National Gallop

Where are all these tourists heading?

Are they making a home visit to my Hungarian ancestors...


because they smell their great cooking?





This is what we tried out--nagyon finom!

This horse shaped cake should give a clue since Hungarians are famous as master horsemen.

It's the National Gallop--this biggest horse event of the year in Hungary. It lasts 5 days and is held on the streets of Budapest near Heroes Square--What better place to celebrate your heritage. We missed it last year so as soon as we heard about it this year we headed off to catch at least one day.

Here are some of Mom's favorite events.



She was sure you'd want to see each of these video clips. Be sure to click on the size expander on the bottom right corner so you can see the footwork in full screen.




Here's one for the men in the family. No wonder everyone feared the Hungarians.

Does Mom look happy on our way home on the train?

Branch youth activity

Once a quarter we do something challenging with the youth of the branch. Here in the front row we have the primary and the young men and women ready for a zip lining and obstacle course adventure high in the treetops at Lövér Kalandpark (Löver Adventurepark). Their zip line safety instructor and their leaders are standing in the back.

It looks like Julia was caught by wild game hunters.

Veronica is doing great balancing on the poles.

Feco (Fatso) seems to be in a hurry.

Is Kiki training to be a pirate and sail the seven seas?

Laci (Latsi) looks relieved that he made it to the platform.

Ferika seems to be doing well on the double high wire.

Bianka made it safely to the end...

as did Balazs.

Can you tell that they had a great time and went through every challenge course several times? We could barely get them to stop for lunch.

Quiet on the set!

One evening this week, we went to visit some members but couldn't go down the street because an Austrian film company was using one of our picturesque streets as a movie set.

Grape harvest time!

Sopron is surrounded by vineyards and now is the harvest season, as you can see by this wagonload.

Which side is yours?

In Hungary, two different families may own the two sides of a house and the paint and decorate the way they please. Can you tell which family has more money and more decorating sense?

Scenic Route 1

Usually we walk or take the bus everywhere. But sometimes, the people we want to visit are easier to get to by car. On the way home, whenever we see signs such as this directing us to nearby sights, the scenic route beckons. In this case one arrow points to Taródi Vár. "Vár" means "castle" so off we go.

After wandering up the hill through a neighborhood of huge mansions we came across this.

It's not the castle. Just a "health spa hotel" with $280 a night rooms for foreign tourists. But if you turn around and look through the trees, this is what you see--a tower of Taródi Castle.

This castle was built by a man starting in 1950. Here is the front entrance.

Here's a look from the side.

There is supposed to be an observation tower nearby so you can see it from the air. We couldn't find the right path, so this picture posted by the parking lot will have to do.

He never finished it before he died and the family didn't want to live in it. They preferred the plusher modern life of their neighbors. It is slowly collapsing into ruin. A family member charges $2 for self guided tours of the rooms filled with antiques.

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.

Without purse or script?

How many suitcases does a missionary need for his white shirts and ties and several changes of underwear? Apparently at least 3 HUGE HEAVY ones. We know since every six weeks they have transfers and we take them and their suitcases to the train. I thought missionaries were supposed to travel without purse or script. I guess these aren't purses so they are OK. Here Elder Beaumond is taking Elder Wright to Budapest...

and coming back with Elder Abram.

Now, in my day, we were only allowed 1 suitcase with less than 44 pounds. Now we travel with just a backpack and a small carry-on. We've got to retrain the younger generation!

Sopron's new musical fountain

Sopron is slowly but surely fancying things up for the tourists. They've just added this dancing fountain in front of the Petöfi Theater on top of the new underground parking garage. Enjoy the concert.

Nutella?

Here I am on a hot day sitting by the fan eating my Nutella on bread--that's a mixture of ground hazelnuts and chocolate that is very popular in Europe.

In Florida we see hazelnuts once and a while in mixed nuts at Christmas time but they are so rare you would think they are some sort of exotic nut. Next to our house in Sopron is a tree full of them. We discovered the tree when Caroly stepped on some hazelnuts on one of our walks. Here she is showing off a few we found on the ground and the sea-urchin-like pod they grow in. Click on the picture to take a closer look. If you look carefully in the leaves, you can see the pods in the tree. When the nut is ready, the pod opens up and the nut falls out.

YSA Service

Before the university starts, we are trying out some things so we can have a well rounded Young Single Adult program here. On the 4th Tuesday we have a service project. This month we visited 89 year old Gizi, our chorister in sacrament meeting, who fell out of the bus this last week while holding her dog and a bag of groceries. (The bus started out before she was off so she says she flew like a bird.) Luckily she is spry and in good health so just got banged up a bit.

For the service project we took a blooming plant and a watermelon, cantaloup, and grape mixture and had a sing-a-long. We almost forgot to take a picture. You can see we had a great time.

Picnic 2011

You might remember our trip to see the Austrian border near our house last fall where we got to see pictures of the former iron curtain and the armed border guards on horses. This is the first place we take visitors, so Deb, Eric, and Kim should recognize the place.

We even showed you a picture of the invitation that Hungarians passed out to thousands of vacationing East Germans at Lake Balaton in August 1989 inviting them to come to the border at Sopron for a special picnic on August 19 to get a souvenir piece of the iron curtain. Here they burst through the border gate and fled into Austria, an action that resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall a couple of months later.

Here's a reconstructed stretch of the iron curtain at the border.The bike path in the background used to be the "no man's land," the last stretch you had to cross to get to Austria without getting shot.

Sopron celebrates this event every year with its own family picnic on the site. You can see children climbing on the monument to freedom.

Here they are enjoying an old fashioned basket ride.

The puppet show was about picking up trash.

Hey, isn't that the missionaries? Is that their new mission car?

No, its a fancied up Trabant, one of the East German cars that were abandoned by the hundreds by fleeing East Germans. Now they are a collectors item. Here is a shot for Dondavid of the Trabant engine, about the same size as a lawn mower engine. It doesn't even fill a third of the engine compartment.