The Hungarian Baths

Apparently the town we are in is a resort area that attracts a lot of tourists from around Europe. We haven't seen any other "Amerikoi" who speak "Angolul" like we do...except for the other family who is here adopting through our same agency, staying at the same apartment as us (which is too cool!). But we hear a lot of different languages, mostly Magyar though.

Most everything around here is translated into about 9 different languages - Magyar, Polish, German, Russian, Romanian, Czech, Slovak, Ukraine, and English (British). The menus at restaurants have different sections for each, the signs are translated into a few different languages, the websites have different pages for each. We always look for the flag of England for the English section.

Some of the signs, and store and product names are already in English, which is pretty handy. It seems like if you were native to this area, you would inherently learn at least 3 or 4 different languages just from being around so many people speaking different tongues all the time.

We planned on one splurge day trip during our stay - so Thursday we spent the day at one of the Hungarian Thermal Baths, or gyógyfürdő (which sounds like "yeuj-fue-du). There are 450 of these natural thermal bath houses in Hungary, as geographically there are about 1500 natural springs bubbling up from the ground! The spa culture here dates back about 2,000 years...but I think the speedos are a relatively new wardrobe addition.

We chose the "Aqua Palace" to spend the day, as it was mostly indoor and had a lot of kid friendly areas. It had 8 different baths to choose from, all as warm as a hot tub.

Periodically different sorts of jets, lazy river currents, fountains, and bubbles would turn on. Our favorite was the bottom one shown, with the iceberg decor. It had a strong current that took you around a loop, and at another time a huge whirlpool section that was so strong you couldn't swim through it. We had lunch in the cafeteria (you can't get a hot dog or cheeseburger at the snack bar here...it was homemade goulash, spaghetti, stew over gnocci. Tasted like someone's gramma made it...yum!!)

Princess didn't want to put on the water wings at first...until I showed her that by holding them under my armpits I could float. I let her just hold them under her arms at first, then she figured out why we wanted to put them on her arms. She wore them the entire time after that. She was also pretty clingy, since she can't swim she held on to either me or daddy, or sometimes Monkey would let her hold onto his shoulders and walk her around. I tried to get her to kick her legs out behind her, and she did it a few times. Then I got her to lay on her back and put her head in, finally at the end she put her ears under and floated for about 10 seconds at a time. We saw progress!

Monkey is quite the swimmer, as you can see his feet were above the water more than his head was most of the day. While I liked to see the scenery above the water, he liked to explore the tiles below.

We never did get to play chess in the water with old men. That was Monkey's dream when we were planning our trip here - the whole reason we got him excited about the trip. Maybe next time. Or maybe we'll get grampa to play a game in the hottub at the Y when we get back? Ha.

5 hours and 11,000 Forints ($50) later, we walked home...wishing we all had white fluffy bathrobes and flip flops like all the other people walking around. All over the streets, people walking around in bathrobes...unless they don't have a bathrobe they just wear a speedo and a tshirt. I'm resisting the urge to post those pics!