mm mmmm Fish Milk

Remember all that fish soup that I was writing about earlier?? Well the other day a Rotarian invited us over to his house for homemade fish soup and red wine (an absolute must when eating fish soup) and as we were chomping down on our fish soup we start talking about what goes in this soup. He says something in hungarian that we dont quite understand so he says in english "fish milk". We just look at each other trying to figure out what this milk could be. Him, realizing that we dont know what it is trys to clarify by adding "you can only get it from male fish". mmm mmmmm. Pass the soup please!



Just before easter was here my Hungarian teacher starts telling us that the traditions celebrated here might be a little bit different from what we are used to at home. This is how my easter played out:

I wake up in the morning and go down for some "traditional" easter breakfast-ham, deviled eggs, and sweet easter bread. Then after an hour or two the door bell rings and my host mum tells me to go out and answer it. So Im up at the big gate in the front of my house letting these "guests" in. They are the same Rotarian who introduced me to the idea of "fish milk" and his grandson and the two boy exchange students who live in Szeged. As soon as they are threw the gate they surround me each armed with spray bottles of carbonated water. All at once they start spraying me! By the end of it I was completly soaked and had to dry off before going inside. THEN! THEN! As custom commands, I invited them in to eat and drink desserts, snacks and palinka prepared by my host mum. Then they sprayed me with perfume and recited poems to me. Random you say?? A little bit.

I guess the tradition is a very old one, but back in the "good old days" the boys would go to the girls houses eeeeaaaaarly in the morning (around 6) with a bucket of icy cold water from the well. Then after being COMPLETLY SOAKED the girl invites (Im still having trouble with this concept) him in for snacks and alcohol. After the sprinkling of perfume and poems, the girl gives the boy an egg dyed red. Sure makes our traditions looks lame.



On thursday all of us exchange students booted it up to Miskolc (the third biggest city in Hungary, east and north of Budapest) to give a presentation to school kids about our native countries and how our exchange has been so far. It was easily the best rotary weekend yet. The first night we were there we went to these hot-spring-like thermal-baths-kind of thing. Most of the walls and ceilings were made out of natural caves and inside there were all of these different pools with different water temperatures and different depths and jets. The majority of the pools are connected by little hallways of water! So you dont have to get out of the water to go to the different pools! There was also quite a few big pools outside and that was nice since we were there from 9-12 at night so we pretended to be all romantic and stare at the stars. The next night we went to the mayors sons latin dance club where we were taught to samba and salsa and everything else latin. It was alot of fun!



So finally after living in Hungary for over eight months I went to Budapest and did a touristy-sightseeing-weekend. Although the only museum we went to was the House of Terror. It is said to be the best museum in all of Hungary, and I was sure impressed.

The building in which the House of Terror is located was in 1944 nicknamed "The House of Loyalty". It was then the Headquarters to the Hungarian Nazis. A year later it became the host to the ÃVO and later the ÃVH, who were the secret police of the communist terror organization. It remained so until 1956. It is a musuem that has earned its name well.

In the basement there are cells that were used to house political prisoners. One so small that a man standing up wouldnt even have enough room to turn around in. Another that constantly had 5 cm of still water in the bottom. It is a place that I constantly had chills in.



The same Rotarian who made fish soup for us invited all of us Szeged exchange students to his summer home on Balaton with his family. Balaton is the biggest lake in Central Europe and basically one big playground. The cabin that we stayed at was just outside of the city of Siófok, one of the biggest cities around the Balaton.

Most of the time it seemed like this Rotarian made it his personal duty to make sure that we did not miss out on a single opportunity while we were there. After one night of fishing off of their back deck into the lake, (where we helped by carrying the fish from the net to the bucket), we were told to go outside to the table in the yard. There we found lots of buckets of fish (about 30) and some knives. I am now professional at scaling and gutting fish. I dont know if he just wanted for us to have experience with this sort of thing....ooorrrrr if he just didnt want to do it. Either way, a new skill learned.



Aaaannnnddd once again adding to the list of things I learned in Hungary: WAKEBOARDING!

About 20km out of Szeged in the great little town of Hódmezővásárhely there is a man made wakeboarding lake with a cable (not pulled behind a boat, they had a rigamafair hooked up in the air with a long rope attached that pulled us along) and a whole little world of hungarians who basically live at this place. So after I rented a wet suit (still a wee chilly in the water) and a board I quickly found out that wakeboarding isnt something that you pick up in an afternoon. At least not for me. But all of the people there were so nice and when I kept falling they just kept letting me go in front of them and giving me ten million different tips. It was so much fun and Im definatly going again.!

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