hungary family 1

i helped joe with the ipod he got for christmas from kathy

in 2003 when i came to hungary there were some missionaries who coordinated everything for me and my teammates as we worked and lived in refugee camps. these missionaries are joe and kathy. they live in budapest. now that i'm back in hungary i reconnected with them, as i really liked them a lot when we first met. when i first got here in the summer, i met up with katy. when liz came for christmas, we spent the night at their house and hung out with them some, and for easter i went to their place again. they are my american/hungarian family here. i'm so glad to have them!

i had a few days off from school so i headed to the capital to see them. we went to the skanzen (an open air museum full of farm houses from all over hungary that have been transplanted to one place) and walked around the village. the weather was fantastic and i was feeling spunky just being outside in it. we walked around, tasted yummy foods they make there (old-school style), talked and took pictures.

joe and kathy have a friend, edina, who is in school to be a pastor. she was there visiting them too so we met and made fast friends. she lives closer to me than joe and kathy do, so it's likely we'll get together without our common friends some time soon. she spent 8 years in america so her english is great, her accent is more american than british, and she gets a lot more of the cultural differences than most of my students or even coworkers.

joe waters himself

sweet lady in one of the houses posed with me and joe

there is a horse drawn wagon that goes around the place

there is also a train and you can get on and off it all day long so you don't have to walk if you don't want to (we wanted to walk)

omg, these goats were so fun! we fed them some grass and they baaaad and baaaad

little sweet faces

there were, of course, some free range chickens and roosters

that little girl was giggling so much. time of her life, i think

joe had to ride the barrel horse, he just had to

look how pretty it is in this village suburb of budapest (szentendre)

there are random crucifixes everywhere. they were supposed to have been destroyed in the past few centuries, but many have endured in true hungarian fashion

they were making gingerbread cookies. i asked the lady on the right if the dough tasted good too, so she pinched me off a piece of the warm gooey stuff. it kind of tasted like apples, in a good way!

edina bought one of those for me, joe, kathy (who didn't come with us) and herself. delish!

this was a typical hungarian bedroom several decades ago. in fact joe and edina both said they remember their grandmothers' houses looking like that

joe wanted us to take a shortcut. across the creek. he was helping us girls by offering us a stick to hold as we hopped on the stones. i was wearing sandals.

pretty church. old, too.

edina made joe and kathy an apple pie (well, the hungarian version) and i got to taste it.
i must have the recipe, MUST.