Weak-End

Weekends in Heves, it turns out, are lacking in several key categories. The first is fun, and really all the others hinge upon that category.

Everything shuts down at noon on Saturday. The number one option after that -- other than leaving, mind you -- is soccer in the afternoon. So I paid 400 forint to cheer on the mighty Heves footballers. Not well-accustomed to the local sport of choice, I didn't even know which team to root for, although I did like that one side had a man in the stands with a drum. As I was set to leave, a man pulled me aside and introduced himself as a teacher at the school, who hadn't gotten around to saying hello yet. We talked for ten minutes. It's those little bits of conversation and friendliness that I like to cling on to.

But walking through town Saturday evening, after making a bit of spaghetti, I stumbled into (not literally, the solo wine-drinking usually comes later in the night) a museum-like building, full of displays of textiles. Hungarians get excited about weird things, it appears. But a man came out of an office and shook my hand. I offered "nem tudok magzarul, sprechen sie deutsch or english?" He replied "wenig," and I knew I was in trouble. He tried, in painful German to explain the textiles to me. We didn't get very far, nor frankly was I that interested. But he motioned me to follow him, toward a wide door at the end of the exhibition hall.

As he swung it open, it occurred to me that maybe I had never seen a more magnificent sight in my life. HEVES HAS A MOVIE THEATRE!!! Now by "movie theatre," I mean a large room, with hundreds of foldable chairs lined up in rows. A portable projection screen stands above a stage designed for theatre or dance. But the small windows above the back wall were the key, an honest-to-goodness movie projector! I did a little dance as he showed me the upcoming shows. Even through the cloud of Hungarian I could see beloved cognates like "Batman" and "Mr." and "Mrs." and "Smith." I smiled all the way home.

And then today I went to the thermal pool. I'll admit it, I was hoping for bikinis. It's rather quite alright that I didn't see any, though, because as I have come to learn, going to the thermal pool is an old-people activity. Woah. I was the only member of the 200 person crowd between the ages of 10 and 40.