Friday, June 17, 2011

Dependent, Documentaries, Debrecen,






This dependent thing is a lot tougher than I thought. I had visualized dependent cocktail parties, dependent trips to the outlet mall and even dependent “day at the spa.” None of this has materialized, yet. I haven’t given up but I have lost faith.

The last few days have been very busy, lots of deadlines and last minute details. The paper is off to be included in an InSEA DVD, the post cards and posters for Lisa’s show have been finalized, ordered and picked up from the printer. The image of the post card invitation will be it's own blog entry today. Lisa was busy looking for email addresses of the Ambassador and the State Department Cultural Attaché. They may as well stop by for a free glass of wine and a snack. We had to get new transit passes as our first month here in Budapest has come to an end.

I am happy to report that my recording of the narration of Lilla Lakatos’s InSEA documentary went smoothly. The film department at ELTE set up the session and Laslo and Gabor were the technicians. You may be able to listen to the pre-dubbing recording at the following link.

http://soki.web.elte.hu

The file name is: etyek_motivation2.mp3

From here the video technicians at the Etyek studios will dub my narration onto the video. There are already some mentions of a nomination by the International Hungarian Academy of Video Documentaries- Voice Dubbing category. (I HAVE VD) I’m already working on the list of people I want to thank; Laslo, Gabor, Peter, Istvan, Peter, Peter, Laslo and my family. Sorry, this was just too tempting.

There is a picture of Laslo at the video control panel.

We are also preparing for our trip to Romania and Transylvania. I have been sharpening our pitchforks so we will blend in. As you may recall, and Lisa will be reading for the first time, we are going with Andrea and Eva. We are leaving on Saturday morning and will return on Tuesday afternoon. We have rented a car, I think. I thought we had rented a car twice already however the rental car system here is a little different.

Remember the Seinfeld episode where Jerry went to pick up a rental car. “You know how to take the reservation but you don’t know how to hold the reservation, and the holding is the most important part.” He of course goes on and on but the point is, they don’t know how to hold the reservation. I had made 2 online inquiries and was told, in Hungarian, I had a reservation. This morning I went to United Hungarian Rent-A-Car and spoke to the lovely Alexandria. When I arrived she was vacuuming a car I’d never heard of, an Aspecta 1.4, she is in charge of taking the reservations, holding the reservations and vacuuming the cars. Talk about cross-training. She found my reservation and politely told me they would call me by 3 pm, if, they would have a car available. Her English was pretty good but I had no confidence she would understand the Seinfeld reference so off I went to wait for the call. There is a caveat to this story that must be disclosed; United Hungarian Rent-A-Car was half price of any other car rental agency, I was willing to wait. The call came in early, about 12:30 the lovely Alexandria called with the bad news, there would be no Aspecta 1.4’s in our Romanian travel photos. Plan B was to call Hertz, pay thru the nose and hope the US Dollar continues to gain on the Forint.

Our plans are to head toward Debrecen, cross the Romanian border and on to Oradea. We will then head north toward Transylvania and the Carpathians. With any luck we will have internet as we travel and will keep up with the blog, if not we will catch up on Tuesday. We are excited to have Andrea as a tour guide and of course excited about spending time with Eva. Andrea has promised us at least one angry mob storming some castle.

Other photos for today include; a group of cute camp kids with matching blue “Uncle Bob” bandanas, Steve and Joseph, antik sellers at the market across the street, a box of Corny Bigs at the cafeteria at ELTE, I have no clue what they are, and workers unloading pork on the street.

Off to Transylvania……hahahahahahah (Bela Lugosi, famous Hungarian, laugh)

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