In Search of St. Patrick's Day

Monday was St. Patrick's Day. I wasn't in the best mood starting out. I stumbled around a local supermarket a couple of blocks from our flat for what seemed like an hour, trying to find the few things I needed and find the lettuce button on a fruit-weighing/pricing machine (which works great otherwise), and screwing up the courage to ask one of the stock clerks what the darned code was for the leafy thing in my hand. With an exchange of hand motions, I understood that the cashier would deal with it when I got there. Then there was looking for the vinegar -- no dice -- and wanting some of the nice-looking meat behind the butcher's counter, but settling for a packaged ham in the meat aisle. I've been willing to point at things and just blurt out English words when I wanted things on previous visits, but I just didn't have it in me that morning.

Travel is a wonderful thing. It inevitably contributes to one's growth and understanding of the world -- and I couldn't be more happy that we've made this trip. But occasionally I just feel like a complete idiot, like a blathering infant trying to make the adults around me understand what it is I need. Today I somehow succeeded in acquiring a SIM card for a cell phone, but if it weren't for the divine intervention that sent a young woman with a decent command of English to be on line behind me at the precise moment the salesperson and I had arrived at our own little Tower of Babel, I think I would have sailed right over the edge.

(Margaret has been much better at diving into the language than I. I'm good at buying the books -- dictionary, phrase books, etc. -- but not in cracking them.)

Anyway, back to St. Patrick's Day. Later that day, I headed out to the tourist information office. I was looking forward to an encounter with a friendly English-speaking Hungarian whose job it would surely be to make me feel right at home here.

First I had to find the place. It was literally about 100 feet from the Metro stop, and I did end up there about an hour later after walking straight by it, then around and around in circles and into a book store where the clerk showed me where it was on a map, which I then bought.

But then I reached it and all was well ... until I decided that the younger of the two women behind the counter would be more able to answer my questions about where to celebrate St. Patrick's Day and where to get a cell phone, than the older woman next to her. So I began to ask the young woman about the latter, and she said, "What is your question? What are you asking me?" I had successfully located the only sourpuss in the entire Hungarian tourist information industry; she told me she had absolutely no idea where I could get a cell phone -- like she didn't have one herself! And then after interrupting my next question a couple of times, she informed me that St. Patrick's Day is celebrated nowhere in all of Hungary. I thanked her quietly, and left, practically tripping over the tail between my legs.

I went to lick my wounds (OK, I wasn't really feeling as terrible as all this, but it just wasn't my finest hour here) at a bookstore/cafe run by an American to recover and sipped some tea and looked at some of the literature I had picked up at the tourist office. As I flipped through the English-language 'Funzine' I stopped cold at a 2-page spread telling me several places where I could -- can you guess? -- celebrate St. Patrick's Day! It included Beckett's, a bar Margaret's uncle had also told her about.

So it was late when I got home and when we got done with dinner. Against our better parental instincts, but not wanting to miss the novelty of saluting St. Patrick in Budapest, we headed off with Devin on the trolley to Beckett's. By more than a decade, Dev was the youngest one there, and drew more than a little attention, particularly from a young Australian tourist who just had to take our picture. "We don't ever see children in bars!" she said, snapping away.

Well here we all are ... If only Madame Sourpus could've seen us ...


And here are Margaret and Devin toasting with their Guinness and OJ respectively.