A day in Gyula

My favorite meal this week was on Friday with the Jokai soup (Jokai Bableves). It is a bean soup with the Bekecscaba delicious sausage. for the main course I got the paradicsomos kaposztapozelek. I think. Basically tomato soup with enormous meatballs in the middle. Surprisingly, the meatballs tasted quite a bit like the meatloaf from yesterday. The tomato soup had all sorts of veggies inside as well. It was a refreshing meal after the nuttella gumbotz the day before.

On Saturday I received the only option of soup which was csirkeaprolekleves. (I later found out that it is basically soup with all the chicken parts in it). After seeing the chicken claw, my appetite was gone. I tried eating just the noodles and peas, but it all just tasted like chicken foot especially since the noodles kind of resembled the texture of the foot. The main course was fustolt-sajijtal baconnal toltott csirkemell, also know as bacon and cheese stuffed chicken and rice. I'm pretty sure this chicken would have tasted twenty times better if I hadn't seen its foot in my soup.

After dinner on Saturday, I took off for Gyula- pronounce Dee-oo-lah, or that's what I think they are saying. Obviously I struggle at taking selfies, but here I am riding through the neighborhood on my bike

This is what they call "Centrum." Basically the center of Gyula. There's all these fountains and tons of people taking pictures in their model poses.

 

This clock is really cool. It shows the time of all the time zones and evidently it works according to the sunlight (We came one time at night and it wasn't working)

Here's the first church I got to go inside. There were all sorts of decorations inside- little bows and stuff- that made me assume that it was someone's wedding day. Hopefully.

 

After about a twenty minute bikeride from Bekecscaba, I arrived at the castle of Gyula. It's super close to the centrum and easy to find. They have a nice path on the outside and a fascinating museum on the inside. Each room had a nice display of what it may have looked like during those days. In one of the pamphlets it said that at one time there were about 50 families living in the castle. This is incredible especially since the middle of it is quite open. Maybe they had the families camping out inside the castle. Or maybe they were talking about miniature people.

Fortunately, they had all the captions for the exhibits written in fairly decent English. "After reading this card, please take it into the case again

 This stairway takes you up to the top of the castle. It made me dizzy going up and I kept hitting my head on the stairs on my way down.

 Below: from the top of the castle. One of my favorite things is looking out on the city and seeing all the red roofed houses.

After I visited the castle, I knew it was time for some gelato and cake. They have some of the best sweets in Gyula- or so I have heard. I was just hoping that it wasn't pig jello on the top of my cake

 

Békéscsaba- judo and more food

On Monday, while Ivana and Andy went to the solarium, I wanted to go to the pharmacy to buy an ice pack. When Andy walked into the solarium (that's what they call the tanning salon) she pointed at the next shop over as the pharmacy. The next shop over was men's clothing. I panicked for a minute and then I saw the sign of the snake on a stick- you can see it on the kigyo sign. I'm really glad I listened in my French class when we were talking about finding medical places. 

On our way out, there was this bum playing the violin really poorly. I was about to pay him money just to make him stop. Or to take his violin away.

Dinner....

Monday I tried the chicken smothered in applesauce. The apple soup is just divine so I knew that I wanted to try this dish especially when the only other interesting option was fried chicken with potatoes (you can see it on Ivana's plate). It was a little strange eating apples with my chicken, but it tasted fine separately. 

These sausages/frankfurters were super good. The direct translation by google said that it was a sort of ratatouille, but this is no ratatouille that I've ever seen. The meat is flavorful and I basically just ate it alone. Those are my pickles on the side. They taste a little like sweet pickles. As you can see, Ivana, on the right ordered the same meat, but with French fries instead of rice. 

For Wednesdays dinner, I was feeling a little ill so I ordered the cabbage cube pasta hoping that cabbage had some important nutrients that my body was missing. The other options were fried cauliflower, or fried chicken.

On Monday, Ivana and I prepared ourselves to eat the Nutella gombotz that was served today. Nutella gombotz is this dessert that evidently the FEK serves for dinner. It's basically cake balls filled with Nutella. It is sooo good and sooo rich. I could barely eat five of them. Ivana is eating this meatloaf with an egg in the middle. Nothing too special. But really good flavored meatloaf.

The other day we went to the Aldi store that is a short walk from our hostel. Ivana introduced me to the choceur chocolate. It's about a dollar and you get a massive bar of chocolate. I got the grape and not chocolate because I decided to be healthy. Or I just didn't have wifi to translate the German writing.

Mogyorò tejfol szelet (slice of sour cream hazelnut cake)

Not sure exactly what these two desserts are, but one Nikki called cremes or something. It has that papery crispy stuff on the top and bottom. On the right is raspberry cheesecake.

This morning we had futás again. We ran three miles and then had additional training with the Békéscsaba judo master. Sometimes I feel extremely stupid when we do workouts because my body has never made movements even close to the movements that I am suppose to be doing. Today was not one of those days. Every single exercise we did was a type of push-up or an extreme ab workout. It was great and made my Nutella gombotz taste even sweeter.

Békéscsaba- end of week 2

Thursdays lunch: garlic soup with popped air on top with spaghetti and pork with sour cream. It tasted a bit like fried dinosaur, though I think I might have liked dad's rendition a bit better!

Below: Fifa/fanni, Betti and Ivana

We ran three miles on Friday morning. Afterwards, Fifa and Betti stopped by a plum tree and filled fifa's red bag with plums. Like fifty or sixty of them. I guess that's what they do around here. They see a tree and they pick as much as they want. Plums are their favorite though as far as I can see.

Dinner Friday: raspberry soup (not my favorite since there were no chinks of anything in it) and rice with chicken. I'm not sure what kind of chicken because it had an interesting texture. Maybe liver? I think that the FEK (that's where lunch/dinner is paid for every day) serves four types of main courses. They always have one deep fried like chicken, cheese, pork or a mix of the two or maybe all three. Then they have another dish that is sour cream with chicken or pork or sausage, but mostly a lot of sour cream. When the girls order this type, they then douse the sour cream in more sour cream.

On my walk home from practice, I say this nice toad. I forgot that my current climate is a little bit better for these kinds of creatures.

Adam finally brought me my laptop. It's really great and basically brand new. The only thing I would change is the language. I can recognize the icon so I can use it fairly well. I am grateful for this new addition to my room. 

Saturday: we had a scrimmage against some boys that live around here. We beat them. Embarassing. 

After the scrimmage we went to the tesco. The tesco is one of the biggest grocery store in békéscsaba. Pretty comparable to Walmart. It is one of the few stores open 24 hours every day.

This cinnamon looking roll (kakaós csiga) is delicious. It has some chocolate-ish flavor in the middle. 

Ivana and I stopped for some ice cream of course. This is becoming a trend. Also these shopping carts are so interesting. Yes we did have to pay 100 ft to use it (about 50 cents). The strange part is that all four wheels are movable. It really makes driving it easier when two of them are fixed. But the crazy maneuvers were quite a bit easier.

Joca invited us to dinner on Saturday night. They cooked up every kind of meat and everything was really flavorful. Oh except for the potato salad and I guess the potato fries. They had some skewers of shush kabob things that were my favorite part. No pineapple though. 

Hear the group at joca's minus Ivana who took the picture. 

Top row: Joca, Peashti (keechi's boyfriend), some friend of theirs (Sean?), keechi

Bottom: sdhuayaksio (joca's boyfriend) Nikki, me, and Lana 

Joca's boyfriend showed us his massive collection of military stuff and we tried on the Hungarian women hats. It was a really fun night with these people. They are all very welcoming.

Sunday: after church me and Ivan rode to Lana's flat. Lana's mom and godmother made some gibonitza (cheese pie) it has this flakey top with cream cheese oozing from the inside. Pretty good, but not sweet.

I think this pastetom is a fairly regular addition to the Hungarian diet. Ivana introduced it to me. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to eat it. It's like putting meat on your bread without inconveniencing yourself with separating the slices.

Hungarian (Magyar) milk. Really nothing special. Tastes a little like evaporated milk.