Relaxing Day in Kestheli

Tuesday, July 29, 2014--Kestheli, Hungary

It was raining this morning, so we were in no hurry to get up.  I finally got out of bed after 10 hours of sleep.  Wes stayed for another hour.  By the time we ate the cheese biscuits our landlady had given us with some Indian Milk Coffee we had made on the single-cup coffee machine in our apartment, had bathed and gotten organized, it was already 11:00 and the clouds were thinning.

We walked back through all the areas we visited yesterday.  We went through the castle grounds, we walked down the pedestrian street, we went through the park between town and the beach, we explored the beach area with its outdoor cafes and pier.

We found an empty bench while on the pedestrian street and sat for about an hour watching people.  As we left there to go to a restaurant where we planned to have lunch at 1:00, we came across a man making huge bubbles using a stick and a rope.  We stood to watch him for a while.  It would have been more fun except for the boys who insisted on trying to pop the bubbles rather than let them float through the air.  They thought they were so cute; whereas, I thought, "They are the boys who will probably grow up to be bullies and ass**les in life."  Fortunately, some of the bubbles came out too high for them to reach or jump, and it was fun watching them float into the air, change shapes, break sometimes into more bubbles, etc.  I wonder if the parents of the obnoxious boys gave any money to the man or just walked away thinking how nice it was to see their kids having fun.

We ate lunch at Margareta Etterem.  It had a good review in my guidebook and was filled with people.  Unfortunately, I found the food to be quite bland.  We each had the grilled chicken breast covered in spinach sauce with rice.  It was preceded by a small bowl of vegetable noodle soup.  There was no flavor to the spinach sauce, and the rice was a poor quality one which seemed to have been cooked without the addition of any salt to bring out its flavor.  Maybe we just got the wrong dish, but the meal at the "etterem" (which seems to mean maybe home-style) in Pecs was far better even though it had too much salt.

In the park, we found a bench and watched people going toward the beach for a while.  It wasn't very busy, though.  We decided to go down to the beach area ourselves.  We watched the people sitting at the restaurants lining the way to the beach having a late lunch or just enjoying a beer or a glass of wine.  We looked through the bars at the people who had gone to the paid beach.  We sat on a bench and watched people feeding the swans and headed for the pier.  It was just a slow, lazy afternoon for us.

Returning to town, we each got a chocolate ice cream cone and sat on a bench beside a guy playing a portable stringed instrument with two metal sticks--something like a zither or a cimbalom.  He was great at it, and the music was pleasant to hear (although Wes commented that the nearby shop owners may get tired of hearing him over and over every day). 

After awhile, we decided to come to the room and relax for a while.  Wes is asleep again.  We plan to go back to the pedestrian street around 19:00 to see how many people are there in the evenings.
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We did go back into town and found it to be rather dead.  We watched people for a while and then returned to the apartment where I made sandwiches for our dinner.

Wes worked on a spreadsheet we are using to keep track of our expenses on the trip.  We have always just used a piece of paper, but since we are travelling together for 4 weeks this time, we worried that we could lose track of our records somehow.  This way, they are in the computer, and I am e-mailing a copy to myself every few days in case the computer gets lost or stolen.

This is our last night in Kestheli and in Hungary.  Our landlady will take us to the train station tomorrow morning.  We will transition to Bratislava via two trains and a metro trip--one from here to Budapest Deli Station, a metro trip from Deli Station to Kelati Station within Budapest, and a train from Kelati Station to Bratislava.

Before closing this chapter, I should say a bit more about our landlady here.  Yesterday, I mentioned that she lived in Switzerland and retired here because her mother was Hungarian and she speaks the language.  She is quite artistic.  She paints, writes poetry, and plays the violin.  She was playing the violin beautifully when we returned from town this afternoon.  Her paintings are nice.  Her poetry is all in German.  Click here for a photo of her and some of her paintings, and click here for an article about her in German.