Start of Our Evacuation

 

So, yesterday was Sari’s last exam, which means the studying part of our Erasmus has came to an end, unfortunately not only the studying part is over, the whole Erasmus program is about to end! We even started packing yesterday…

Sari’s exam was at noon, which is possibly the worst time to write a test, because you can’t even eat before the test which means your brain doesn’t necessarily have enough sugar to work.

We were hungry and had no motivation to cook, and we were planning to go to IKEA anyways, so we decided to beat the traffic instead and have some good old IKEA vegetarian hotdogs. It was totally worth, we payed 14 zlotyi for a two meals. That simply doesn’t happen anywhere else. Then we walked around in IKEA God and Sari only knows what we were looking for, but we only found something I wanted for a long time. A doormat with ‘Dzien dobry’ sign on it. 

mint isn’t it?

When we got out of the store I hoped we were out of the woods, but then it turned out we still have to buy some souvenirs for home, so we walked to the closest grocery store where we bought someh chocolate, beers, and pirogies for 288 zlotyi. 288! Damn. I’m usually as cheap as possible, however I couldn’t cheap out on this one. We have to bring our families some goodies since they were a huge support for us. As we were leaving the store we pulled up next to our car with the shopping cart, when an old homeless appeared on the horizon. First I didn’t want to interact with him, but he had different ideas, so I told him something like we don’t speak Polish, then he asked where we were coming from I said Wegry, then he went ‘magyarska, magyarszka’ and he knew some Hungarian words he wasn’t shy to tell us. He knew surprisingly difficult and long words, with almost excellent pronunciation — he said ‘cheers’ which is egészségedre, and ‘Good morning’ ‘Jó napot kívánok!’ and some other words I can’t remember. He was so friendly, so smart. When he asked if he could return our shopping cart for the 2 zlotyi that was in it, we could say no. And why do I say he was smart? Because he asked me what was thank you in Hungarian — which is köszönöm — and he replied it with out a single mistake, he stressed the right letters, I was absolutely astonished! And also a bit sad that a man like him ends up on the streets. For me, that’s absolutely heartbreaking. I wish there was something I could do to stop these people living on the street. I’m not sure if you remember, but we’ve also met another homeless guy previous month, who also spoke pretty good English, and yet was homeless. And the most annoying thing is that people like them with good language learning skills end up on streets, meanwhile in Hungary most of our politicians make at least 10,000 times more one that we gave these guys, and they speak half as good in any foreign language as these homeless people did. That’s just unfair.

After shopping we came home, and with a heavy heart Sari started packing. It’s really sad to see our wardrobe getting emptier and emptier by the minutes. We closed our day with some homemade burgers which made this quite overwhelming day a bit better.

I hope you’re doing great, take care,

Almos