As mentioned in a previous post, I'd failed to get hold of my uncle to let him know that I was coming to the country with a possible visit out to him, his family and my grandmother in the offing.
However, on our very first day in Budapest, right after we'd walked into our hotel room and were unpacking, my mobile rang.
It was my aunt! I couldn't believe it. Had she somehow found out that we were coming? No, it turned out that she was ringing for an altogether different reason. My grandma was ill and in hospital and things didn't look good. But then when you are 93, I guess illnesses become more of a pray and hope type thing.
She was so surprised when I told her that I was in the country. We arranged to come down on the Friday to visit everyone and go and see my grandma in hospital too. It was lucky that she had called as originally we were planning to go down on the Thursday, unannounced and, as it was, it turned out that nobody would have been home!
So we were very fortunate, however unfortunate the circumstances of her call, that we had managed to get in touch.
I'd printed out train schedules before leaving the UK off the excellent Elvira Hungarian railways site and we went along on the Thursday to buy tickets for a 9:45 train leaving the following day. It turned out to be extremely easy and the cost of tickets was just plain silly. Just over four pounds for each of us.
The next day, though, we overslept slightly, so it was a bit of a mad dash to the station. Things wouldn't have been so bad but for the fact that when we arrived, there were two trains leaving at 9:45, both going to the same destination and both on platforms that were on opposite ends of the station! I frantically looked through my printed out schedule and saw something written on the paper for our train that matched one of the trains listed on the departure boards.
We had to jog down to catch it and I spotted someone in a Hungarian railways uniform lounging by the train of whom I asked, in Hungarian, if this was the train for Ujszsaz. "Not for Ujszasz", she corrected me, "But, yes, going through Ujszasz."
That was good enough for me, though afterwards, once we had settled into a carriage and caught our collective breaths, it did suddenly occur to me that she might have meant that it was going through Ujszasz without stopping on the way to its destination. I prayed not!
The train was quite old, and it was one of those with a corridor running along the left side and compartments with doors along the right. We walked along the train until we found a compartment that wasn't full of people and settled ourselves into the comfortable seats.
I said "Jo napot" (good day) to the one other occupant, a woman tucked into a seat by the window facing the direction of the train reading her book, as I remember during one of my Hungarian language classes, years ago, that it was deemed polite to do this whenever you walked into shops and/or train carriages. I knew that that was time well spent after all!
The train left right on time and it wasn't long before we had trundled away from the city and its suburbs and were crossing the flat Great Hungarian Plain. Fields of corn, sunflowers and the occasional vineyard broken up by small towns with stations made up of a single sign and sometimes a platform whizzed by. We only stopped once before I recognised the surroundings and station that marked Ujszasz, our destination, and we quickly disembarked (not helped by a really non-yielding door) to find my uncle waiting for us on the platform.
It was nice to see him again. He explained that we would drive back to the house and then straight off to the main town where my grandma was in hospital. As we drove back to his place he gave us a brief scenic tour of Ujszasz taking in the new school buildings in the town and the new nursery that my God son now attends.
It all looked much as I remembered it from my previous visits, though each time I go there always appears to be at least one more tarmac road than there was before. It was sizzlingly hot too, something that further evoked childhood memories of hot Summer holidays spent here.
My uncle's house was also much as I had remembered it from two years previous bar the fact that the room that I had slept in then was now back to being a storage room. It was even hotter inside and there were lots of flies buzzing around, something that a town with so many farms and livestock can't avoid.
Within a few minutes we were off again to Szolnok to see my grandma...
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