Thursday, September 1, 2011

Scenic Route 2

When we take the car to visit members on the edge of town beyond where the buses go, we sometimes like to take the scenic route home. In this part of Hungary, the city limit signs are in both in Hungarian and German.

The "Welcome" signs are also in both languages to make the travelers from nearby Austria more likely to come over to spend their money.

This village has lots of horses so we followed a newly paved road back to town to look around.

Suddenly, I noticed that the signs were no longer in Hungarian and German--just German. ("trinkwasser" is German for drinking water)

A block further past the park the explanations for the traffic signs were just in German ("anfang" means "start") The sign on the school in the background says "Volksschule" "Public School" in German.

We turned around to see where we crossed the border. Here I am sitting on the border stone by the new park with the "Trinkwasser" sign. ("M" marks the Hungarian side.) The cobblestone line through the pavement is the only indication that you have crossed into Austria.

If you look in the Hungarian direction (and click on the picture and have knowing eyes), you can see the radio tower by our house on the right, the churches and towers of downtown Sopron on the left, and the apartment houses and churches in between that mark where we had been visiting the members just a few minutes earlier.

The maps mark this field as part of the former "forbidden" territory for Hungarians. The European Union has been paying to reconnect Hungary to the rest of Europe. That's why this 1 mile road connecting the nearby villages of Agfalva in Hungary and Schattendorf in Austria was paved this past summer. In the Sopron area, these new connecting roads are very popular with cyclists.

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