that we can't even set foot inside the garden and could not take photographs either. We asked very nicely hoping to be let in, when I heard the noise of a car behind me.  It was a large Mercedes tank, out of which a guy stuck his head and asked the guards who we were. He said: Tourists. What do they want? - asked he again.  To go in and take photos from the garden.  That's OK he said, so we went in. I was just about getting my camera out when the security guard's phone went and he was told that he could guide us into the building where a young lady is waiting to show us around.  We were suitably flabbergasted, but found out that the guy in the Merc was the owner of the place and we were allowed in at his express permission.  How nice!!

A dining room in the cellar

Well, the place was. We saw the photos of what it looked like when he bought it. A complete ruin waiting to fall down altogether.  As we saw the most expensive apartment, the function room, the smoking room, then the cellar, then the Wellness Suite, followed by the garden, Roy mentioned that he could see the owner must love the place, or it could not be so perfect. That was the point when we found out that renovating chateaux is only his hobby, his real business is having 3 haulage companies. Aha, I thought, that would explain how he could find the 40% of 700,000,000 forints as the EU only financed 60%. Eventually we worked out that 280 million forints is only a tad over £700,000, which is the price of a not too expensive large(ish) house in the South of England.

The smoking room in the Forgách Chateau

On Friday Robi got frightened of a bit of rain, which finally never happened. Zsuzsi came alone and we did only one church, the rest were chateaux and museums. The museum in Kisvárda was especially interesting.  It was housed in the old synagogue of the town and it was in near perfect condition. The exhibitions inside were also quite lovely.  They showed the trades, craft, art and in general the life of the people in the area in the past. We had a really good time in there and even the cache was easy to get, because the lady at the cash desk took us outside to see the marble plaque on which there were the clues.

On arriving back to the hotel we said good-bye to Zsuzsi, sent our love to Robi and went to have dinner. We had an early night after gathering a few caches to get en route home. The trip back was delightful, the weather good and the three caches easy and interesting.  After some Tesco shopping we got home mid-afternoon.The grass needed cutting again, the garden looked like I never weeded it before and generally there was lots to do.  We also discovered that the Dutch were back, but upon meeting up with them it turned out that they were going home on Tuesday.  We managed to miss them almost completely by being away for this long.

The last of the three caches en route home was near here

I placed the moving cache by the Second World War memorial in the middle of Bér. I have just looked on the internet and somebody already found it at 5pm the same day, but didn't move it.  So it is still there. Today we went to visit my cardiologist, who was satisfied with my progress after a cardiac ultrasound. He wants me to wear a Holter belt for 24 hours, which will happen in about 3 weeks. On our way home I tried to find a cache without success, but I think I would find it now if I tried again, as I followed my route on Google Maps and now I know where I went wrong.  As it has not been found for almost a year, I think I will have a go next time I am in the area.

I have a concert on Thursday, so I will pop in to town just for that and come back on the early bus on Friday morning.  Let us hope Roy can be left alone just for one night without doing anything silly again. :-)