Hungarian karaoke

This past weekend, I went on a retreat with my office to Lake Balaton, Central Europe's largest lake (45 x 10 miles). During the summer, that's where you can find the entire city of Budapest - the highways are jammed both to and from. About 30/50 people went, so it was a fun group.

We kicked things off with a GPS sailing treasure hunt game in five groups. We had to answer questions about people in the office on our blackberries, and once we got a certain number of questions right we were given GPS coordinates to run or sail to.

At lunch, we conveniently ended up at a winery across the lake. We had gulyash in a big stewpot and sampled a lot of the local wine. People picked and ate fruit directly from the trees (figs, grapes, etc). Back home, we're so worried about pesticides and concerned that we need to wash things off that we might not even have thought of doing so. Wine is really big in Hungary - we were missing a person or two on the trip because they had to help their relatives with the grape harvest for their homemade wine!

We'd special ordered 40 streudels to the winery and finished them quickly. Then, we decided that they simply weren't enough - so we ordered 40 more and stayed another hour drinking more wine while we waited for them to be cooked. The streudel shop was apparently quite small, and we cleaned out their entire streudel supply. In typical fashion, the filling options were cottage cheese, poppy seed/squash, apple or cherry. (Cottage cheese is big here.)

We sailed back to the hotel (the sun set and NU beat Southern Illinois in the process) where the fun began. My teammate on my project is friends with an illusionist (yes!) and picked up some cool lanterns that you could light that would float up into the sky. We did that and then it was time for karaoke. One thing led to another and the head of our office insisted that I begin the show with Eminem. As you may know, this challenge was right up my alley. So, I rapped "Lose Yourself" for my new colleagues.

The karaoke was part English and part Hungarian. Every time a Hungarian song came on, at least two colleagues came up to tell me what it was about. ("Jenny, this is about how much he loves his Porsche!") Most songs were about friendship or driving fast cars. I could make out some of the words (like the song "Szerelem Vonat" is "Love Train"), but didn't get fully involved until someone approached me and remarked, "Hey! You may not know what the words mean, but you know how to read them, right? C'mon!!" That comment put me on a path to sing myself hoarse doing Hungarian karaoke. The whole office stayed up til 4am, and I had a great time.

After coming back to Budapest Sunday morning, I met up with co-workers that evening for a run around Margaret Island. We've entered two teams in a business 10km relay race this weekend, and I'll be doing the 5km leg for the women's team.

I also met with a threat that hasn't been followed through on yet.... people have been able to goad me into trying pretty much anything simply by saying, "But Jenny! This is typical Hungarian! You have to try it!" One thing that came up at the retreat was that I had yet to try fried fat or chicken feet. I will let you know how that goes once that comes to pass!