Hungary Hot Springs

We’re loving the hot spring experience in Hungary, a country supposedly covering an deep underground reservoir of hot water. Similar to Japan, the locals have been enjoying the springs for centuries for their supposed curative aspects and spa towns dot the map in Eastern Europe. Not too sure about the health benefits, the closest thing we’ve experienced is sunburn (the weather’s been wonderful lately)


Right now staying in a tiny spa village called Heviz. The whole development is based around ‘the largest biologically active, natural, peat-mud thermal lake of volcanic origin in the world’ (I don’t understand all of that so though I better quote it.) (I heard its mildly radioactive as well) Anyway, it’s a relatively enormous 4.4ha pond 38meters deep that’s warm summer and winter (though winter can’t be much fun – its only the temperature of a swimming pool in Singapore, not at all like a hot bath.) It is tremendous fun though, its like getting good exercise while having soak. Because if you don’t swim you would drown or get too cold.

Budapest (we love that city!) is also full of hot springs and there are thermal baths spread throughout the city. Went to a famous one which had more pools than we could count, indoor and outdoor, all ranging from 16 deg to 38 deg (Celcius), and numerous saunas- wet, dry, hot, hotter, and with strange coloured lights. No slides and stuff, but a few bubble jet sprays and a whirlpool.

Differences from Japan: no one soaks in temperatures of 45-50degrees here, all the bathers wear swimsuits, and the spas are big institutional facilities (from communist times) with people in white coats and medical apparatus. Inside comment to my family (Sharon’s): I learnt that ‘Therme’ is a legitimate word and basically means hot spring. I think its Te-ru-me that actually has no meaning!!

Seven Days Of Work

A quick closure of our WWOOFing experience for this entry, as we’ll be loading more pictures on Facebook soon.

Firstly, to properly introduce our hosts. Lukas and Klara Hadasovi had come a long way since their urbanite lifestyles in Prague, to their current ideal of a mostly self-sustaining 20-hectare farm in a rural part of Czech Republic, near the Polish border. A non-commercial outfit, their 3 dairy cows and 8 chickens produce enough to feed their family of six. You can say they’re dreamers. But certainly not a dream for everyone, lovely as it sounds, beautiful are their fields and 4 children. Took them many years of musing solitude before they painstakingly self-learnt how to run a farm, and much trial and error before their homemade food taste scrumptious.

There’s not much of a routine here except to milk the cows, feed hay to the 2 horses, and for Klara to home-school her kids for one fidgety hour. So our work gets pretty varied – Chopping/burning fir-wood, fixing up fences, transplanting seed(lings), shoveling compost, attempting to help with cooking or babysitting etc. Gets tough sometimes but certainly good exercise for us both!

We learnt quite a fair bit too from our daily interaction with the Hadasovis. Like the rest of the ex-communist satellite countries, nobody in Czech Republic likes Russia. Parenting also seem to be a common thread running through our travels as people have been talking to us about a variety of parenting issues. In this farm with 4 children under the age of ten, the discussion centered on freedom and space for children to play, including ideals on safety (like internalizing in children awareness through experience for heights, hot surfaces, sharp objects etc and thereby allowing the parents to trust and leave them largely unattended), training them not to seek attention cry over cuts and bruises (We were very impressed), spending family time, etc.

We also really enjoyed listening from them about nutrition (on natural versus chemical laden), ecological sustainability, and how slower is better than faster, handmade is better than factory produced, poorer is better than richer – it was definitely a refreshing change from urban life. The Hadasovis aim to be fully self sustaining rather than selling their organic products or having a small homespun businesses to make money. We thought that was an interesting paradigm shift.

Besides the philosophy discussions, we learned the multiple uses of milk including butter, cheese (in 7 days Sharon saw Feta, Mozarella, yogurt cheese, cottage cheese, hard cheese, and cheese steaks being made!), curd, yogurt, and cream. We ground raw wheat for bread, pasta, dumplings, pancakes. We made mayonnaise. Klara makes supermarket bought ingredients look like instant food: before use, raw wheat needs to be ground and sifted. Milk needs to be born, fed, de-cowed (‘milked’), filtered, and pasteurized to 65 degrees. Somewhat similar process for eggs. Butter needs to go through the ‘milk’ process then go through several further steps. Tea is gathered, dried and steeped in boiling water. One gets the idea. We do some of these steps while actually preparing meals.

So all these and much more, as we venture towards our travelling phase based on volunteering opportunities around. :)

Hadasovi Farm

Such surreal experiences we are having WWOOF-ing here at Hadasovi Farm in Czech Republic! Just a quick blog on this as we should get to work soon:


- Sleeping in a firelit teepee under the moonlight out in the open
- Eating homemade organic food everyday like cheese, bread, mayo, tea and various other dairy products
- Trying unsuccessfully to be a farmer like helping out to chop firewood, milk the cows, transplanting seedlings etc
- Learning about the Czech way of life. politics, history, and snippets of parenting from the Hadasovis who let their 4 children run all over the farm and playing with the 3 cows, 2 horses and various animals.

Well just 2 pictures to show it all first, will upload more next time! Meantime read more about their farm at this link.

GeoCaching & Taxi Strike

What an excellent game Uncle Alan introduced to us recently! It’s called Geocaching, involving enthusiasts using GPS coordinates to track down concealed boxes of little treasures hidden by other Geocachers. It really puts in some wee-fun into simply hiking or a walk in the numerous parks around UK.

Some Geocaches are even brazenly placed in public areas such as train stations hidden from the prying eyes of “muggles” – non-Geocachers”, using techniques such as magnets behind phone booths. This necessarily involves a security risk though, for Geocaches in such locations as be easily mistaken for bombs. Anyway I’m inspired enough to consider getting a GPS device and jump on the bandwagon!

In other news, we encountered our first union strike in Europe. Thank goodness the whole of Dublin didn’t shutdown. We simply found the taxi stand deserted as most taxi drivers went on strike, campaigning for a cap on issued taxi licenses that had flooded the city, and eating into their earnings. We were lucky enough to source a vehicle eventually through the good people at the airport customer service.

This is apparently a non-official strike which isn’t synchronized between the 3 taxi unions, and not all taxi drivers are obligated to participate in. That’s what we learnt from our driver when we met him at the customer service counter. I wonder if he’ll get mobbed by other tourists or heckled by fellow striking taxi drivers if we met him at the taxi stand instead. So from a pragmatic point of view, it’s probably not such a bad thing that our unions are Singapore are pretty much toothless. But then again, if you really need to fight for fair wages if you’re exploited, who can you actually turn to?