15 June

15 June

The ship got us going only to have to sit on the buses for almost an hour, not a great start to the day.  We left at 9 and headed north to Budapest.  Rest areas/gas stations in Serbia are not designed to have 5 buses pull in at the same time.  So our scheduled 15 minute stops turned into well over a half an hour, with the women commandeering the men's room once the men were finished with it.  We suspect the average age of the group might be 67, so there are a lot of folks who suffer from TWB.  Seniors are also slow getting off the bus, and back on the bus due to mobility issues and just getting them up and going.  Once we all got back on the bus, we headed towards the Serbia Hungary border.  It took over 45 minutes to leave Serbia.  We don't know why Serbia was so particular on scrutinizing our passports when we were leaving the country?  It took about 20 minutes to clear Hungary border control.  Fortunately we weren't headed into Serbia, because there was well over a kilometer of commercial trucks waiting to clear with trucks and buses in the same line.  After the border, we had to make another restroom stop.  Are you getting the picture that our 5 hour bus ride might take a lot longer than advertised?  Once we were all back on the bus, we actually did some traveling and stopped at 1 at a Hungarian farm that raises and trains world famous Hungarian trick horses.  We had a typical Hungarian lunch that included goulash.  After lunch we watched about a half an hour show that demonstrated various skills of the horses and their riders.  It was more a country demonstration than a formal dressage demonstration, that a lot of people expected.  To me it was like a cowboy show with horse tricks.  After the show they offered wagon rides, and of course the seniors wanted to take their wagon rides, since they paid for it.  I passed, because the wagons were kicking up a lot of dust, and I was already sneezing/coughing a lot.  Roger went to see the livestock and I went as far away from the animals and dust as I could get.

We finally got to Budapest around 6pm.  Of course we had to stand in line at the hotel to check in, but it was organized chaos, so things went surprisingly quick.  Note to self-- don't get in way of a senior who is trying to check into their hotel room, they'll whack you with their cane, because they have no spatial perimeter.

Random notes that occurred to me while we were on the bus:

-- In Belgrade, newspapers are printed using both the Cyrillic alphabet and Latin alphabet using both Serbian and Hungarian languages.  

-- Graffiti is international, every where we've been there's been lots of it.  

-- Pharmacies are separate stores from food stores.  All products are behind a glass partition, and I can't read ingredients in Cyrillic to guess what's in the cold drug.

-- The crops we've seen in the Puszta River plain included corn, wheat, sugar beets, carrots, and onions.  If the family house has a yard, there's a garden which has peas and generally a plastic arched "hot house" for tomatoes.  Paprika is  a very common Hungarian spice.

-- Roger got an unsolicited "welcome to Hungary" text on his phone from Vodafone, which he had to pay for.  What a great business trick.

-- In Hungary, if the town has a stork family it is up to the townspeople to take care of the stork's nest when it has migrated to Africa for the winter.  It is considered a privilege to have a stork live in your town.  Townspeople often do winter repairs to the nest if damage occurs from a hard winter.  Storks raise their young from April until September in Hungary.

-- The land between the Danube and Puszta River is really sandy and flat, as a result of being former river basin land.