Balaton Bash

After two weeks, I’m back to fluid in moving about Hungary, but it’s always the wacky things that remind me of how adventurous it really is. On the train to Balatonfured it was a fish head – and the spine of that same fish – laying underneath my seat, picked clean by whoever had been in that compartment on the stop previous. I tried to convince the distraught middle-age woman across from me that it was “nem baj, nem baj,” but she insisted on calling MAV employees to discard of the skeleton.

I was proud of myself, just as Balaton came into view and the tracks started to skirt Central Europe’s largest lake, for talking to the cute girl who had been sitting in my compartment as we gazed out the window, mesmerized by blue water and floating sails. Timi spoke English, of course, so we talked about swimming and sailing and studying as we got closer to Batalonfured. From there, she’d catch a kics-piros train to Zanka for a weekend with friends.

This weekend, just like last year, I was off to Lake Balaton for a welcome-to-summer bash with American teachers. This time we crashed the north shore, Balatonfured, rather than overstay our welcome on the south shore near Siofok. I only knew a handful (Janos, Emily, Harpswell) of the 23 from last year, but I’ve gotten to know Matt and our token Hungarian Noemi well in the first weeks of being here. The rest of the crew were new teachers I’d only heard about in so many stories.

Friday night was the drama and uber-americanism that the stories had promised. Apparently the group isn’t as tight knit as last year, not a smallish band of brothers and sisters battling through a foreign land with the comforting drunkenness of quick-tongued conversation with fellow Americans. So it goes, that sometimes you’re a part of something magical, and trying to recapture that is more difficult than in should seem. So instead of take part in naplos and merriment, I convinced Noemi that we should climb into the bar’s tree-house and talk an hour of the evening away.

Saturday was summer, and it felt good. Sunshine warmed our walk to the beach, and after a minute or two of trepidation, the water felt good. A brief afternoon thunderstorm was the perfect preventative cure for sunburn and allowed a nice lunch break. By evening we were ready for the pitcher after pitcher of free white wine samples that our guest house arranged for. They really treated us well for $10 a night. And while eating supper before drinking wine might perhaps have been advisable, it’s hardly a necessity if you’ve got a pole to lean against.

But, of course, there’s no getting around the absolute highlight of the weekend: Not once, but an amazing twice, I found myself locked inside a bathroom…

The first, definitely, was the charming Noemi’s fault! We let ourselves into what might have been a locked bathroom at the beach. Thinking that I must have finished before her, she locked the hallway door on the way out. A minute later, I found myself trapped on the inside of a locked door, inside a darkened hallway. I stood befuddled for a few minutes, pondering exactly how I found myself locked inside a bathroom. I was just about to start knocking on the door, from the inside, when an employee unlocked the door. I think he was surprised to see me in the locked, darkened hallway, but I koszonom szepan-ed him and walked past before he could ask the obvious question.

The second incident, though, was no one’s fault but my own. Back at the guesthouse, about to take off for the train station, I thought I’d be smart and use the flushable facilities rather than wait and use the more primitive accommodations available on-board the train. On my way out, I struggled with the key. It’d been giving me problems all weekend. For the life of me, I couldn’t get the lock mechanism to budge.

Not about to be caught trapped in a bathroom twice in one weekend, I decided to get smart. Rather than bust my fingers trying to click the lock open, I’d use mechanical advantage. I picked up the doorstop and the can of aerosol fragrance – I’d squeeze them together like a pliers, using mechanical advantage to force the lock to give way. With fierce determination, I put my plan into action. I squeeze the key between the doorjam and aerosol can, and turned. I smiled when I felt it easily give way. But then I heard a terrifying clink – one-half of the key falling onto the hard bathroom floor, snapped completely off of the operative end of the key.

I let my head crash into the door in disgust. And again I found myself pondering being locked inside a bathroom. With imagines of missed trains and eventual starvation creeping into my psyche, I began to knock on the door, from the inside. Five minutes later, help arrived. We concocted a plan. They’d get the other bathroom key, and try to open the door from the outside. I was ready to plant kisses on my saviors when the plan worked, a hostage freed of misfortune, but that would have only increased the intra-group drama and intrigue, so I simply offered thanks.

Needless to say, I avoided bathrooms on the train-ride home. Luckily, the most excitement at Deli Pu was recognizing Timi and waving a hello. Hungary made a little smaller by a familiar face, a voyage come full-circle.