Musuems should be free

SimonTrew wrote:

.....The Fitzwilliam in Cambrige has a fantastic collection of impressionists ,...

Wot? Mike Yarwood?  (US: say, Tina Fey).

But yes, they should be free.  The Transport museum isn't bad and there's the tram museum in Szentendre. Kids like it as they can climb on the trams.  There's also the plane museum down at the airport. Worth a look.

Met my closeted old boyfriend at age 16 at the LA Natural Arts Museum, but that's another story...
Nice red headed Jewish boy from a nice family... Too bad he wasn't "out of the bag" when I met him, great  friend and fantastic tailor, also a professional  ballet dancer...also suffered from epilepsy and had an attack on stage in the Netherlands... He came to on a flight back to the states. Loved our roller skating dates all around Hollywood . I was to young and silly to drive and he was afraid of having a fit while driving so roller skating was our way of transportation.He was 4 years my senior, so strange really met him at a school outing and then found out later he knew all of my Hollywood friends from his school days. Birds of a feather do flock together after all.
He was head over heels in love with me because I happened to be wearing a 1940's jacket with a fresh flower in my lapel that day.  Lost him later because my BFF looked more like Mia Farrow  then I did...
Sorry, I always do have a odd story.Very true stuff but very odd too.

Yes museums are lovely but I also get bored after a couple of hours.
Here in Hungary if you are over age 62 then it's usually half price.

My husband hates going into museums and going to the opera.
He also dislikes sitting in cafes or eating out, sometimes I really do wonder if he is really European or not.

I've dragged him kicking and screaming to a few museums over the years so pretty much have seen most of the larger ones in the city.

Crazy stuff does happen to us, went to one Eszterhazy museum in 1986.
Nightmare!!!!
My husband had just bought himself a brand new Sony cam recorder and was filming inside the place.
I told him someone was going to get hurt because they made everyone put on some cloth material over their shoes to protect the floors of the old estate.
Well. as my bad luck would have it, my husband approached the large staircase and was not tuning in as usual , didn't hear me tell him to watch out for the stairs....
Went down hard but didn't hurt his camera.
Broke several ribs but refused to see a "horse doctor" out there. We drove back to Erd .. ambulance and doctor were called , long insane tale, I swear my life is cursed.
The air was gone from him and he didn't even speak for about one hour, people carried him into a back  room to get his breath back, no one even thought to call for ER help! A few tourists spoke German with broken English and Hungarian , they tried to help but no one in Hungary was speaking much English back then in that area of HU. I wanted to just fly away...Was thinking to myself back then, just great, here in a oddball place with my 12 year old son and can't speak to anyone and we are in a communist country on top of it all... Life is good.Hmm.

Hours went by then we drove back to Erd. My husband drove between moans of pain for about 3 hours to him moms home.Waited another couple of hours for the doc to come to the house, back then you had to have a doctor call the ambulance before they would show up.
The ambulance drivers were so rude with us because we had US passports, they actually told my husband that we were no longer in the US and the sped up on gravel roads with his ribs rubbing each other an d him screaming in pain. Felt sorry for the other 3 accident victims in the same ambulance. They used to just do a few emergency runs a day out in Erd and take several people in at one time.
No wonder we waited hours for them to show up, some poor guy holding his bleeding head and some other man so out of it no one could tell what was his issue.
We jumped out of the ambulance and my BIL picked us up and rove us to Budapest to get X-rays.
I am so over museums, too much history for me!

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

.....The Fitzwilliam in Cambrige has a fantastic collection of impressionists ,...

Wot? Mike Yarwood?  (US: say, Tina Fey).

Actually I was going to tack him on the end of the list in the original post, but resisted the temptation. Thee and I are probably the only two people here who remember Mike Yarwood. Unfortunately you still made me laugh though I am not sure why. The Marx Brothers, Groucho, Harpo, Karl...

fluffy2560 wrote:

But yes, they should be free.  The Transport museum isn't bad and there's the tram museum in Szentendre. Kids like it as they can climb on the trams.  There's also the plane museum down at the airport. Worth a look.

Yeah I don't think I have been to the one in Szentendre, the misssus' office used to be there (now near Arpád Hid) and that would have been another pleasant hour or so waiting for her to get out of work or something, I guess you take the HÉV to the end? The castle at Godollo (sorry can't do the accents on this layout) is quite good not much for the kiddies though, again quite a trp on the HÉV. Good indian restaurant there actually. The train museum at MÁV-telep is quite popular with the kids but not so much for steam nuts, they have a few rusty old Russian locos but nothing in working order, the turntable is in working order and you can have the fun of being T U R N E D   A R O U N D  V E R Y  S L O W L Y. They have a kinda sit-on ride on train I guess about a kilometre long that choo choos around the site for the kiddies to sit on and wave to mum and dad etc. It is worth an afternoon out to that, they often have motor shows there and the ticket is the same price so choose a day when they have a motor show. We just paid with the culture card but I think it was a couple of thousand each, I imagine they do a family price, and they have some old stock etc indoors but not a great deal in the way of rolling stock really. We just walked there but on open days I think they  run (just normal MÁV) trains from Nyugati that stop on the station site.  Definitely worth a visit but probably a couple of hours you'll have seen everything. There's a model railway that is kinda all right but nothing astonishing, done by the model railway club (to nobody's surprise). The kiddie railway is quite good cos they have signals and level crossings and stuff, obviously being a big boy I was not allowed on it but the kiddies all seemed to love it.

I keep being asked by one of the volunteer organisations to do tour guiding in Budapest but you would get a very SimonTrew flavour of it which might be good or might be appalling. I have no idea where nightclubs are or which is the best langos, I just know where Lomex Electronics is and where you can get dimmer switches for 1.450 each. Such is the way of being a resident, you rarely do the tourist stuff. Perhaps easier with the a family because you think, oh, they might not see this again. Had the same when I lived in Cairo as a teenager and relatives flew over to visit, OH NO DAD DO WE HAVE TO GO TO THE PYRAMIDS AGAIN? IT'S SO BORING DAD. OH DAD DO WE HAVE TO?

Marilyn Tassy wrote:

going to the opera.

When I first came to live in Budapest I went on a crash course in Hungarian at one of the schools. Which was ridiculously expensive and useless because you get taught what a hotel is (szalloda, no it is hotel. Look around in Budapest, they are called Hotel. The Astoria is a szalloda and the  nemzeti szalloda at blaha luiza tér, but even then they also say hotel. Hotel is patently hotel. Taxi is taxi. What I wanted to be taught was what a three-quarter-inch grubscrew is or half a pound of inch eights or anything useful like that, just szalloda and good morning and may I have more bread please, this soup is very hot.)

There were eight of us in the class and all of us spoke English and at least one other language pretty well (I speak French very well and a smattering of other romance languages, a bit of Japanese and Arabic) so it is not as if we were totally immune to the idea that different languages do things differently. One girl she had got a job at the ópera, the posh one on andrassy. I though I am in here if I play my cards right, free opera tickets. Well, I think she was just a singer in the chorus or something but she was so full of herself, right little opera diva. But she had some kind of notion that Hungarian should be German. She wasn't herself German, but for some reason whenever a Hungarian word or construct was taught, she would say  "No, that is not right, Match, gyufa, in German it is fuhrerstreiker" (I don't know German) or whatever. "No, that is not right, autopálya, motorway, in German it is autobahn". "No, that is not right, pályaúdvar, in German it is bahnhof" or whatever. No we have pályaudvar, allomás, and [vasut]mégallo. It depends on  how big the stop is. Look there is no hard and fast rule we are not German. If lots of trains stop there it's an allomás. If they stop there and can't go any further it's a pályaúdvar, except that some termini like Kelenfold they continue. And mégallo, well they do all stop there yes that particular station all the trains that come there stop there but on the fast lines many may pass without stopping oh I give up.

We had two weeks of this,  I just wanted to strangle her. "No, that is not right". Look, love, on the top of the piece it has instructions in italian that translates Not Too Fast (who do they think I am? Lewis Hamilton? Which is the soft pedal and which is the clutch?) and Sotto Voce which I would like you to do for a bit, now your old eyetie, that is a romance language right? German is, er, a Germanic language. Do I have to teach you some basic history of Indo-European languages? Apparently. English is a bit of a mix of both and some latin and greek thrown in. Magyar is not, it's Finno-Ugric.  It's related to Estonian and Finnish, but they've rather drifted apart over the centuries.

You are not going to get very far trying to compare it to German, you just have to learn it. You might be all right at the opera singing Wagner in German or o sole mio in Italian, but you patently aren't doing your homework. Yes, you say hallo at the end of a conversation. Because it is "hallom", the verb... look do i have to go into the history of Edison's Hungarian assistant, it is apocryphal, Edison wanted the telephone  greeting to be "ahoy", never mind... yes.... you say "See ya" at the start of a conversation. Look, just PLEASE TRY TO FORGET GERMAN. IT IS NOT GERMAN.

She really could not get it and disrupted the whole class. I think she managed to count to five by the end of the week. Of course she stayed on for another week or two, kerching kerching kerching (I didn't, I realised I already knew more than what they were teaching me). The teachers at these schools get paid a pittance but to an extent deserve it. Ours was Hungarian whose second language was Spanish and was now teaching people, all of whom spoke a second language well, in English, a language the teacher didn't speak particularly well. One lass I got on with quite well, spoke fluent Welsh (another "strange" language) and I don't speak Welsh but can do the Welsh sound system from long experience of knowing Welsh people, so we would have mock-Welsh conversations just to  wind the teacher up who can't say llantrisant or machynlleth and gwynedd and things like that. Pobol-w-cwm a televio llantrisant? Borra da, look you, machynlleth engineivor coalllyminllech and so on. (I can also do the guttural sounds in Arabic. Hungarians have a great deal of trouble with "th" and "w", I myself never get close to "Új", 'new' Two bloody letters and I never ever get close, end up having to say 'not used but..', 'Oh, új'. Yes, that's what I said. No you didn't you said ooooooh. I didn't I said új. Oh well) These language schools are complete waste of time. As if you didn't know that already.

I've heard they are a waste of time.
My hubby has started out teaching me some Hungarian but he goes so fast that I lose interest.
I know myself pretty well, I actually do very good under pressure of competing with others, even though I really don't care if I come in first or last.
Just like a group setting for learning.
I am a good lab rat.
Over the years our friends thought it funny to teach me rough street Hungarian as a joke, I can swear like a sailor in Hungarian but can hardly order a decent meal in the tongue twister language.
At this point in time, I really do not even care one way or the other.
I'm strange enough in my own language, can't even think about how I will come off in Hungarian.
I scare the life out of most Hungarians we know as it is.

Marilyn Tassy wrote:

My hubby has started out teaching me some Hungarian but he goes so fast that I lose interest.

The missus has the same problem as your husband. Because her job is in English, my job is in English, and she speaks very good English, it is just easier for her to speak English than have to slow down to speak Hungarian to me. But it is no good for me, because then I don't learn much Hungarian. I am quite good on nouns and stuff, but I can't really string a sentence together because I only have about three verbs, csinalni (to do), lenni (to be) and beszelni (to speak). I probably do have a few others but I get by on a very limited range of verbs so am constantly making rather roundabout sentences to say "The washing machine has done what washing machines do"  instead of "the washing machine has finished". Although "mosogép" is a far better word than "washing machine". Yet "hoover" is still the best word for a vacuum cleaner. Because it is onomatopoeic. It goes around bellowing  HOOOOOOOOVE. Patently, it is a hoover. How could it be anything else?

One of the strange things about monolingualists is they tend to assume that people translate. Actually translation is very hard (I have translated many articles from Hungarian or French into English on Wikipedia; never try to translate out of your native language, always only into it.) But when you are talking, you do not translate in your head, you think in the language you are talking in. Then you come to a bump when you are nicely proceeding through a sentence and don't know what something is called because then your brain has to step down a gear, find it in the other language, and try to translate it back. My brain often crunches the gears and then I come out with the French word for it instead of the Hungarian, which doesn't help as the missus don't speak French, unless it happens to be a free ride where the French is the same as the Hungarian, which is quite rare. But usually you are not thinking in English, say, but in Hungarian or French or whatever. You don't mentally translate everything someone is saying.

And to a first approximation, everyone on the planet is multilingual. Being monolingual is a minority.

Marilyn Tassy wrote:

I've heard they are a waste of time.
My hubby has started out teaching me some Hungarian but he goes so fast that I lose interest.
I know myself pretty well, I actually do very good under pressure of competing with others, even though I really don't care if I come in first or last.
Just like a group setting for learning.
I am a good lab rat.
Over the years our friends thought it funny to teach me rough street Hungarian as a joke, I can swear like a sailor in Hungarian but can hardly order a decent meal in the tongue twister language.
At this point in time, I really do not even care one way or the other.
I'm strange enough in my own language, can't even think about how I will come off in Hungarian.
I scare the life out of most Hungarians we know as it is.

My Hungarian is total rubbish even after being with Mrs Fluffy for 23 years.  Looking back, we were were travelling around a lot so speaking English was a lot more important for her than for me to speak Hungarian.  So I kind of ignored it a lot. She's now really good in English and I'm still rubbish in Hungarian.   I should have paid more attention to it.

SimonTrew wrote:

One thing I like about England, and I think it is the same in the rest of the UK, is that museums are usually free admission.

When were you last in the UK?