November 14, 2010: Slow Day in Ujpalota

November 14, 2010: After Kent left this morning, I completed some household chores and went downtown to take my usual walk along the Danube. Today was a gloomy day, one good for walking. The leaves have all fallen from the trees and I have seen crews of 30 plus people converge early in the morning rake in hand to rake all of them into big piles. A steam shovel is then used to pick the leaves up and dump them into carts for removal from the parks/lawns. I guess these rakers of leaves are cheap labor and with unemployment so high, there's plenty of people willing to do this work. Actually, I find Hungary to be a relatively clean country -- men and women regularly scour the areas of the city sweeping up litter (mostly cigarette butts) so that the streets, sidewalks, and subway stations are relatively clean. However, Hungary still has a long ways to go to match other countries of Europe (Italy for example) in eliminating smokers from restaurants and public buildings. I hear that every country of the EU is required to follow certain basic laws, a ban on smoking in public places being one of them, to remain a member in good standing of the EU. Although this law is one of the EU's laws, Hungary has not adopted it seriously, or if they have, they certainly don't enforce it. Oh well. I hear that 15 years ago, Italy was much like Hungary is now regarding smoking, so if Italy can make such a sweeping change in 15 years, I'm sure Hungary can, too.

Interesting language tidbit: To show you how "interesting" the Hungarian language is, the word "Szia" (pronounced "See ya", or "See yaw") means "Hello" while Hungarians usually conclude their telephone conversations with "Hallo" (meaning "Goodbye"). Now can you see why I haven't mastered the language by now?

As you can see, today was a bit slow. I hope that things pick up a bit next week.