house hunting hungaryian style:

alright calm down...no need to worry it was not for us, we headed down to lake balaton to stay with joska and sandi who are looking to buy a place there. it was a great time of relaxing, and seeing the area we will be moving to (hopefully by september) and also attending the local church. we helped them paint the place they are borrowing and then headed out on the hunt with them. and what a hunt it was, they are looking in smaller towns just a bit away from balaton and there are some amazing quaint farming towns up in that area, and when i say town i mean it, the smaller of the two towns had maybe 12 houses and a phone booth. oddly enough this booth was in the middle of their field. house hunting is very unique compared to back home as real estate agents are rarely used and its mostly done by word of mouth, so you either head to the local coffee house, to the local pastor or you head straight for the mayor himself. The local reform pastor was nice enough to take us around all day and show us all the houses for sale. You rarely leave a "viewing" without something to take along, one house we picked a bag of fresh cherries, yes they ripen early here, and from others we left with hand fulls of flowers, we actually had to sneak the second hand of flowers into the trunk without the old women seeing the first batch, didnt want to seem ungrateful but they smelled amazingly strong (hello allergies!) and were exactly the same as the first load! The pic bellow is of the property way up in the smaller village, as you can see there used to be a structure of some kind that is now burned down to nothing but a little walls, this was actually a great piece of land and its probably better than any places that actually have houses on them cause most would have to be completely torn down anyways.
the pastor was telling us a little history of the catholic reform battles that have happened in this town and it was quite amazing to hear. his church which he gave us a tour of was the third reform one, the first was completely demolished by the catholics and the second was burned down. during a reform service the catholics came and barricaded the doors with all inside and then light it up, all escaped though, this all happened during the reformation days but he said it can still be felt within the town, he also showed us a bible that was 300 years old, lynnette is very proud to be able to say she has flipped through a 300 year old bible, i was quite nervous one of us might rip a page out or something but it survived! when you think of it that bible that we held was the cause for all the battles in that time, the catholics trying to keep the bible in latin and in the church only and the reforms translating into hungarian and getting it into the peoples hands.

The pic below is of a man we ran into on the banks of the balaton, as we walked up he pulled in a foot long fish which looked like a bass but i was told it was a variety of the carp, which the balaton is overrun with not that the hungarians mind, we helped him to pull his catch net in and had a good laugh as he got soaked by the waves, he then proceeded to slowly sit down remove his shoes and dump the water out and the hork up a huge spit ball which the ladies were oh so impressed by, old men are great... not a care in the world!