Day 2 - The Sausage

The Sausage

I’ve been in Budapest for two days now and I fancy a sausage.  As luck would have it, I’m standing outside a shop on Szent Istvan Kerut that looks suspiciously as though it may contain sausages.  I wander inside and intrepidly make my way through the shop.  Aisles of tinned food, bottles of potent spirits, fresh tomatoes, peppers and cheeses try to put me off the meaty scent, but they are doomed to failure.  Nothing can stand between this man and his sausage. 

I reach the back of the shop and I am delighted.  For in front of my sparkling eyes lies some kind of sausage Babylon.  Rows and rows of delicious, processed, animal meat hang, delectable, delightful and practically screaming out to be devoured.  “Come eat us!” they plead.  “You are our destiny!” they somewhat creepily chant.  But the path to my sausage destiny is not as simple as you may be currently imagining.  Oh no!  For I must first get past the sausage guardian who stands before me, behind a meat counter, guarding her meaty treasures.  I am not fooled by her appearance.  She may resemble a sweet, if slightly hairy, little Hungarian lady, but I know she is carved from granite with an unbreakable, iron will to protect these sausages from the unworthy.  She has sworn an oath to these slender tubes of meat, and around here that means something.

Cautiously I take my position in a three person queue.  Another elderly Hungarian lady comes and stands to my right and this throws me.  Who is this brazen harlot, this free spirit, this renegade who doesn’t abide by the law of the queue.  Stand behind, not to the side!  With my British upbringing, naturally, I am falling apart inside.  While this battle is enraging, the leader of the sausage queue claims her meat and moves aside and the queue moves forward.  Surely this challenger to my rightful throne will now hold back a step so that order can be assumed?  But no!  What is this treachery!?  She moves forward with me, in unison!  We are side, by side!  My mind is racing.  Beads of sweat are forcing their way through the pores in my forehead.  I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, that the next three minutes were some of the most stressful of my lifetime as this mental and physical battle took place.  But, with a series of throat clearings, a subtle use of elbows and an ability to spread myself to three times my usual width, I eventually thwarted the challenger, despite her aggressive use of walking stick.

And now I’m at the counter, just me and the sausage guardian, face to face.  But, then it hits me.  I haven’t chosen my sausage poison!  I had been so engrossed in fighting off my queue challenger that I hadn’t prepared myself mentally for my next challenge!

“Szia”, bellows the guardian menacingly.  

“Uh, szia”, I skilfully retort.

“Kekndflsecnejnflzefmwmdzzwsnz?” apparently asks the guardian.  

And in the heat of battle I panic.  All of those Hungarian classes that I have been taking to prepare me for this epic moment are wasted.  I can barely remember English.  My queue challenger shuffles behind me, with menace.  In that moment all I can do is grunt and point at one particular sausage adorning the wall.  The sausage guardian looks at me and seems confused.

“Horz!”, she says.  

I have no idea what that means.  I mentally travel back to my Hungarian class in London, racking my brain.  No, ‘horz’ is a new word for me.  I nod defiantly.

“Horz?” she says again, although this time adding a question mark.  

The sausage guardian is apparently perplexed by my choice of sausage.  Is this a trick?  I need to be assertive and demonstrate that I am worthy of this treasure.  I need to display my balls of steel (not literally).  I compose myself.

“Igen, köszönöm szepen”, I reply, suddenly delighted with my use of the native tongue.

The guardian, clearly impressed by my linguistical magnificence, but trying to play it cool, shrugs, grabs the sausage from it’s hook, wraps it in paper and hands it to me.  I return the kind gesture by crossing the guardians palm with forint, turn and triumphantly leave.  I have won.  I am the penitent man!  I have passed the test.  I have seen off my challenger.  I will now return home to my basecamp, present my heavily pregnant wife with the fruits of my victory and we will enjoy sausage!

Thirty minutes later.

“Honey.  Why have you bought a horse sausage?”

We order a pizza.

Day 1 - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Blending in with the natives

It’s my first full day in Budapest.  I wake up, the sun is shining.  Yes!  Take that UK!  Shove your erratic weather right up your rainy anus!  My heavily pregnant Hungarian wife, who at this late stage of pregnancy is beginning to resemble a pregnant guppy, is in the kitchen making coffee.  I step out on to our little, but delightful balcony, survey the scenic Buda hills, take a great big contented breath of Buda air, and then it hits me.  Bloody hell, it’s hot!  Very hot.  I immediately make a calculated decision that it’s too hot for pants and this, obviously, makes me happy.

“Morning honey”, my miniature wife beams, waddles over wth her big fat belly full of baby, and hands me a piece of paper with an unusual number of ‘Zs’ on it.  I look at the paper, puzzled.  “This is your list of challenges for the morning”.  Have I woken up in The Crystal Maze?  As wondrous as that sounds, alas the answer is no.  I’ve been given a number of ‘The Apprentice’ style challenges to complete, assuming of course, that it was an episode of ‘The Apprentice’ where they were challenged to go and buy nectarines.  The thing about me, probably one of your favourite bits about me actually, is that I’m bloody brave.

“I accept your challenge!  I will buy you fruit!”

And so off I trot, to the wild plains of Buda, a warrior in flip flops, armed only with a piece of paper covered in ‘Zs’ and a mobile phone with a dodgy reception.  Shortly after stepping outside I notice something unusual about my hair.  It has become apparent that my hair and the Hungarian climate are an unusual, dare I say it, heady mix.  Back in dear old Blighty my hair is slightly wavy, but nothing too extravagant.  However, after a little under five minutes in the mid thirty, Hungarian heat, my hair has decided enough is enough and is making a play to become exceedingly extravagant.  My hair has turned in to Liberace.  Suddenly I’m a white man with an afro, or so it feels.  I need too check this bad boy out before meeting my friendly local greengrocer who I’m sure, even before meeting him, is called Laszlo.  

Being the eagle eyed swine that we both know that I am, I spot a darkened car window just a few metres ahead and on the other side of the road.  Bingo!  I momentarily wonder if there are Bingo halls in Budapest and then flip flop over to the car, looking around to avoid appearing like a preening, vain peacock wearing a David Hasselhoff wig.  With the coast seemingly clear I peer in to the dark, back seat window and begin inspecting the damage.  Verging on a code red, curly hair disaster, but I can manage this.  With a bit of spit and a fleshy five pronged comb I can tame this frantic beast.  And so I set to work.  

You know how when you’re in a lit room and the lights go out, and for a few moments everything is pitch black, but then gradually, your eyes adjust and you start to make out shapes?  Well the same is actually true for darkened car windows.  I’m leaning right in, staring so intently at my own reflection that I can count my own pores, when something moves.  It’s in the car.  I adjust my gaze slightly and then lean in further to inspect the movement.  What I see chills me to the core.  There’s somebody starring back at me.  A pair of eyes.  A startled pair of eyes.  A startled pair of female eyes.  A mother’s eyes.  A breastfeeding mother’s eyes!  I am staring intently at a breastfeeding mother, discreetly, feeding her tiny baby.  Oh, the horror!  And yet I’m still staring, like a rabbit caught in the headlights!  Must…stop…staring!  The expression on the woman seems to be changing.  Anger is replacing fear!  I do the only sensible thing that I can do.  With all of the blood drained from my face like a piece of halal meat, I mutter the words “sorry” under my breath, turn and hurriedly canter away, flip flops clopping like a mule.

Back in the safety of the flat, moments later, I tell my wife the bad news.  “All out of fruit sorry honey”.  The streets of Buda are fraught with peril.  The next twelve months could be dangerous.

The Prologue

Budapesten Élek!

I live in Budapest.  This is very odd as I don’t usually live in Budapest.  In fact, I’ve never lived outside of the UK, but here I am, sitting on a sofa in my new digs in sunny Budapest.  A soon to be forty year old, soon to be first time father, immigrant.  My heavily pregnant wife is currently on the phone, speaking to her mother in tongues.  Some Hungarian duck pate is lazily lounging on a piece of Hungarian bread on a table next to me.  All of the food products in our kitchen have an unnatural number of ‘Zs’ on their packaging.  If I look up, my view is of the Buda hills.  It’s sunny and hot outside!  No, this is definitely not London in June (which according to the grumbles and moans that I’ve read via Facebook is currently suffering rain on a biblical scale).  I arrived two days ago and still feel very much like an old cat, torn from his natural habitat and dumped in to a new home.  I’m discombobulated, sniffing all of the new corners of my home whilst resisting the urge to pee and mark my territory.  What am I doing here?

Well as all good stories should begin, it started with a brain fart.  “What if we move to Budapest for the first year of Junior’s life?”.  We initially dismissed this thought, but soon realised that it wouldn’t simply dissipate like a well behaved fart into the ether, no matter how vigorously we wafted.  

Naturally there were opposing thoughts that did their best to put us of the Budapest scent.  “What about my job?  What about our mortgage?  How would we watch Masterchef?”   But then that little brain fart slowly became a brain hurricane, battering all obstacles in it’s path and turning the opposing thoughts on their heads.  “What if I quit my day job and pursued my dreams of being a full-time writer?  Why don’t we rent our place out?  We can stream Masterchef via the old tinterweb can’t we?”  And so I did it.  I quit my lovely, secure day job in London and we found renters for our London basecamp.  What followed were several weeks of blind panic.  I’d wake up in the dead of night, mind racing and heart pumping.  My thoughts during these wee hours usually went along the lines of…

“Fucking hell!  What in the name of God have I done?!  I won’t have a job!  Nobody will understand me!  I’m going to be forty!  I will be forty seven when my child is seven.  But that’s only three years from fifty!  When I’m fifty, that’s only ten years from sixty!  I’m supposed to retire at around sixty five aren’t I?  I’m a mere half a century from the probably end and I’ve just quit my job to go and live in a country where they speak in mostly ‘consonants’ and I have a baby on the way!  Help me!”

But with the unwavering support of my miniature wife, my tiny tower of strength, I got through those dark hours, and now here I am in beautiful Budapest, trying in vain to understand what on earth everyone else is saying, whilst eating an unnatural amount of sour cream, and with a heavily pregnant little lady by my side.  The next 12 months or so should be an interesting ride, full of cultural clashes, sleepless nights, shitty nappies and me being a clueless father in a foreign land.  So like a slightly more hirsute Captain Jean-Luc Piccard, I’m going to chronicle my adventures.  Here we go…