I think about a month ago Pat & Nel told me they were sending me some food items that are hard to find here. The package didn’t arrive but then neither did other cards I heard were on the way. Dennis thought I should maybe find out if the post office was having trouble with my address. How to do that when I have yet to find a postal person who speaks English is a conundrum.
Last week just before we left town a letter appeared from the post office. I took it to my office for my Hungarian colleagues to translate. The first readers decided the post office had a 1,150 kilo package for me to pick-up. Did you order a car or a refrigerator? In a different office of colleagues assured me that I had a 1.15 colleages, “the package is long and rather thin.”
Next where to go to pick it up: I was told to go to the “main” post office. When I arrived at the suggested post office on Kossuth Lajos labeled “city post office” on my map I found it was the wrong post office. Two clerks looked at my map and after some discussion they pulled out the phone book and found the “main post office” of course it’s not called anything like that in Hungarian. They showed me the location on the phonebook map & what really helped wrote down the tram number and transfer point. I had to rest another day but this morning I took it on.
Once I got there it was relatively painless. The lines were much shorter than usual. 
I had just a couple of lines and an awkward moment because I’m too inept to count in Hungarian and I confused window “ot” (6) with window 8. There was again one more moment of slight panic as I saw them wheeling in several large packages on dollies. Those were for someone else at window ot thank goodness.
My package contains some very precious commodities, herbal tea that doesn’t taste like grass, decent granola bars and above all PEANUTBUTTER. I opened it in my office today & I can tell you one of my colleagues was pretty jealous. That & the assorted other junk food is going with us to Croatia this week. We have two 7 hour “no food” train rides ahead & I doubt that there will be a crumb left.
A word of correction: Leigh did not almost fall under the wheels of the train. The train was moving and I was holding onto Leigh trying to pull her into the train but my suitcase was where she needed to jump. There is some family debate as to how this situation should have been handled. In any case we have all survived our trip to Romania and the train trip to and from Zagreb. Even better we survived our auto trip around Croatia although we did not make it all the way down to Dubrovnik. We decided we would prefer a more relaxed pace rather than driving an extra 5 or six hours. We opted for an easier day on the Adriatic in a town called Makarska and a visit to a UNESCO/Croatian National Park. We have some wonderful pictures but with one computer and three cameras it will take some time to edit our collections. 
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