Moving South in Hungary

Saturday, July 26, 2014—Budapest to Pecs

Things were a bit confusing today.  I was working from memory thinking that our train was leaving at 9:23, so we set the alarm for 7:00, got ready, removed the bedding from our beds and stacked it on top of the washer, made sandwiches for our trip, and left the Hello Leo apartment.  When we got to the station, there was no train listed for that time.  Then I recalled that 9:23 had been the time that I found that we could leave our nearby station for the trip to the departure station where our train to Pecs was not really leaving until 9:59.  We could have slept another 30 to 45 minutes!!

Another confusing aspect of the morning was that Leo, the owner of the apartment had told us he would be going out with friends in the evening and probably would not be able to meet us before we departed this morning.  I had suggested that we just lock the front door and the door burglar gate and drop the keys through the mail slot I had noticed beside the door.  (I've done that in other places before.)  But this morning, I discovered that the mail slot was sealed shut!  In a quick decision, we reopened the door, locked the gate without locking the door, threw the keys inside through the gate, and closed the door (by reaching through the gate) and pulling it shut without locking it.  Hope Leo wasn't upset when he found it that way, but there didn't seem to be any other solution at the time.

The train trip was a HOT one.  The air conditioning wasn't working properly.  Everyone was suffocating.  Not until about two hours into the trip did the conductor come through opening the windows.  The breeze created by that made all the difference in the world, especially since the train had fallen behind schedule by about 20 minutes.

We discovered upon our arrival in Pecs that it would be an uphill walk to the Green Garden Apartment we had reserved.  (The photos at the website are of the actual apartment we are occupying, including a cream-colored rose from the garden on the coffee table.)  It was a hot, sunny day, so it wasn't a comfortable walk.  We made it in about 35 minutes, though.  The apartment is bigger and nicer than the one in Budapest, and it is just on the edge of the old city--a block outside of the remaining parts of the walls.

We got glimpses of this beautiful, old city of Pecs as walked through it coming to the apartment.  Pecs has been around for hundreds of years.  It was the northernmost city in Europe to be occupied by the Ottoman Empire.  In fact, in the center of town is a church that was originally built to be a mosque, and it has the unusual name of Mosque Church--a reversal of what happened in Istanbul with churches that got turned into mosques!  Pecs is also the home of the first university in Hungary which was founded in the 1400s and is a "bit" older than Harvard and other older universities in the US!

We went to the bus station to try to buy our tickets in advance for our trip on Monday to our next destination.  As we understood it, we must wait and buy the ticket from the bus driver that day.  We asked our landlord, whose English is very limited, and we got the same impression from him.  I just hope the bus won't be full and that we will be able to get seats on it.

From there, we explored town further.  There are medieval buildings here including some used by the university.  We stopped at a supermarket to buy some things for the refrigerator.  Then we returned to the apartment.  The landlord just passed us a plate of fresh peaches from his garden through the window, so we are about to eat them.  Then we will go to the table in the garden to sit and drink a bottle of wine we bought at the supermarket.