Bombs in Budapest

Nobby took the day off on Friday so we pootled off to town for a bit of culture – Bodies The Exhibition . The children were horrified that we wanted to go look at preserved human bodies with their insides exposed (“Were there any eyeballs? Did you see a brain?” “Yes we did.” “Eeuuurgh!!”) Don’t get me wrong, it was all very educational and took me right back to my Biology A Level studies, but I couldn’t get over the feeling that the exposed femur on the skinless chap with the football bore more than a fleeting resemblance to the thing I gave Tiggy to chew on before we left.

Anyway, on the journey into town we passed a line of police cars outside a building site which had been cordoned off. ‘Ooh, it must be a body!’ we decided; clearly our modern diet of CSI and Waking The Dead makes us bypass more benign explanations such as a protest against the construction, or a gas leak and leads us straight to murder and mayhem. But I did wonder why the army had just turned up as well... On our way home we were heading past the same building site, only to be re-directed to a safe distance because they had since blocked all the neighbouring roads and created a traffic jam to rival France’s finest. We were very nearly late for the school family assembly where Pickle put in a memorable performance of ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ along with the rest of his class.

As it turns out the bulldozers at the site had uncovered an unexploded World War II bomb. Not quite the murder mystery we had imagined, which wasn’t so bad as we were rather over dead bodies after the exhibition (the parma ham pizza was not the best lunch choice in hindsight) but still pretty exciting. Nobby called the office which is located within the ‘blast radius’ (we watch ‘24’ as well, see how easily the terminology comes?) to find out that had he been at work he would have been on stand-by for evacuation! We shared the gossip with the other expat parents at the school who were very excited too. But the Hungarian Mums were somewhat blasé about it, apparently unexploded bombs turn up on construction sites fairly routinely here given the bombardment during the war. I guess we sometimes forget where we are now.

Well, I notice it has been about a month since I last Blogged, how does the time pass so quickly? I have a couple of valid excuses for my slackness. One being that I had to turn the study into a bedroom for a week while my sister and parents were here and I didn’t think my Sis would want to find me tapping away into the small hours while she was trying to get some sleep. Another excuse is the weekend I just lost to a migraine that completely floored me from Thursday night to Sunday morning. Big thanks to Nobby and K for rescuing me from the school runs and general childcare while I lay in my darkened room.

It’s been quite hectic recently though, with the half term holidays, a lovely week with my rellies, meeting up with Rose who was also in town staying with her Mum… and a Halloween party for all the kids in both my children’s classes at school. I have to say that throwing a bash for 22 children and a dozen adults wasn’t the nightmare you might imagine, thanks to a tonne of face-paints, a table full of goodies and a cleverly constructed witches cave with spooky music. Oh, and an unseasonably glorious sunny November day really helped – I wonder what the neighbours thought of all the witches and vampires jumping on our trampoline and swinging off the climbing frame all afternoon. I was oddly serene afterwards as I took down the spiders and pumpkins which festooned the house.

That is until I stepped into the post office the following day – now THAT is what I call stress. Let me explain. A Hungarian lady we know sent us a parcel. I wasn’t home when the Postie came so I got a slip in Hungarian which I sussed was something to do with a delivery but couldn’t fathom where I was supposed to go with it. I asked a semi-bi-lingual lady at the Tescos post office, who sent me to another local post office, where I had to resort to calling K to translate over the mobile as even my pals the Berlitz phrasebook and sign-language were falling flat. Eventually we confirmed I need to go to the big sorting office in downtown Budapest, so off I trotted, slip in hand, putting 15 minutes on the parking meter as this shouldn’t be too hard now, and after all we’re not in France any more, right? Wrong.

All the signs in the sorting office are illegible to me of course, so I stood in the wrong queue for the first 10 minutes until someone showed me the way. In the new queue the person in front of me handed over a similar looking slip to mine, the man went in back for a moment, returned after 30 seconds with a parcel, gave it to the person and it was my turn. I handed over my slip, the man went in back, returned with a parcel about 5 minutes later, put it on the floor next to him, tapped on the computer for a bit then started to talk to me in Hungarian, shaking his head ominously.

The only phrase I know in Hungarian is ‘I don’t speak Hungarian’. Luckily a nice old man in the queue behind me spoke English and stepped in to give me a hand. And then he started to have an argument with the post-chappie while I stood there staring longingly at my long-awaited parcel. It turned out that although my parcel was *physically* still at the sorting office, it had *officially* already been returned to the sender because they only keep them for 10 days and I had shown up on day 10. Some official notification had already been sent to someone that it was going back so I wasn’t allowed to have it, even though it was right there in front of me! The old chap was getting very cross on my behalf because it seemed they were all for telling me to go away empty handed and letting them return it, even when I had him explain that the sender had moved away from Budapest 2 days after posting the parcel so it was going to come straight back to the sorting office when she didn’t answer the door. At this they decided it would be ok if the sender could telephone the sorting office to confirm that I could have the parcel. ?? Isn’t that what she was doing by mailing it to me in the first place? Argh!!

Anyway, I am risk of ranting here and I had been so enjoying leaving the French bureaucracy behind. I don’t know how it followed me. Since that incident, which was indeed resolved by a phone call from the sender when I eventually tracked her down in Dublin, although in theory I could have had anyone make the call, how on earth did the post office know it was her who sent it? I have entered a twilight zone of triplicate forms, successive help-desk visiting and standing in line like I’m at back at Disney but without the thrill-ride at the end of it, and this was just to return a £1.50 battery. So I have a feeling there is more yet to come.