Decoration, Memorial or Fetish?

It has been a very busy week!

The Eden House has been pretty full for the past week or two, with several people here for surgeries or visa runs.  You can always gage how full the Eden House is by the number of shoes on the shoe rack.  (Guests are supposed to take their shoes off upon entering.  It keeps the amount of dirt tracked in way down!

I also have been meeting with one of our single ladies for the past couple of weeks to help her process some things she has gone through.  One day she and I decided to go into downtown to walk around.  We found this wonderful import store and in it I found wheat gluten!  My daughter has me hooked on making homemade whole wheat bread, and she taught me that by adding wheat gluten, it will make the bread moister and less crumbly.   A 500 gram bag is only $2.50!

While we were in town, we stopped at a coffee shop and got those delicious pastries (Kurtos Kalache) that are cooked over a fire and then dredged in cinnamon sugar or finely chopped walnuts!  Yum!

To burn off some of the calories of the pastries, Glenn and I took an afternoon off and rode bikes to a park  that is half-way out to the airport.   It was just a little cool, so perfect for a bike ride. 

Unfortunately, half of Budapest was out that day at the park!  Evidently, there was some children's camp or children's bike club with the park as their destination because we saw this long line of about 75 children and a few adult chaperones on bikes pouring into the park all in a line!

One night during the week, we came home to find a car parked out in front of our house.  Now, ordinarily in America, this wouldn't be such a strange thing, but we don't have any houses right next to ours or directly across the street so to whom did this car belong?   Our house in on a corner and faces an intersection, so there are no houses right next to us, and no parties up the street who needed to park overflow cars in front of our house.   Anyway, it was parked there all night, so Glenn went out and took pictures of it from all sides JUST IN CASE it was the get-away car in a robbery or something equally sinister...

Well, it stayed there all night and into the afternoon the next day, and then disappeared, without incident.  Phew!

Dan and Janet left today for their stateside assignment so earlier this week we had a going-away dinner for them and invited Mary and Alvin to join us.  Janet is my morning walking partner so I will really miss her!  She will be back in July.  

Because all of us previously served in Africa, Glenn and I fixed peanut stew with chicken with various condiments on top because we all appreciate good ol' African food.  I'm looking forward to when Kari and Jonathan and Alec come from Senegal and I can learn another Senegalese dish or two.

This, this, this ... whatever it is, showed up in the empty lot across from our house earlier this week.  It is about 3 feet tall, made out of some kind of plastic or acrylic.  We don't know if the owners dropped this fine piece of art off the back of their truck (and hopefully, will come back to get it), or if it is a memorial to someone who was killed in this location (unbeknownst to us in the 5 years we've lived here) or if it is a fetish against something (like Americans?).  If it were facing our house, I would be concerned, but since it is facing the intersection, I don't think it is against us.  I'm just going to hope it is someone's lost art and they'll come back for it!

Catch you next week with lots of pictures of two countries we've never visited!