A Festival and Castle!

3/16/12
We started the day with another visit to an apartment we'd found and decided we wanted, to give the landlord a rental contract from the church. We'd heard from some people that many landlords don't want a contract because they don't want to pay taxes. With sales tax being about 27%, I don't wonder that they feel taxed-out. But this landlord didn't bat an eye. We left the contract for him and his wife to look over and arranged to meet again in the evening to go over it and sign it.
Yesterday was the biggest national holiday in Hungary, except for Christmas. All the stores were closed and the City Center, (the medieval part of the city) was filled with boths of food and handicrafts. 1848 as Forradalom es Szabadsagharc is the celebration of a bloodless uprising when Hungary demanded, and won, the civil rights of freedom of the press, religion, speech, their own army and parliament, a national bank and withdrawal of foreign military presence from the country. It was short won, as a year later, Russia joined Austria and musceled Hungary back into the German rule it had been under. We had a great time wandering through all the booths and watching the people. When we finally had serveyed all the food booths, and picked one; the line was about 20 ft. long. It took us more than an hour to get up to order. The kolvash, or sausages, were ordered, then cooked, then weighed, then placed on a paper plate and paid for. Good thing only two men had to make a living on that system! The sausage came with two big slices of peasant bread, and I paid for mustard and horseradish. One kind was very good and the other was not good. Live and learn.
It the afternoon, the missionaries, an investigator, (Barbi,)a new member, (Laura) and the church clerk, (Krisztian), piled into his and our cars. We drove 20 k. into the country, outside of Szekes. to the Csokakoi castle ruins. Climbing the steps up to this fortifiction made me realize what a good idea it was to build a castle on a hilltop. I would not have wanted to be the easy target while I tried to haul my armored self up that hill. There wasn't a whole lot of the castle to explore, but the view of small villages and farms was wonderful! After we hiked back down, we stayed in a park at the foot of the hill, for a couple of hours. It was sunny and warm, (I still wore my Northface ski jacket, lined with a light down jacket,) and the "youngsters" (a word a 22 year old church member always uses in reference to teenagers,) threw a football and frisbee. Elder Reme had brought a Hungarian whip and tried to teach us to crack it. He made it look easy, but it was very tricky. I finally got it down, but not without leaving a nice welt down the side of my face. The sound it made was incredible- like a gun report echoing off the hills. Next year we would like to go to the political gatherings associated with this day.
Then we met the landlord at the apartment we decided to move to and got the contract to take to Budapest. We celebrated with a dinner in the City Center. It was a great day!