Békéscsaba

After sleeping until noon our first morning in Hungary, we embarked on a road trip to drive from Tatabánya to Békéscsaba.

Feri let us borrow his car, and we ended up spending close to $150 on gas for the trip after we paid somewhere around $7-8/gallon. 

 

Hungary's version of the SUV.

Sarah particularly enjoyed the bed in our hotel.

King = two twins with a three inch wood board in between.

 It's somewhat difficult to miss the only hotel in town when it is so adequately labeled.

 We also enjoyed the largest Lutheran Church in Eastern Europe, although we couldn't go inside.

Interesting sidenote about the Lutheran Church pictured above:  Our first branch house that we rented in Békéscsaba was on Luther Street, that runs right into this large church.  If you can't tell, it has a yellow hue to it.  Across the street is a smaller Lutheran Church that they use for weekly services, which is also yellow (they only use the big one for Christmas and Easter).  At the other end of Luther Street was the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which was yellow, of course.  Yep, you guessed it, the building that we rented for our branch house was yellow, and right on the middle of Luther Street.

Here is an example of the conversation we had with people many times:

"Where is your church?"

"We rent a yellow building on Luther Street, number 8 1/2."

"Is that the big one at the end of the street?"

"Nope.  That's the Lutheran Church."

"Oh, is it the little one across the street?"

"No, that's also a Lutheran Church."

"Oh, you guys are down at the other end.  I know that building."

"No, that's the Seventh Day Adventists.  We're on the middle of the street."

"And it's a church?  I don't know of any churches on the middle of Luther Street."

"It's just a building that we rent where we hold our church services."

"Oh, I've never been there before."  Probably because we've only been here for a few months...

I bet you'd never guess it, but they got a new branch house on a different street, and, yep, it's yellow.  We enjoyed the branch conference that they had there, despite the fact that there were only 14 of us in church (Edina and her family left for Croatia for a vacation early that morning, so they weren't there).  After church, we enjoyed a lunch with a couple of the members and the missionaries at the branch house that Bea had cooked for us.

 

Bea is the one on the right, sitting next to me.