Shorter posts. More pictures.

I think I will post more often on here, more briefly. And include some pictures.
Just like the title of this post says.

Visitors to my blog

I have just had a look at the stats for my blog and found that I have had some visitors, which is surprising and quite nice. None of them liked it enough to comment, but then again I don't write much, and there doesn't seem to be much of a theme. The visitors came from Poland and the Russian federation, so I suppose it was due to someone idly clicking on my username after I had left one of my comments over at Polandian.
My comments there follow a predictable pattern (most patterns tend to be predictable, that being a condition of patternness.) Basically one of the Polandian writers makes some observation about Poland, mostly in contrast to the UK (or western Europe in general, if it really can be generalised.) I then write and say that it is just the same in Hungary and/or Romania. Someone once commented favourably on the wider persepctive I bring to the discussion, but that was a while ago. Hmmm. Anyway, I like to add my tuppence about one of my hobbyhorses - really, there are lots of similarities between the countries round here. Its the real differences, and the really unique things about each country and people which fascinate me. It just gets my goat slightly when bloggers claim that some feature of their adopted country's culture, cuisine, politics or building malpractice is "uniquely Polish" or "typically Hungarian" or "only in Romania." I know better, so I say so. Like this post on the Day of the dead which is quite interesting, but still mildly objectionable in claiming the practice for Poland alone.
Its my personal hobby horse, setting these slight inaccuracies to rights  and I feel qualified to ride it, so giddy up. And you shouldn't switch horses midstream. Neigh, neigh and thrice neigh.

 An example - gathering plums to make plum brandy, AKA pálinka, AKA śliwowica AKA ţuica AKA slivovitz, slivovice etc etc. All claim to be different - if so, then only as far as Czech plums are different to Hungarian ones. And what if the plum tree was on one side of the border, and the fruit fell on the other?

Shelves, Tax re-allocation, Water heaters

I had to go to the tax office today, but I got there at 12.02, and it closes at 12.00 on a Friday. It had taken me quite a while to work out how to fill out the form I wanted to submit, and I asked around at the technical university. This is the latest part of a lengthy process to do with the duty I have to pay on the flat we bought in March. My other half and I are joint owners, so we each have to pay a fairly hefty sum, the "illeték" - something like stamp duty. The amount of this is worked out by a typically complicated process, whereby the first 2 million forints is tax free, then up to 4 million is taxed at  2%, then the rest at 4% (or something like that.) So actually if the flat had only one owner he (I?) would pay more duty, if my maths are not mistaken. Anyway, we decided to try to ask the tax authorities - APEH - if we could pay this in installments, as they give you a fairly tight deadline to pay the lump sum, after which you have to pay a late payment penalty, which increases with every passing day. Applying for this involved a fair amoutn of hassle, filling in forms, writing a begging letter, working out how poor we could make ourselves out to be and proving it with supporting documents.
After sending all said bumpf we then received no reply for about two months, and were on the verge of phoning APEH (who would have said that they never received anything, ina typical knee jerk reaction) when they actually granted our wish. My letter said that they would not allow me to pay the full amount in installments, as they had found the overpaid taxes I was due after giving up being an "entrepreneur" a couple of years ago. These, they said, had to be transferred over to pay for part of the duty on the flat. This involved filling in a form, which I could only do after researcing the various tax codes of the 5 or 6 separate taxes and health and pensions contributions involved. Hungarian pay slips are long, complicated documents, as they list all these various taxes, contributions and deductions. Why they can't just have income tax and national insurance I don't know, but that is HOW THINGS ARE here, so I doubt anything will be changed, even if they draw up a new constitution as they will apparently be doing next spring.

Well, that was all rather dull, but I think it conveys the amount of time and energy that is wasted by Hungarian bureaucracy. The drones of this bureaucracy only work in the afternoons twice a week, so not only does everyone have to do most of their work for them, by doing lots of sums and finding out the codes they should know and use internally, but anyone who actually has a job has to take time off work to go and take a ticket wait in their offices for their turn to invariably told that a vital document is missing, and that they will have to come back another day.

Not that I really have a full time 9-5 job, but if I did it would be even more annoying. So it is a bit rich of me to call the bureaucrats lazy gets, but I will anyway, as many of them are rude, and seem to take delight in denying satisfaction.

In the afternoon I went to Praktiker, a DIY superstore and bought two shelves I had been procrastinatiing over for a week. I then went home and put them up in the kitchen, and they look rather good, neatly dividing the lower, rendered half of one wall with the upper, plastered half. They are "floating shelves", which is a translation from the Hungarian on my part, but I have just goolged it and that is indeed the English term too. No brackets. They look rather neat. Hope they don't fall off the wall.

To revive a blog

Having seen more than a few blogs fade away, fizzle out or stop abruptly I thought I'd let this one limp onwards instead, so it is back. My faithful readers would be glad, no doubt, although puzzled by a two year absence. As I don't have any faithful readers that won't actually be happening though.

I am back in Budapest, having been to Edinburgh for  three cloudy, cool weeks. In fact I have been back for more than a week now, and have watched a lot of old TV series (Twin Peaks, Life on Mars, erm, You Rang My Lord) and films, and read a couple of books - "The Resurrection Club" and "Snow Falling on Cedars." Both were rather readable novels, picked up at charity shops in Edinburgh. As I have just had to check the title of the former it may seem that it was not the most memorable book, but I think that may just be a trick of my memory's way of dividing up memory space.
The attentive reader would note at this stage that I clearly have had a lot of spare time on my hands, and would be correct to in this. I am still on holiday from university, and will not be back teaching full time-ish for another week. I have taken the opportunity to tidy up a bit, pay some bills, clear some administrative work and suffer from a cold too, but all in all I have been rather unbusy. Not quite "A Summer Wasting" but an approximation of it for someone with a new flat still throwing up little DIY tasks and other things to sort out. There is always something that needs doing - a bill to pay, net curtains to put up, a form to fill in - and this state of affairs is perhaps preferable to really having nothing to do - it gets me out of the house. And offf the internet. Hmmmmm....

Proofreading

Or copy editing, I should say.
I have a couple of sources of "vetting" work checking texts in English written or translated by non-native speakers of English. The topics range from public administration, through art history to computer game manuals. I made no active attempt to get this work, and it is rather interesting, once I actually get down to it.
Local county councils in Albania and Ukrainian land reform aren't, admittedly, the most fascinating subjets in their own right. The interest lies in trying to work out what the authors are trying to say, and then trying to come up with an acceptable formulation in English. Or in spotting a poor choice of words in a sentence which may initially look OK, until you notice that it isn't consistent with the rest of the text, or the dictates of logic.
Often I refer to bilingual ditionaries (online) to try and uncover what the writer might have been trying to say. I take the offending word (usually a verb) in an opaque sentence, look it up in Bulgarian, Hungarian or whatever. This invariably presents several options: odmienic, prekstalcic, zazmenovat' (to invent my own vaguely slavic language) and I then look these up in turn, and get perhaps: change, exchange, transform and reform for odmienic. The one that makes the most sense can then replace the rather bizarre verb that the translator opted to select. Fortunately it isn't always necessary to go to so much trouble, but it is a good method if I get really stuck - and I don't have the author to ask what on earth they meant by "The reform of money is fulfilled at transform offices, that's why we can state the elaboration of the above mentioned system draws up several offices" or whatever nonsense they had come out with.
It gets easier with practice, and I get to know the foibles of Hungarian translators, conceited Polish academics who think they can write English and so forth. Spotting the mirror translations is fun, and the characteristic confusion caused by the mismatch between the semantic field of a word in one language and another.
I also have to do a bit of background research into public administration, European jurisprudence and so forth. Sometimes I find that a word I would never accept is actually an established feature of "EU-ese" Wikipedia helps, as do EU and UK local government websites. I strike a balance between my own stylistic preferences and any standardized jargon in the field. Often translators will come up with formulations that I onsider to be too culture specific - e.g. "high school degree". Well, degree is obviously wrong, but I'd also get rid of High School. France doesn't have high school diplomas or indeed high schools. It has baccalaureates and lycees. A explanation of what each is can help e.g. " a type of secondary school leaving certificate" but calling a baccalaureate a high school diploma is as bad as calling it A-levels. The same should go for Slovakia, Romania, or Hungary. It is just slack thinking to do otherwise.

Easter(n) Monday

Spent watching "Der Untergang" - "A Bukás" in Hungarian dubbing, with Hungarian subtitles. Apparently written by different translators, as almost every line was phrased slightly differently.
This allowed me to while away a holiday while also being vaguely self-improving, thus satisfying the last-vestiges of my inherited protestant work ethic, or possibly working class guilt.

Yesterday enjoyed lamb, potato salad, taragon soup and lots of divers cakes.

I have apparently managed to go for an entire year without writing anything in this blog

...and I feel that this is a cause for hearty self-congratulation, so I have slapped myself on the back.
Blogging is one of those activities that you can feel guilty about doing - because you should be out in the sunshine - or feel guilty about not doing - because you aren't keeping up with your blog.
Whereas reading other people's blogs - as I have done rather too avidly for the past year or so - is definitely a guilty pleasure. Leaving snide comments is the guilty pleasure non plus ultra of blogging, but I'd better not incriminate myself, in case a any one is reading.

So perhaps it is indeed time to start that blog, even with its rather ridiculuous title. Mentioneing Budapest in the title could be dangerous - I am certainly no expert on the city. I have lived here a year and managed to go out very little, stay in quite a lot, and have had the most minimal of contacts with the "ex-pat community." This was partly by design, but now I think I can be bothered to do so. How self-important that sounds, but you know what I mean.

I have managed to get married in the past year, which should certainly have been writing about in a blog. It wasn't in Budapest though, but in the lovely little village of Torockó szentgyörgy.
Bizarrely, you can read about it in Szabadság, the Hungarian language daily newspaper from Cluj. The wedding was on Saturday 18th, and the new reached Kolozsvár a few days later, a report appearing on Thursday of the following week. http://www.szabadsag.ro/uj/
So apparently I didn't have to write a blog after all, as conventional journalism was on hand to record the more momentous events.

On November 1st in Hungary I assume everything is closed. All the shops that is. I evidently assumed the same thing last year. I am going out. Maybe I'll see something interesting things to write about.