More from Bekescsaba

That little blue dot- that's where I have been living for the past two months. I am really loving this new adventure. 

This is the Svent Istvan University. I live in the hostel just next to it with all the students. I went and explored the campus. It took me about ten minutes total. Definitely the smallest campus I have been on yet. Most of the girls on the team go to school here during the day (while the rest of us practice) and then we all practice together at night.

The days here don't change much. Ivana and I start off each day after practice riding our bikes to "center." I decided to name my bike Fanni because about half of the girls on the team are named Fanni or have a sister named Fanni.  Sometimes Fanni has a really hard time. Actually always. The hand brakes are broken and sometimes the gears don't work too well. But Fanni hasn't failed me yet. 

I got caught pretty bad in a rainstorm. Right in the middle of my ten minute bike ride home, the clouds started pouring buckets of water down. I am grateful that my dear Fanni has made it through the storms. You can't really see it, but I am making a puddle right there in the middle of my room. It took about two days for all my stuff to dry. And by some miracle, my Hungarian phone made it through the ordeal (my iphone was heavily guarded from the rain)

Most days we spend quite a bit of time relaxing at the cafe (Cafe One). Fortunately it also has wifi and delicious juices so I don't have to drink coffee. On this particular day, it was Cafe One's third birthday so they gave us free cake. These cakes have murdered my nutrition plan.

We had our first match of the Hungarian Championship on October 4. We just smothered them. I served almost twenty-five serves in that match. To celebrate, Lana, Ivana, and I went to Cafe One: Ivana with her martini and me with my hot chocolate. 

And of course we had to celebrate with some cake!

-While the people next to us celebrated with some big container of apple juice. They probably would have invited us to join them, but didn't speak any English.

Oh and here's the ball that we play with. (The Gala ball) The other one you should recognize and there's a handball there two.

Whenever I tell people I am American, they always ask me to make them pancakes. On a nice Sunday afternoon, I made them for Ivana. The only thing missing was the maple syrup. I spent a couple days looking in every store for maple flavoring. I ended up making vanilla flavored syrup instead and it worked just fine. They won't ever know the difference. Lana got jealous of our pancake picture on Facebook so I told her I would make them for her at our next girls night.

So we had a girls night three days later complete with death by mayo grilled cheese sandwiches, coffee (or cockta for those of us that don't drink coffee) and pancakes.

It was a marvelous night with delicious food and splendid company.

My days at the FEK still continue. Here's the menu for one of the weeks. The words are beginning to look familiar, although the week's menu has not once repeated itself. I am thoroughly impressed with their creativity.

Now that school has started, there's always kids hanging out in front of the restaurant smoking their hearts out. 

Here's some of my favorite foods that they have served recently.

My go-to meal is meatloaf. They cook a mean meatloaf and when all the other dishes are fried or breaded or doused in oil, I default to this meatball meatloaf. This particular meatloaf is sitting in pea pottage. Sometimes they throw an egg in the middle

Or they will put egg in their potato soup.

Or tasty sausage in the soup

Or cauliflower and corn puffs.

Or they fry the cauliflower. Hungarians can make some killer fried cauliflower with tartar sauce. Served, of course, with fries.

Or sausages with fries. But this is a Serbian dish called Cevap

I can't forget about my favorite fruit soup. This one is forest fruit soup with currants and blackberries.

This is lentil stew. Every time I see lentils, I order it rarely with a moment of hesitation. It reminds me of home. They make it with a little more sour cream though.

On Saturdays they have these nice rolls. I first tried them plain and it tasted like a mouth full of sour bread. Don't worry, it tastes delightful with a little sour cream smothered on top. The policy here is that if some food doesn't taste good, smother it with sour cream till it tastes good.

Every Thursday they have their dessert dish as their fourth meal. I always order it, even if lentils is the third meal. Above is plum ravioli and below is their version of apple pie with a meringue on the top. I am fairly certain they will enjoy some god old dog food pie.

I had the unfortunate occurrence of happening upon these watermelon haribo snacks. Because of my undying affection for watermelon candies in America, I was surprised to find out that these taste a lot like laundry detergent. Don't be fooled by the sugar coating.

Plum Gombotz! Lana's Mom made these for us.

Some Poppyseed pastry. I'm pretty sure I would have failed a drug test after this delicacy.

More cake of course!!!!

And I learned that Pottyos (the Hungarian famous treat) comes in multiple flavors. This is the peanut flavor, or that's what I guessed after examining the peanut picture on the package.

Lugoj!!

This weekend we had a tournament in Lugoj, Romania. We met at 11 to eat at the FEK before making the drive. The waiter in that nice maroon shirt is the only one there that speaks English so he always takes our table and lets us know when there is fruit soup and which dishes have chicken in them. The picture above is Lana and me dressed in the fifty year old warmups and t-shirts. And below is Andy, mostly hidden by the pole, and Ivana on the right.

Today we took the gardener's soup. This reminded me a ton of our homemade vegetable soup, but this version was a little more bland, but still good. While the other girls ordered Hawaiian haystacks, I got the szekelykaposzta (layered cabbage). It was a type of goulash with cabbage and rice and a little bit of pork. I really enjoyed it.

This is Lana and me, we are crammed into the back of the van. Evidently all the buses were unavailable so we had to pack into a van and a car and even had to leave one girl behind. For some reason, the team decided to put the foreigners in the back seat of the van. Probably because we are the only ones who understand "go" in English. They didn't tell us that despite it being 31 degrees Celsius outside, they would have the heater blowing on our feet and the windows rolled up the entire three hour trip to Lugoj. I thought for sure I was going to have a heat stroke. 

Here's the nice little van that got nine of us safely to the Lugoj gym (photos below).

I think this arena is the nicest thing in their entire city. The floor was a sport court, which I haven't seen since I have been in the States.

We won our first game against Craiova. Misi informed me before the tournament that this would be our toughest opponent, but it ended up being the only game that we won. After the game, we went to Portofino to eat dinner. The restaurant is just past that opened red door. I would almost miss it every time we would go to eat.

Dinner: The dinners were always the same. Some cold-ish chicken meat oozing with oil, served with mashed potatoes, rice, vegetables or vegetables and rice. 

Their chicken noodle soup was pretty decent. Not half as good as the soup from Bekescsaba, though.

Some meatball soup. It was alright.

Breakfasts was the same both days. They gave us a basket of toast (not bread) and meat and butter with jam. After just a few days of eating at the Portofino, I am so grateful to be returning to Bekescsaba where I can have some variety in the foods that I eat.

After Lunch on Thursday, we (Lana and I) ordered some Pompanash from the Portofino restaurant. It is basically two cakey donuts and their corresponding donut holes smothered in vanilla pudding and jam. Ivana previously lived in Lugoj and said it was one of her favorite desserts here. I definitely enjoyed it just as much.

After our loss to Klek (a misereable second league team from Serbia), Lana and I went to a local grocery store and found some cake. "It was perfect."

Later that night, Lana, Ivana, and I found ourselves with another round of Pompanash. Yeah it is that good. Twice in one day. 

Here's a couple photos of the city. I was surprised to find that it was not as clean as Bekescsaba

Here's the hotel room where we stayed. Lana got a kick out of sleeping with the blanket that had Playboy written all over it.

Here's a video of driving through an area in Romania. I'm not quite sure if it is Lugoj or not. You can hear the Serbian jabber and a little Hungarian in the background.

The Start of Preseason

As a new member of the BRSE, I was informed that before I played in my first match, I needed to bring the whole team a treat. Rather than buy them something from the store, I decided to make them something "American." I found this great recipe for homemade Reese's and I decided to try to make it. It was my favorite adventure for the week. Finding the peanut butter was fairly easy since the missionaries were able to refer me to the right store. The hardest part was the chocolate. Because of previous experiences at home in "The States" with failed melting chocolate attempts resulting in cougar bait cookies and other mishaps, I wanted the chocolate to melt nicely. I found some chocolate that they use for icing cake which seemed like a good idea. I ended up creating my own double boiler so that I could melt the chocolate evenly. (I realized after that I could have easily used my milk chocolate bar because it melts in my hand. If I had just put it in the sun it would have melted evenly and wouldn't have burned at all)

The pregame meal: I ordered lentil soup  (lencsegulyas-leves) This reminded me of Mom's soup. The biggest difference was the added dumplings and meat.

I also ordered the cheese covered gnocchi (sztrapacska- I guess Hungary's version of mac and cheese). It was a very different flavor of cheese. Almost like blue cheese dressing.

After lunch we headed on the road to Subotica, Serbia. You can sorta see our really great travelling suits in this picture. We have these old black tops and then some cutoff sweatpants. I don't think that I have ever seen these things before in my life in the US. I have seen people cut their sweat pants to be knee length, but I haven't seen anyone wearing these sort of shorts. At least intentionally. After a three hour "bus" ride we arrived in Subotica. Well, all of us except for Moris who didn't have her travelling card so we left her at the border. The Spartan team was really well prepared and killed us. We played six sets against them and they won five of them. I played in five of them and the second six played in the last set.

 The post game meal was at a place called the Boss Pizzeria. The food was sooooo good. Ivana and Lana insisted that it was because we were now in Serbia. Ivana and Lana are the two Serbians on the team. I basically spend all my time with them. They are pretty cool people.

Here's Ivana and I at another lunch this week. It was probably my most experimental meal. (Toltott dagado) translated it means spent dagato. After further investigation it was discovered to be something stuffed. Basically it was two slices of something. It was like they had made a huge roll of stuffing, covered it in pork and then sliced it up and gave me two of them. Then slathered it with a marinara sauce. It was pretty good, but the meat on the outside was pretty fatty so I didn't eat much of it.

Friday's dinner: cabbage soup and the Hungarian style Gyro. They really love their French fries. They have a permanent option to have the meal with "salted potatoes" instead of rice.

Here's the view from my window. Its been overcast like this all week. I wake up in the morning and look out my window to see the grogginess outside and put on a long sleeve shirt for the walk to the gym. Then when I would walk outside and it would be almost 30 Celcius, which is pretty warm. I guess that's how it is before the rainstorms here.

On Friday night, before practice, the Vice-mayor came to visit our team as part of his campaign. His gift to us was a massive platter of "golden pasta." It was a gift to the team as a result of their first place finish last season in the Hungarian tournament. This golden pasta is one of the girls' favorites. I would have to say that it isn't the best baked good I have had thus far. It was quite bland. Basically two layers of bread with a thin layer of nuts between. Then they drench it in bland pudding. Maybe I didn't get enough pudding. Oh it's also not even made of pasta. Weird.

Saturday morning, we met at 8:30 am and loaded up the "bus" to start our trip to Jaszbereny. We threw all our bags into this nice trailer and crammed into the Mormon assault vehicle.

The gym at Jaszbereny. It is small, but here we are all lined up and ready to play our first match. Each match consisted of three sets, no more or less.

We played two matches on Saturday. Between matches, Ivana and Lana decided to go get coffee and I came along to eat cake. I ate the nice cherry cake, Lana had a strawberry cake and Ivana ate a three layered cake with an apple, cherry, and poppyseed layer.

Dinner was incredibly small compared to all the other meals I have eaten in Hungary. It was good though. The chicken wasn't fried in ninety gallons of oil and the rice had some nice vegetables in it. The only problem was that they gave us about two cups of water for the four of us to share. Yeah that's just half a cup for four athletes that just played a match of volleyball. We definitely were parched.

Here's the hostel that we stayed at. I shared a room with Lana and Ivana. They are great roommates. Their Serbian chatter just lulled me to sleep. I slept really good that night. All around us hung our jerseys that we had washed so that we could play in somewhat clean jerseys.

Breakfast this morning. Man their baked goods are just to die for. There was a small round of bread with a chunk of ham wrapped around it. Also a loaf of apple stuffed bread. Super good.

Dinner after the match was another delicious fruit soup. Andy, sitting across from me, unfortunately did not get to partake of the delicious fruit soup that was part of our dinner (by choice).

The main meal was spaghetti with the fried chicken. It was fairly good. It was the first time I have eaten spaghetti since leaving the States.

We took first place in the tournament and took a nice team picture. Ivana was one of the special players who received the nice package in front of us. I'm not sure what it was for because I didn't understand anything they were saying, but I think I can safely assume that she was a tournament MVP, not just an award for being the oldest Serbian on the team.