Sunday, July 15, 2007

Summer holidays at my grandma's village - 1960s ,70s


It is hot here and dull . For some unknown reason the summer festival had been cancelled here in Doha . This period of the year make me homesick .
Strangely , it is not our beautiful little town, Tapolca that I miss - but the village of my grandma - what I did not like much in my childhood .....

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 Every year we  made the same journey - coming from Western Hungary to the Great Plain - I loved grandma and her house  but I found some things  in her  village simply horrifying.
The railway station for example:The village station was a building about to collapse .The rails had finished there . It was the end of the world . There was  some terrible smell due to a rubber factory nearby . This village station would have been a perfect scene for Adams family  as the cemetery was also near.It was thrilling and sad .
In this collage you can see the protestant church , the station building , the meditation chair and some houses .
 In  my hometown Tapolca we had a neat building  for railway station with slot machines , vendors , a cute restaurant and so on. 
We left early in the morning from Tapolca , Western Hungary .Then we arrived late at night to the eastern village or rather the day after -as we spent the night at my uncle 's home . He used to live in a posh area of capital .
I saw very different lifestyles around myself during our journey .

In the real  collage of my  memories there is the veranda of my grandma's house , the garden, the big sorghum among which we used to play hide and seek , the raspberry brushes , the carpenter's workshop , the smell of wood , the baker , the smell of flour and fresh bread , maize , cows going home from the village pastures in the evening and blocking the traffic on the road , my cousins skilled in farming , a nearby lake , simplicity , backwardness , the heritage of glorious past - the rights of a"free town " rights which were given by the great freedom fighter Rakoczi ...
And when I think about all that I feel how lucky I am that I had had a grandma for nearly thirty years ...

 It was really something different to be there . We loved very much her  storage loft . It was full of dried corns on the cob - our favorite activity was to  rub it with our little hands to get the kernel off the cob- we enjoyed it so much !
expat Qatar