by I’m tired. Tons of lessons. Not enough sleep. The end of the world as we know it, fast approaching. Just six days now. At least I’ve been amassing a healthy brick of lei, even though I don’t get as many cash payments as I did in pre-Covid days.
I felt shattered when I got up on Sunday. I still decided to make the trip to Szeged, a city just over the border which like Timișoara is replete with beautiful architecture. Our clocks had gone back an hour the night before, and then Hungary is a further hour behind Romania. So I had four different times in my head all at once: Romanian summer, Romanian winter, Hungarian summer, and Hungarian winter, the middle two of those four being equivalent. (Szeged’s buildings featured many clocks, some of which hadn’t yet been put back to winter time.) Szeged sits on the Tisa which is a major river. I parked by the river and mooched around the city for a couple of hours. Then, because it was still quite early, I decided to go to Kecskemét, the city we visited in early September on the way back from Vienna. On the way I met more pheasants than I’d ever seen before. The autumn colours were stunning. Szeged is a clean, modern-looking European city, while Kecskemét has a very different vibe with its communist blocks crowding out the lovely empire-era architecture that it still has. At the car park a woman tried to communicate with me. Do we have to pay? It’s Sunday. I could tell that was her question, but I had the same question and I couldn’t speak her language. She asked somebody else, then relayed the reply of “nem” (no) to me. I had a tortilla there – this was a bit of a disappointment – and then went back home. In total I did 425 km. Luckily I only had short queues at the border. I noted that they no longer bother to stamp my passport. That’s a shame; all those stamps were a useful memory jogger.
This was on the table of the fast food place I ate at. Hungarian names are always surname first. In Romanian they can go either way, which can be horribly confusing when the surname happens to be a possible first name too.
Back in Romania, at a small lake in Sânnicolau Mare, popular with fishermen. Next to the lake, a couple were roasting a chicken in their back garden.
