Eastern Europe and the very best and worse of the British

 Once again, a late blog post. I guess if you intend to make each post cover ‘a week in the life’, and you only get around to writing it every couple of weeks, if you carry on living then you’re gonna carry on getting behind on the old blog writing. Anyway, presuming I can still remember all that way back, I shall continue…

  So the end of April brought about another trip into the unknown. I may have previously mentioned about how shit it was that you make all these new friends from all the world, have an amazing 5 months or so, then most of them bugger off to wherever it is they come from, but I hadn’t realised the one major advantage of them all buggering off – that it gives you an excuse to go and visit them in wherever it is they come from. So this rather long weekend was spent dashing around Eastern Europe to visit Petra in Zagreb and Dora in Budapest. Nice work if you can get it.

  For a reason I can’t remember I thought it was a good idea not to sleep before our 8am flight, presumably thinking I can get forty precious winks in the hour and a half spent in the luxurious hands of EasyJet (this sounds like a joke but it really isn’t – as a frequent Ryanair flyer you really appreciate small mercies such as being able to hear yourself think over the noise of the engines, not being asked every five minutes if I’d like smokeless cigarettes, a cool refreshing glass of J20 or a Ryanair lucky scratch card, and the lack of that fucking fanfare to announce they’ve landed on time again when they always overestimate the flight time by at least half an hour, so that it’s practically impossible to be late without taking a wrong turn towards the Norwegian Fjords. I love Ryanair of course, but you really do get what you pay for).

Well good ice-cream

  Yeah so due to lack of sleep that first day in Zagreb was somewhat of a haze, apart from that our hostel was above a restaurant that did the best (and biggest) pizzas ever for less than four quid, they had this amazing huge fruit and veg market around the size a football field, and that the whole place was slightly run-down but somehow quite romantic for that. We wandered around the nooks and crannies of the city, had one of the best ice-creams of my short-but-ice-cream-filled life, and had a cheeky cocktail in the Lord of the Rings themed pub, before getting a relatively early night in preparation for the big important day ahead of us.

Somewhat confused by the St. George statue

Wedding Preparations

  The big important day was a Friday. Friday the 29^th of April to be precise. Does that date ring a bell for any British readers out there in web land? If not, then shame on you, because I was certainly aware of a certain wedding taking place, and had come well-prepared. Scones and jam already cooled in the fridge overnight, tea in the pot and Union Jacks at the ready, we went into the common room at the hotel to find the TV remote was missing. Luckily Petra’s mother was able to rescue us from catastrophe, and we made it to their flat in time to see the vows being exchanged in Croatian and Petra’s mum on the verge of tears. Clearly the Croatians had taken our dream couple to their hearts too.

Toasting the happy couple

  I was able to convince her to switch from the Croatian channel, and in the absence of BBC on their satellite network (what the hell?), we were forced to go with our dear friends across the pond and our not so dear friend from this side of the pond, Piers Morgan, drivelling on CNN with a couple of blonde airheads about how Kate’s dress was really ‘pushing the boundaries of wedding-day fashion’. Luckily we found German network ZDF later, who remarked that the atmosphere before the balcony kiss was like if England won the world cup, only less drunk people. Not so sure myself – I have a feeling most people in that crowd were pretty pissed, I mean it was mid-afternoon at the start of a four day weekend after all.

  It was all very sweet though, I taught Petra’s mum how to make a proper cup of Yorkshire Tea (surprisingly difficult to explain – she wanted to do it in a saucepan, and explaining the colour and that yes, it does taste good with milk was tricky), she dutifully decorated the room with my Kate and Wills tea towels, everyone ate and loved custard creams, I got unexpectedly emotional when they played Jerusalem, and when we went outside again (after having a conversation with Petra’s dad in very broken English about how Peter Crouch is very tall) I felt that the world had become a slightly better place now that we’d blessed it with our magical fairy tale wedding.

I'm clearly the most excited of the lot here

  Shaking myself out of my bliss, we set about checking out some of Zagreb’s museums. The Museum of Naïve Art was very cool, and almost unique in being one of the few art forms that I could appreciate in some small way. Petra and Chris (I was travelling with Hun-gu and Chris from Iowa) went off on a date to the movies, and Hun-gu and I, as if we were trying to do the complete opposite of their activity, went on a date to the Museum of Broken Relationships.

  It’s a cool idea actually, basically asking people to donate objects that were symbolic of a failed relationship. The objects and stories were nothing if not wide-ranging, from the psychotic (a huge axe, an old love letter glued to a mirror and then smashed to pieces and stored in a jar), to the tragic (a book written in memory of a life cut short, fallen-out hair from a cancer patient), via the perverted (a paper maché model of a big pair of tits that a girl was asked to wear so that her husband would get turned on when they have sex) and the jokers (a picture of President Obama with the sign “relationship length: 2 years – I really wanted it to work out). Most of it was just quite poignant, old unloved teddies, discarded marriage albums and the like, and it’s in London soon on the search for new objects, so if you get your heart broken between now and then, you know where to go.

Traditional food

  We finished up with ordering traditional Croatian food, getting pissed on strong Croatian lager mostly because I was so pleased I could order it in Croatian, and dancing the night away to The Beatles. After that it was on the old East European train to Budapest.

Lovin' Budapest

  I think I came across as a bit of a smart-arse in Budapest, since I’d spent all of 48 hours there at the end of my hitch-hiking trip last year, and had learned to count to ten in Hungarian from Dora. Those of you who know your way around Europe will probably know what to expect from Budapest – one side of the Danube (Pest) full of cafés, tourists, nightlife, and a breathtaking parliament building, and the other side (Buda) full of awesome castles, walls which offer spectacular views of the city, and therefore lots more tourists. The city is also famous for its old roman baths, and we went to the grounds of the most famous, Széchenyi, but not to bathe, rather to a may day fest where we danced to Hungarian folk music, and I made a pathetic attempt to haggle in Hungarian (haggle here is an overstatement, I can only really do the numbers so I just shouted random numbers at the man in the hope I could confuse me to give me it for cheap. It didn’t work) for a Dora the Explorer balloon.

The main purpose of the trip to Budapest was to party, so I guess I should talk about that. We went to many famous bars in the city, but the one that sticks in the mind is Szimpla. The inside is mental, kind of decked out like some sort of dystopian robot land of rubbish, where you can sit back and relax with some Hungarian Pálinka in the back seat of an old Chrysler or sat on a trashed TV set.

   In this bar I had my two worst experiences of the whole trip. The first was a shot called Unicum – very famous in Hungary and originally designed as medicine. After taking the shot I honestly wished I’d been given cod liver oil instead, I’ve never tasted medicine, let alone alcohol, that tasted as bad as that. The second was plain embarrassing – on the way back from the toilet I encountered 4 burley bald-headed men blocking the way through, so I attempted to use ‘bocsi’ (excuse me) to get through, and when they continued to keep their backs turned, I squeezed through them. After a few steps I heard a deep threatening voice call ‘oi you cocky shit, come back ‘ere if you fink you gonna push through us lads like that’. Not only do you have to ask yourself what he thought he was going to achieve by threatening in thickest lad-glish someone who spoke to him in Hungarian, but what makes dickheads like that think it’s alright to cart this boorish shite around Europe. Some might call it ‘aving it, I think it’s just sad.

Luckily I could drown my sorrows with a well tasty Langos  (a deep fried flat bread made of a dough with flour, yeast, salt and water.) from the market for lunch, once I’d weaved through all the English lads already on their third beer. Somehow I’d never been more pissed off to hear English voices. In Germany I’d already got that strange sensation from being surrounded by people who answer German attempts in English, and foreign students who obviously speak English nearly all the time, but here it was really strong.

Perfect Pálinka Glass

Unfortunately the only picture of me and the phone box

To shake that feeling, our last night was spent in an English-themed karaoke bar called Morrison’s (yes, really). Luckily we weren’t dancing in the frozen foods aisle of a modestly priced Bradford-based supermarket, but a really cool place boasting loads of old signs for products you don’t see any more, and a full-sized red telephone box, which you don’t really see any more either. My triumphant rendition of We Like To Party by Vengaboys was one thing, but eating a Pálinka soaked apricot and singing along to all four tracks of Follow The Signs by Room To Move (the greatest thing to come out of Cononley since Yorkshire Dales Ice Cream) on the way to the bar with Hun-gu was really something else!

  Once back in Dortmund I had just under 48 hours to prepare for the next onslaught that was my family coming to stay, but there was still time for a Belgian beers and Scrabble evening with Hugo from Liege. On the day, I spoke to him and he assured me everything was in place except for one thing – celery salt. I was somewhat confused to say the least, but after what felt like hours searching for this magic ingredient, we unearthed some and the evening was saved. The beers were awesome (Leffe and Delerium are especially worth a try), and it turns out so awesome that they can only be truly enjoyed with cheese cubes sprinkled with a generous amount of celery salt. Those crazy Belgians. German Scrabble was a bit of a failure though, there are far too few words and far too many that end in EN or contain SCHT or some other lovely combination of consonants for it to work, and even the German amongst us gave up on it.

So Eastern Europe started with joy in my heart for the magic and romance of a royal wedding, and ended with it being completely crushed by a few rowdy lager louts. Sums up the regular let-downs that come with being British quite nicely I think


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