Journal of a Sabbatical

August 12, 1999

the price of laundry

Settling up the accounts with Edit is a major project requiring István to interpret and that handy-dandy Hungarian/English dictionary fan thingie we used to request the boiled eggs. My laundry finally made it to my room all neatly folded and pressed and mixed in with Carol's so we had to separate it out before packing, but Edit's bills had it carefully enumerated separately. Go figure. Edit had to call around to laundries in Budakeszi and Telki to find out how much to charge, as the lodge does not normally offer laundry service. Evidently rich German hunters don't need to change clothes as often as sweaty botanists. I can't help wondering if Janos Kadar had to do his own laundry in the tiny sink though :-) And who did Brezhnev's laundry?

The price of the wild boar painting went up while Edit was checking on the exchange rate, but it's still a bargain at $71. My one indulgence.

We moved to downtown Budakeszi - if Budakeszi can be said to have a downtown. I'm sharing an apartment with Carol, Mary, and Isabel on the second floor of a house near the bus stop and the lumber yard. This house has window boxes full of geraniums everywhere: the stairs, the windows, the garden, the doors... it's geranium city. That's saying something since it seems like red geraniums in window boxes are mandated by law in Hungary.

We're on the top floor under a very steep roof. If I sit up to read in bed my head hits the ceiling.

The TV works, as does the satellite dish - unlike Edit's luxury hunting lodge - so we watched the English language news for the first time since we arrived. It's so depressing! Life is much easier to handle if you don't watch the news.

The new landlady loves my wild boar painting. She was oohing and ahhing over it when I was moving in. I have it perched on the bedside table just like I did at the luxury hunting lodge.

Besides moving, I re-pressed some of the Japan specimens. Working with Judy in a room on the first floor of the white house so we'd be cooler, we wet down the wrinkled specimens with a spray bottle of water (it apparently once held Japanese window cleaner) and stored them in plastic bags until after lunch. After lunch we took them out and they were much smoother and softer for us to flatten. Once you uncrease the leaves and smooth out the bad parts, you pack the specimen between two layers of cardboard and a layer of sponge. Then you tie them up into bundles (with twine - not pink raffia) of five or six for the dryer. It was nice to see some of the really wrinkled Japan specimens looking smooth again. Looks like they're going to press up OK.

Today is the first day it hasn't been oppressively hot and humid. My clothes weren't soaked and my hair wasn't slimy when I went back to the apartment tonight.