First Trip to Hungary!

Debrecen, Hungary

On Friday (the 13th!), I went on a trip with the CIWC group (13 of us including the bus driver!) to Debrecen, Hungary.  This is a town about the same size as Cluj and pretty close to the Romanian-Hungarian border.  The group rented a little bus that had just enough room for all of us and almost enough room for everything we bought :)  The point of the trip was mostly to do shopping, but I still decided to go since it would be a great excuse to get out of town and get into Hungary for my first time!  It was a fun group of women that went.  We all brought tons of snacks for the 3.5 hour drive each way and basically ate the entire time. 

First stop: shoe store.  And, I actually found a few in my size, which apparently is just as hard to find in Europe as it is in the U.S.  Sigh!  I have been needing a pair of nice looking, comfortable boots to wear in the bad winter weather and ended up finding a pair.  They ended up being more expensive than I thought since we were having a hard time figuring out the Hungarian fornit exchange rate as compared to the Romanian lei, the dollar, and the euro.  We were such a tourist-y mess at the store, but we finally got the exchange rate under our belts!

After the shoe store, we were supposed to check out several other stores - mostly large grocery store types of places.  Before that, most of us went into the center of town to get lunch.  The center was so cute - with the requisite big church that appears in all European cities and a lovely little festival that had a great marizpan booth.  What luck!

Marzipan as far as the eye can see - yum!

I might think that Romania and Cluj looks awfully "western" but wow does this take it to another lovely.  So much cleaner and more organized and just a little more ornate.  Different but hard to explain how.

The center of Debrecen with the little festival going on during our visit.

The restaurant was quite nice.  They had a huge selection of goose (goose breast, goose liver, etc etc) as apparently Hungary is big on the goose.  We even passed a big goose farm as we entered the country!  I shared a mussel salad with citrus dressing and then had some pasta with spinach and shrimp.  It was pretty good and just nice to be out.  And, surprisingly enough, it worked out fairly well with everyone adding in their amount of money - I couldn't believe it!

From there we ran by Tessco, which is a huge British grocery store chain.  I just had time to do a quick run through, but it was fun to see.  Lots of things that we cannot get here like salsa, coconut, milk, and so much more!  It is interesting to see all the things you cannot get here in Cluj - it becomes very clear when I look at recipes because so many of them I cannot make because of a lack of ingredients.  It just means I have to be a little more creative and work with the local, fresh produce, which I think is nice.  I am trying to get up the courage to grill an eggplant to make salata vinete (like baba ghanoush).

This isn't Tessco but one of the other shopping complexes we stopped at.  Praktiker is like Lowe's or Home Depot, and Interspar is just a huge grocery store.

In case you didn't know, Hungarian is a very difficult language to learn and one of the few languages in the world (Zuni in the US and Finnish are others) that has NO connections with any other languages in the world.  Hungarian I learned on this trip (some of these do have connections but must not be traditional Hungarian words):

muffinok - muffin
mosdok - bathroom
drogetaria (or something similar) - drugstore
parfumeria - perfume store

I think that is pretty impressive considering that Hungarian is supposed to be crazy hard to learn and considering I basically was on a bus all day!

Here are a couple more pics of the trip:

Just a nice street picture in the center of town.

A big, fancy hotel in the center of town.

The CIWC group in the center of Debrecen.

And, because I know that you need to know what I bought.... (sorry no picture of the boots)

My Tessco purchase!  I am so excited about this - it is like febreze (which cannot be found here) and is very important considering the smoky restaurants here.  I have been looking for it since I have gotten here and, finally, success!!

I just love this little dish.  It is very tiny, about the size of a big piece of soap.  My sister needs to learn how to make these :)

And, yes, I bought a huge, breakable vase.  I cannot believe it either.  But, I just loved it, and it was only $35-40 dollars.  I guess it reminds me of the kind of thing I can imagine my sister making in her pottery classes in college.  Now, how will I get it home in one piece (about 1 foot tall and 6 inches across!)??

Thus, concludes my first trip to Hungary.  It was fun, and I am glad that know that that kind of shopping is (fairly) close by in case I ever need something.  Next time, Budapest!