Lángos party!

  

On Saturday, we were joined by several other teachers from our program, and we headed to Briggi’s colleague Eta’s house to make the Hungarian Langos.  Langos has been described as an elephant ear with garlic, sour cream and cheese.  Eta is quite an interesting person – we met her at Margie’s birthday and she is now our bosom buddy.  She is the Hungarian contact for Rick Steeves, and leads the Eastern Europe tours that he offers.  She is also going to be starting the Russian tours to St. Petersburg for Rick Steeves.  She is an English and Russian teacher, and mother to many foreigners who have visited or lived with her family over the years.  She welcomed 7 Americans with open arms, and taught us the secrets to making our very own homemade Langos.  I volunteered to help by kneading the dough – which is apparently a 30 minute process.  I wasn’t doing it right initially, but by the end, I had some damn fine dough.  We spent the afternoon talking, telling stores, trying to score free Rick Steeves books (didn’t work mom, sorry) and enjoying the Hungarian hospitality.  

After eating our fresh Langos (I had three, which is going to cause a heart attack at any point now) we played a board game.  Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve played a board game?  A long time.  Unfortunately, its like riding a bike.  I reverted into my competitive cutthroat self and was determined to win.  The game we were playing is a Hungarian game called “Activity.”  You try to move around the board, and in doing so you have to either describe something using words, by drawing or by acting it out depending on what you landed on.  Unfortunately all the clues were in Hungarian, and referenced many things that we would not know, so we enlisted Eta to make our clues.  She dug into her many years of English teaching using idioms, songs, phrases and landmarks we’d be familiar with (as well has her 20 something daughter), and we had a great time.  Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, Frannie and I didn’t win.  I’m pretty sure that there was some prejudice against the clearly superior skills of our team, and we were dealt some tough clues.  Ok, not really, Lauren and Lyla got some pretty stiff ones, but we had fun anyway.