a "wild" train ride

"The hours grow shorter as the days go by."

But I did have the chance to stop and open my eyes. On my well traveled route from Debrecen to Vecsés by train, I'm asking myself how this adventure can possibly get any more like a fairytale. A strange winter mist is hanging over the Hungarian plains as the sun glows low and red between clouds, struggling through the mist to reach the frozen fields.

Small groups of dwarf deer laze around as if conscious that no natural predators remain. Oversized rabbits flee the racket of the train.  Stout raptors pose statuesque, keeping watch with feathers ruffled against the cold. I've always considered this intercity train expensive at $20 for the two hour ride. But how much would I pay to see the silhouette of a lone fox with a huge bushy tail, leap up and dive into the snow after a rodent?

Then, with my mouth still agape, I watch a pheasant with two dangling tail feathers that must be almost a metre long, swoop down to land in the snow outside my train window.

With some remnant of homesickness for my older home, I listen to the Bare Naked Ladies as I type this blog on my iPod. With only a few days left in Hungary, my adventure will soon enter a new era.

"Try to see the world beyond your front door..."

In a few days I'm off to Romania, then Bulgaria, then Turkey where I meet up with Dharlene at long last. Then together we adventure into the middle east.

an original poem I wrote on the bus from the Balaton to Budapest

Rest, fox  by Sheldon Valeda

Rest, fox.
A vision of you flashed by, resting finally, somehow still graceful
on unlikely grey ground, your Hungarian home,
your auburn hair still resplendent may fall like the oak leaves behind you.
Oblivious now to myriad parasites.
Halted sting of hunger. Halted quest for habitat.

Forgotten your misunderstood ancestors, stalked for sport.
Forgotten the unnerving cries and roars of crowded cousins
both shrill and deep, mutated,
snouts psychotically stretched to blindness.

On German ground in spring you woke me from nightmare
on moonless late eve you howled not,
but growled, struggling to drag me
on dewy grass into black forest,
my foot clamped softly through sleeping bag.
Unconvinced of consciousness, still connected,
we shared an absurd moment, before I sat up and gasped,
severing our physical bond.
You lept back, but less than a metre, and we stared,
exhilarated, eyes blazing both.

Would that I could drag you into the thin forest this autumn.
Me not growling nor howling, but whimpering.
No, my bus only flashed past, oblivious too.
No eyes blazing, neither.
Just mine staring inside after your message.

Rest, fox.

wildlife (part II)

A few posts ago you may have read my first entry about wildlife.  Well, I've seen a few things since, and want to include them for you here:

Now this first shot is a bit of a stretch, in terms of wildlife.  But I needed to put this photo somewhere because I think it shows the striking clash of the two worlds in Vecses, and perhaps in much of Hungary.  The beautiful, reliable old-school horse and wagon being overtaken by the modern auto.  It may interest some non-Hungarian readers that one of the few words in English that came from Hungarian is "coach" from the word "kocsi" (co-chee) which is a carriage, produced and exported from Hungary a very long time ago. Apparently they were sent as presents to royalty around Europe.  In Hungarian it's now also another word for car.  The pink house is my grandma's niece's place, where my grandma is currently staying.

classic Vecses scene

Let's get the iffy wildlife over with first.  Here is a pet rabbit at another relative's place.  Darn, I forget its name and gender.  Anyway, they were trying to prove to me that it has eyes.  (By the way, did you know that you can click on images to expand them?  Try it and see the one eye!  No doubt there's another eye on the other side.)

Csaba, Szilvia, & one-eyed rabbit

And I know pigeons are a bit of a stretch too, but I was mildly excited to see a pigeon coop in Vecses. (Hungarians: I know the second "e" in Vecses should have an accent, but I don't have a Hungarian keyboard  so it's just too hard to get it in.  I don't think this will devastate the Vecses tourism industry!  Everyone else: it's pronounced vech-eysh.)

Vecsesi pigeon coop

Vecsesi pigeons from that coop

I was excited to hear and then see a woodpecker in the front yard in Vecses!  I had to hang out the kitchen window to capture it.  This is only one out of about 30 awful photos of it:

woodpecker

young pigeons on my balcony, moments before a forced fledge

In case anyone was curious about the baby pigeons on my balcony in Debrecen, the good news is that they fledged from their nest recently!  The bad news is that I opened the door to get a better photo of them and really startled them, causing what I think was an early first flight, forcing them to flap desperately for the roof across the street!  Sorry little guys.  Don't you realize I'm the one who put those crumbs on the balcony for you?





Here's a billboard we stumbled upon in the "DEBRECEN GREAT FOREST" as the title says.  The next phrase has something to do with natural blah blah.  Hungarians, please feel free and encouraged, to comment with translations and corrections!

great forest nature billboard

I went to Veszprem recently (accent on the second "e", so it sounds like ves-pray m.) Near Veszprem is the great lake Balaton, apparently the largest lake in Europe.  Poor Europe, which in its entirety probably fits inside our great lakes in Canada, which are just a few of hundreds of giant lakes. Regardless, the Balaton is plenty beautiful and I had perfect weather there for scampering in the icy water and strolling and reminiscing. (Many years ago I lived for one year in Balatonalmadi where I taught Physics for the first time; yes, in English.)

water fowl in the Balaton

As you can imagine, by November the Balaton is very chilly.  It beckoned me into it, but I didn't bring a bathing suit (which hasn't stopped me in the past!) and I had the feeling that if I went all the way in, I wouldn't be able to get out and they would discover my popsicle body frozen in an awkward embarrassing half diving pose. Instead I just waded in a bit, the icy water burning my feet such that I could only stay a minute or two, then jump out and shake them and say "ooouuu ouuu ooou" really loud or if a Hungarian was passing I'd switch to the more understandable "huuuuu haaa, huuuu ha, huu ha!"

clams in the Balaton

I can't claim the fame of discovering this little gem in cedar shrub; a couple were on their knees taking macro photos of a shrub, so I had to see what was up.  There was a similar snake in the shrub on the left.

I have no idea what kind of snake this is; but it's pretty!

another nature billboard, this one at lake Balaton

On my way back on a bus, I spotted a pretty fox, laid out lengthwise on the side of the road.  Since it was somehow still graceful there, I thought, only for an instant, that it was sleeping; but it was obviously road-kill. It brought me back in my mind to an encounter I had with a fox in Germany: I was sleeping in a sleeping bag on the lawn under the stars beside a castle in Heidelberg when I was suddenly awoken by the feeling of being dragged by my feet.  Well, just one foot.  When I gained full consciousness, but couldn't believe that I had, I saw a fox and realized he was clamped onto my foot through the sleeping bag, painlessly.  And he was struggling to drag me into the black forest.  I know it wasn't a dream.  I made a pathetic cry aloud, in shock and he jumped back, still facing me, staring me down for a few moments.  I reached for my bag with my camera in it and he scampered off into the forest. I got a dark blurry picture in which can be seen a distant, tiny, faint rusty blur.

Seeing this dead fox on the side of the road in Hungary and reminiscing about my past encounter in Germany inspired me to write a poem during my bus ride back to Budapest.  I'm too insecure to include it here.  It might be a masterpiece, but more than likely it's crap. It's only the second poem I've written (as far as I can recall) and this is the only one I actually like.

Back in Debrecen one evening I had what was to me a mystical experience with an animal.  I was strolling downtown in the pedestrian square and heard the beeping of a bank machine as I passed someone doing a transaction.  Then I detected another layer of sound on top of that, something strikingly beautiful.  I circled around, perhaps a bit too close to the guy making his withdrawal, and saw him nervously look over his shoulder a couple times.  Finally I located the source of the sound: a smallish black bird in a small tree above me.  I could be wrong, but it seemed to be communicating with the bank machine beeps.  The guy scurried off with his cash and the machine fell silent, and so did the bird.  I whistled something short and random, and the bird seemed to immediately reply with a tune slightly more complex.  I tried to match it.  The bird added some impossibly complex gurgles and lengthened our duet.  This repeated three times, us taking turns, until the bird perhaps became bored and blew me away with a one minute symphony that I could never believe a single bird could achieve, if I didn't see it with my own eyes and hear it with my own ears!  Then it fell silent, its victory utterly obvious, and I strolled off, defeated by orders of magnitude, but delighted by the exchange.

In the last post about wildlife, I guessed that this black and grey bird was a magpie.  I've seen magpies in Australia but forgot that they are pitch black and snow white, not grey like these birds I see around here.  Thanks to Kitti for suggesting that it's a hooded crow, common in eastern Europe.  I double-checked and she's right.  Since then I saw a lot of magpies in the cemetery in Budapest after the Day of the Dead, no doubt rummaging around and finding lots of shiny objects to steal such as the lids to the contained candles.  They're clever and shy and so I never got close enough for a clear photo.

But these hooded crows are clever too!  At the same cemetery I kept hearing a loud, hollow clunk every couple minutes.  I followed the sound and found a hooded crow pecking at something on a marble patio in front of a tall structure in the centre of the cemetery. I saw that it looked like a walnut.  From a distance I watched the crow pick it up, fly to the top of the building, and drop it onto the marble slab below with a loud clunk.  Then he would fly down and see if it split sufficiently to get the contents out.  I approached to get a photo but it got spooked and flew off.  I felt bad because the cracked walnut was left behind.  Although I was hungry, no, I didn't eat it.

Here's the guy again who caught the pike.  In the close-up you can see that he's even more shocked than I was to see what looks exactly like a northern pike in Hungary.  It could be a musky but without the stripes or spots it's hard to tell.

It begs so many questions: how did he catch it? Why is he fishing naked? Why is he in a cemetery?

Ya, I know, this is really morbid.  But it really fascinated me to see that a crow died and didn't even make it to the ground.  Sorry if it bothers some.  It's just part of the cycle of life.  There's a lot of mosquitoes here and back home this could be a sign of the West Nile virus (we're told to report sightings of dead birds, and I think especially crows for some reason.)  Now I wonder if the West Nile virus is in Hungary, and if so, if I'm the only one who has considered that!

But to be honest, considering the multitude of crows that I later saw, the chances of seeing a dead one must be fairly high.  Apparently hoards of crows collect in Hungary this time of year from all over eastern Europe.  I was waiting for a bus for a while, to take me back to town from the big cemetery in Debrecen, and noticed how scores of crows where passing overhead.  After a while I realized that I unconsciously viewed dozens of large groups go by and became conscious that it would add up to a lot of crows!  Just as the bus was finally arriving, I beheld a giant whirl-wind funnel of crows over the cemetery across the street.  My jaw dropped and I staggered across the road toward the cemetery, oblivious to the fact that my bus had at long last arrived.

Unfortunately, once again, by the time I got closer, regained my presence of mind, drew out my camera and turned it on, they began to disband and settle into the trees.  Notice all the trees behind the cemetery building in the photo below, weighed down with dozens of crows.

Breath-taking or creepy?  It seems superstitious to find it creepy.  I do admit that if I was directly under such a volume of birds, I might find the high probability of getting splattered with some messy fallout rather creepy, indeed.

The Wildlife in Debrecen, Hungary

Before you biologists or naturalists get too excited, let me warn you that there isn't really any wildlife here.  Well, that's what it seemed like at first, but I did eventually discover a few mildly interesting critters.  It's weird not seeing squirrels scampering around all over the place, nor their once adventurous furry flattened carcasses littering the roadside.  Not a squirrel in the country, as far as I can tell.

"wildlife", sort of

Of course, there are the typical boring city creatures, such as pigeons galore, sparrows, and mosquitoes.  The mosquitoes are fairly plentiful.  I think I've killed an average of one per day since I arrived in Hungary, but the strange thing is that they don't seem to bite, or perhaps they don't like my foreign blood. On my balcony there is a pigeon nest behind a broom, which seems to be constructed of pigeon poo (the nest I mean, not the broom.)

my balcony with the nest behind the broom

The fledglings are getting brave and wandering around the balcony now.  That explains why you can't see them in the poo nest behind the broom.

a baby pigeon on my balcony

There are lots of crows too.  And half black, half grey ones.  Are they magpies perhaps?  I thought they were black and white, not black and grey.

a magpie?

Other than colouring, and a very wimpy call, they seem exactly like crows.

a chilly, chilling turtle

I saw this turtle come out of the frog pond in the "great forest" to sun himself, but when he felt the eight degree cold and a wind chill, he changed his mind and dove back in before I could snap a photo.  He posed nicely in the floating leaves for me when he resurfaced.

two over-crowded bat houses

I didn't even have my camera, sadly, when I first discovered something strange going on in the tree shown above.  I heard a lot of squeaking on my way by, and it was really bugging me.  I kept circling the area saying "what is that sound?"  I first thought it may be some kind of insect I didn't know about.  Then I just decided to sit under this tree and stare and listen.  Did I see something move in the dark of one of those holes, I asked myself.  Then a bat stuck his head out, then back in.  Suddenly one popped out of the top hole and took flight.  This was at 4 pm on a warm, sunny day.  Then another one popped out.  Were they young bats fledging from the nest perhaps?  They were all pretty big though. All in all I watched over a dozen bats come out of the two holes and fly away, all of them simultaneously shouting, a squeaky symphony.

I didn't see any moles, but evidence of them is obvious everywhere: myriads of molehills.  

mole hills

These bugs were unfamiliar to me.  Not common, but plentiful on this tree!

strange bugs on a tree by my street

And of course, the frog pond has frogs.  I saw some quick ones, but they were too quick for my camera, sorry.  Here is the frog pond below.

frog pond

I had to get some willow tree shots for Dharlene:

me under a willow on the bank of the frog pond

Speaking of trees, they have a lot of oak and maybe beech?  And some kind of maple with giant leaves:

big maple leaf

There are tree-huggers, and then there are hugging trees (you may have seen this guy in one of the Lord of the Rings movies)

the hugging tree

No raccoons, no colourful birds, no possums.  Not sure about wolves or coyotes.  If I get attacked by wolves in the great forest, and survive, I'll definitely blog about it for you...

McDonalds in one of Budapest's train stations, with a McCafe

one of many mosaics on a random wall (can you see the horses?)

all of Marika's tiny pets in one basket

yield to radioactive sheep?

she redefines the term statuesque!

a cool statue in Munich

catching up on more photos

me and a lion, somewhere in Munich