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Published: August 11th 2009
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We boarded the bus for Budapest outside our Eger Hotel at 10am. Here we met Ben (Benson) who would be our tour guide and liaison for the remainder of our stay in Hungary. Ben is about 21 years old and plays professional water polo for a club team in Switzerland in the first division. He was born and raised in Budapest and played for BVSC growing up. He did live for a short while in New York and Florida so he speaks very good English.
The bus ride to Budapest took about an hour less than our original ride to Eger when we flew in on Tuesday so I’m not really sure if our original bus driver knew what he was doing. We got to our hotel, Hotel FTC, at noon. FTC is one of many sports complexes in Budapest that has its own water polo, soccer, handball and other teams. In addition it has its own restaurant which we will be eating at and of course our hotel. The hotel is very modest compared to what we just stayed at in Eger. The rooms are about the size of dorm rooms and contain two single beds a desk, TV
and night stand. But thank god there is also air conditioning.
We had lunch at the hotel at 1pm and then headed into town with Ben. Everywhere we go in Budapest we will be taking public buses, subways or we will be walking… a lot. It is a good experience for the boys to see how other cultures live their everyday lives. After about a twenty minute bus ride where we switched buses a few times, we got off and walked about a mile to a Turbo shop. This was one of the biggest Turbo shops in Hungary and the boys were in heaven. Many of them bought suits, shirts, shorts etc. So if you are wandering where all your money went, we are definitely keeping Turbo in business.
One item of bad news we got early on is that the pool at FTC is down for repair right now so we cannot train there until Monday. Instead the pool we will be using is one of the most famous pools in Hungary and is located on St. Margaret’s Island. It is where the Hungarian National Team practices. And while this doesn’t sound like bad news, it’s just
more of an inconvenience as the island is quite far from our hotel and we will again be riding many different busses or subways and walking to get there.
We got to the pool a little after 4pm which was too early for us to enter so we sat around for a while. At 5 we were allowed to go in and it is quite a complex. The pool we are using is a 50 meter pool with stands on both sides that seat up to 10,000 people. There are several other pools at the complex as well. They told us we would be scrimmaging a team from club UTE and that the players were born in ’94, so fifteen year olds. They thought this would be the proper level of competition for us as I guess this club is the second best in the state at that age level. Unfortunately for both them and us the match was not close at all. They were not up to our level. It was a good confidence boost for the boys after losing in Eger however we didn’t come to Hungary to win. We want to learn from the best and
get our butts kicked a little. We played about six quarters and everyone got to play a lot. I think we won 22-11 or something like that. After the match we convinced Ben to let us play the older age groups on Monday when we come back.
We left the pool just after 7 and headed into town for dinner. Ben took us to a small underground restaurant where we pretty much filled up the place ourselves. In fact they had to bring in extra tables so we could all fit. To entertain us before dinner they had a violinist and xylophone player playing gypsy music. I actually don’t know if it is a xylophone but that’s what I’m going to call it. Dinner was some sort of fried meat and potatoes with chocolate cake for dessert. At dinner we met one of Ben’s friends, Sergey, who is a former teammate of his at BVSC. He is a 6’5” goalie who currently plays professionally in Hungary and will be working with our goalies tomorrow in our clinic.
After dinner we got a bunch of the boys to attempt to play the musical instruments. Dylan, Danny, Adam, Jon and
Chuck all took a stab at it. It was obvious that due to their water polo training schedule they haven’t had the time to keep up on their music lessons. After dinner we headed back to the hotel to go to bed. Tomorrow will be a long day.
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