How Did I Forget to Write About This??

OK, this happened a month ago, and I'm realizing I never put it in the blog since I basically rely on my pictures to jog my memory and there weren't any of this.  So here goes...

Around February 20 (less than a week after we moved into our house), Tom was out of town.  At about 1:30am, the buzzer to our pedestrian gate rang.  I certainly wasn't going to buzz anyone up, and since speaking on the gate phone is tough without knowing how to speak Hungarian, I popped out the front door to see what was going on.  (In true Cabrini fashion I was still up and dressed, so at least I had that going for me.)  A nice gentleman who spoke English was walking his dog, and told me there was water coming out of my house.  What!?!  There's a manhole cover in our driveway where the water meter is.  Water was bubbling up out of that and running like a river, away (thankfully) from our house and down the street.  So now what?  I don't even know what the water company is called, since Tom's assistant set up the utilities and they all get directly billed to Emerson.  I try finding out online, and I think I have the right company, but it's all in Hungarian, and from what I can gather the customer service doesn't open until 7am.  I try calling the landlord.  No answer and no voice mail.  Tom (now awake and trying to help despite being in another country), texts the landlord who eventually calls me back.  He calls the water company, then calls me back and says they should be there in an hour.  They arrive around 3am, and don't speak English.  They work in my driveway, and eventually come to get me to show me their work.  "OK?" they ask.  Um, sure.  The water is no longer flowing down my driveway, so....great.  Off they go. 

I'm an independent, take-charge kind of person, and this pretty much epitomizes the massive helplessness I feel living here.  Just another reason to continue my Hungarian classes!

Szamos

Another day, another chance to try a famous dessert place!  We went into the city with the kids for dinner as a Welcome Back, Tom/Beginning of Spring Break celebration.  We walked around and reminisced about living down there.  I love my house, and am glad to be here with a yard and lots of space and to be close to the kids' school...but I'm also really glad we had the experience of living in the city and getting familiar with the whole city scene.  Anyway, we had a fantastic dinner at the place we went on our first night in Budapest together, then went a block away to Szamos for dessert.  Szamos is a famous company founded in the 1930s.  The café in the heart of Pest is beautiful.  We sat down and ordered.  Verdict?  Not our favorite.  While the setting gets a big plus, the desserts themselves were just ok.  In reading up about the company, they actually are famous for their chocolate and marzipan.  There was a huge counter inside that sold truffles and marzipan.  We're thinking next time we'll just get a box to-go (or "takeaway" as they say here) and skip the desserts!

Bounty from America!

 

Tom is back from St. Louis.  While we are happy to have him home, we are also really excited about having things like Neosporin.  And chocolate chips.  And peanut butter without sugar.  And steel cut oatmeal.  OK, I'll stop now or I'll describe everything in the picture (which isn't even everything he brought).  Sadly I've already realized about five things that I forgot to have him pick up, so the list for July is already started.  It's so nice to have semi-regular delivery service for all these things which aren't available here!

Filled Fánk

Is it bad that one of the first Hungarian words my children learned was fánk, which means donut?  I blame it all on their Hungarian Culture instruction.  Fánk are part of the Farsang celebration.  People wear masks with horns and other people hang donuts on the horns...sounds good to me.  Anyway, the kids' school served fánk on the day of the Farsang parade.  The kids fell in love.

Now we have discovered something I haven't seen in the States (or maybe I'm not as widely informed as I thought about American donuts??)  Here, they have custard filled fánk...with a hole.  A hole!  I have never seen this.  Here they are sold in the markets...and at Subway, which is where Nico got his.  Yum!

 

The Monster Hiding in the Dryer

You may remember the issues I had in the apartment with laundry, especially the dryer.  I had high hopes that the washer and dryer in the house would be better.  And they are...sort of.  I have a fantastic laundry room.  Infinitely better than the unfinished basement laundry I had in St Louis.  But the washer holds TINY amounts of laundry.  Seriously tiny.  And the dryer, while still better than one at the apartment, is still not like I'm used to with my old (really old...like 12+ years) American dryer.  But tonight I figured out that some of the dryer issues may indeed be my fault. 

My very decent landlord provided English translated manuals for our German washer and dryer.  I did read a lot of them (since all the buttons and dials are in German), but clearly I didn't read them completely.  Tonight I was cleaning the heat exchange unit (don't ask...just a weird maintenance thing with this dryer), and something caught my eye in the door.  It looked like something was wrong inside the actual door panel.  As if something had fallen out of place inside the door.  I tried to figure out how to get into it, when I realized there was an oh so handy latch on the top.  As if one was supposed to access the door panel.  BECAUSE THAT'S WHERE THE LINT FILTER IS.  Now I'm not one of those people who only cleans the lint filter on occasion.  I clean it every time.  I had noticed how little lint was collecting on what I believed to be the lint filter.  But this dryer is a completely different animal than any I've seen (besides the cleaning the heat exchanger thing, I have to dump a collection bin of water out of it after every load), so I figured that must just be another quirk.  In fact, no.  So in the entire time I've lived in this house and done laundry (over a month)...I have NEVER properly cleaned the lint filter.  You can imagine what I found inside.  Or maybe you can't.  So I took pictures.

 

The machines

 

The strange thing that fills with water...

 

and needs to be removed and dumped after every load. (See...I read most of the manual!)

 

 

This is what I thought was the lint filter.  It's a filter.  And it does get small amounts of lint on it.

 

 

See how it looks strange inside the holes?

Because of this lint monster!

 

Is that crazy or what?!?

 

I am now diligently cleaning the lint filter, which gets a completely normal amount of lint on it after every load.  But it still takes forever to dry.  :)

Loving Spring

It's shorts weather here so we spent the afternoon basking in the sunshine.  We dug around in some garage boxes and managed to find the bin of balls.  

 

 

The kids were overjoyed and used some serious sibling teamwork to get it up from the garage. 

 

The previous owners left some soccer goals which are now a fixture in the backyard.

 

We LOVE having this great backyard!

The Buzz is Back!

 

Every so often, when there are no school pictures or major events upcoming, Nicholas gets to shave off his hair.  He loves it.  He'll sit and just rub it.  He also likes not having to do anything to it in the mornings before school.

 

At the end of our street there's a French place Tom and I went to on Friday for lunch when he got into town (another lovely daytime date...awesome!).  The food is impeccable, and you can even get a salad, which is a rarity here.  I took the kids after church today for lunch.  Nico loved that he matched the napkins.

 

 

 Charlotte would like it noted that she too matched the napkins.  Sort of.  :)