Week 3: Bacsfa - On the way to Slovakia

Finally I'm heading to Slovakia, the main goal of my trip. Strangely, my goal was to find more Marafkos, add that elusive data to my research and now I was heading to Hidaskűrt - currently an ethnic Hungarian town in Slovakia. I say 'strangely' because I pro-actively told quite a few on my relatives why I came. It was not just to meet with them but to continue my researches and finally bring an end to the Marafko genealogy. Hidaskűrt is known as Mostova by the Slovaks.

However, the trip from Érd to Hidaskűrt was not direct. Feri also wanted me to meet with members of his father's family in Bacsfa (not sure of the Slovak name) and Bratislava.
First stop: Szalay Arpad's home in Bacsfa - just across the border. All I could think of was the wealth of the family. A new home but lots of work to make it happen.

The front gate - still with a buzzer to open the gate remotely from the house.

A new house with aspects of the old style Hungarian architecture.

Arpad's Pavilon

View of the back of the house.

A pig cooker!

The end of the 'porta'    Still customarily full of orchards, grapes, strawberries, walnuts and cherries.

Next Stop: Bratislava.
We wasted some time here trying to get to a specific place along the Danube, but we ran out of time and ended up in Hidaskurt at 8 pm at night.

On the way we stopped off at Feri's Koszsegi relatives in an apartment in Bratislava.

So we met up with Feri's relative (I'm sorry but I forgot her name) and a lovely lady called Beata. Her mother is Hungarian, and father Slovak. She doesn't speak Hungarian and her job is to translate technical manuals from English to Slovak. I spoke to her in English about common themes in Slovak politics. Her response was interesting in that she stated that many of the Slovak policies relating to ethnic minorities were not shared by the Slovaks themselves.

Feri's relative, Feri and Beata - a Slovak-English translator.

 I should also say something about the border. These border posts are now abandoned, though I did see some Slovak police stop a 'Kamion' or a truck for one reason or another. Apart from driving through the border posts, our mobile phones beeped with an sms from our providers stating that we were now roaming. Suddenly I was roaming in Slovak T-mobile territory and not Magyar T-mobile territory. This will cause me no end of grief in setting up my T-mobile internet in Slovakia.
Other than that, I saw very little difference in the portas, roads and so on. I just had to get used to spending Euros instead of Forints.
The exchange rate at the time was great. A $1 AUS = $1.04 US and I got 227 forints for my dollar and I had 500 Euros in cash as a gift from my mum. Later in the trip, the Australian dollar fell dramatically to around 95c which I felt when I took out another 40,000 Forints in the last week of my trip.

Next post - Hidaskurt - Hometown of the Marafkos