After a brief foray into driving during Budapest morning rush hour. (Lots of one way and no left turn) we made it out to my dad’s house.
I think opening the door for the first time is the hardest part of it all. Walking into a space as it was left; as it was meant to be walked into by someone else. After getting over the initial trauma of what was going on we got to actually working on sorting the contents.
Figuring what to keep and what’s not to keep.
You keep something because it has value in some dimension: monetary, sentimental or legal. Most of the things are in the sentimental category. Pictures, letters and some personal records mainly.
My uncle (dad’s youngest brother) Gyula came over with his wife to help out shortly after we arrived. It’s good to have someone local to be helping out since we’re not here to do everything.
Jenn and Pete were left behind to continue the process of going though “stuff,” me, my mom, Gyula and his wife went to the bank to try to get some forints out to pay for the services. I say try because all we have is a US bank account and no local account. It turns out getting large amounts of currency is hard to do. It looks like we’ll have to make lots of trips to the ATM to pull out each of our daily limits to get enough together to pay for things.
Lesson learned: have a local account that you can wire money into if you need lots of $$. It seems that a lot of people get by without a bank account. I don’t think that Gyula has one since he never offered to get the money.
Later on my dad’s former neighbor (she had moved out in the past year) Terike came over with her daughter to offer their support as well. My mom has gotten close to her with all the talking on the phone that they’ve been doing.
As the day was drawing to a close Pete and I went to drop off Gyula and his wife (they don’t have a car and took the bus to come over) in our rental car. While we were over there they showed us lots of pictures that they had of my dad as he was growing up. I think that they’re the folks that inherited the pictures when my dad’s grandparents passed away so there was lots of baby pictures of him that we never saw before. Of all of it I think that was the hardest part of the whole day. We gave their old dog, Bárros a bit of attention too – he’s old and sick and liked my dad when he came over to visit.
Finally, we walked over to the restaurant that my dad (and mom when she was visiting sometimes) frequented. The food was delicious. The waiter remembered my dad and had a brief conversation with my mom.
An observation: everyone in Hungary has a dog. Some have more than one. On the way home we gave some of our leftovers to the neighbor’s dogs. They seemed rather happy with the proposition. If you do that in the states you’re liable to get sued. Over here, nothing like that happens other than the dogs getting happier with the tasty treats.
After more successfully navigating our way back to our hotel Jenn and I ventured out to get some coffee and desert. We went to a local café that has wifi to post out pictures while sipping some espresso and nibbling on some Dobos torte. Mmmm…