We’ve now been on the road for a full month, have left some 3200 km behind us, done several loads of laundry en route, and made it as far as Eger in Hungary. This marks Eloïse’s tenth country in thirteen months, not including our silly excursion into Ukraine earlier this week. What a shame she won’t remember any of this when she’s older!
It’s still crotch-squelchingly hot, at about 33°C, but the weather forecast brings hope for the coming days. The key word here is fagylalt, which was zmrzlina in Slovakia; better known to you, I suspect, as ice-cream. One has to fend off the heat somehow.
This is actually our second day here, having arrived at about 13:00 yesterday from Rožňava. We had lunch and spent the afternoon walking around town until the heat forced us inside.
Today, we ascended the 97 steps of the town’s very slender minaret and then attended an organ concert at Eger’s cathedral, the second largest in the country.
Tomorrow morning, we’ll amble over to the Lyceum (we were too late today) to see the Diocesan Library and the Camera Obscura, before driving on to the capital, Budapest.
Even fewer people here seem to speak English than in Slovakia, which is saying something. After almost a month in Czechia and Slovakia, whose languages are quite similar, I’d grown quite accustomed to seeing certain words on menus and such, and using certain phrases. Suddenly, all of that knowledge has been rendered useless and we find ourselves staring at words that we can scarcely begin to utter. No matter, another few days and we’ll have mastered this tongue-defying language!
I’d like to write at length about the Domica cave system we visited near Rožňava, and the Aggtelek, which is actually part of the same system, but just over the border on the Hungarian side, but I’m in the hotel foyer and the meter is running, as they say. Suffice it to say that the caves were utterly breathtaking and I’ll write about them and many other things when we eventually return home.