Then we stumbled on a quilt store. When Armando went to take the picture, the store clerk nearly had a heart attack - NO! NO PHOTOS! All these designs are copyrighted!!! But Armando had already taken the photo. She had fabrics, DMC threads, yarn, embroidery stuff, a little of everything for crafting. I didn't see any fabric I wanted to buy. The calico I looked at was selling for about $14.00 / yard. We also saw a gas station, and calculated that gas here costs about $7/gallon. And we complain about $3.
After the museum, our feet were tired, it was raining, so we just decided to hang out in the hotel lobby until train time. You were going to get this edition of the blog on Friday, but in the lobby I couldn't pick up the free WiFi signal we were getting in our room. And the desk clerk wouldn't sell me an hour of time, only 24 hours for 5 euro. So you got a reprieve.
More about Hungary's political situation. My niece Ingrid sent this information: "The religion thing is scary, but only the tip of the iceberg. Hungary's democratically elected center-right governing party has legally rewritten the country's consitution so they can't be voted out of power, ever. There's no one piece of legislation that you can point to as being obviously wrong, but when you combine them, you get a practically unbreakable death grip on the government."
From December: A NY Times article and a blog
And an update.
My sister wrote that she had heard on NPR that "the EU is threatening to expel Hungary because their leader seems to be changing laws and trying to make himself into a dictator, and they are insisting that he preserve the democratic government to remain a member. Maybe the motorcade you saw was a delegation from the EU come to tell him be better back off or else."
The guide in the parliament simply said of the new constitution that when they have elections next year that it will be interesting because there will only be 200 seats to fill instead of 350 or so. But she said, we are a small country, maybe we only need 200 representatives. Of course she works inside the parliament and probably has to be careful what she says.
And according to Rick Steves guide book what led up to the current situation is this:
The transition in 1989 from communism to capitalism was rocky - people wanted freedom to travel and pursue the interests that democracy allowed, but they weren't prepared for the sudden reduction of government services. Hungary joined the EU in 2004. The Hungarian Socialist Party that took control of parliament in 2002 stubbornly maintained and even extended some social programs, prompting experts to worry that the mounting public debt would bankrupt the country.
In 2006 the prime minister gave a secret speech to the party's leaders after the Hungarian Socialist Party won re-election. The intent of the speech was to give his colleagues a wake-up call. But his method - ranting on about how badly they had fouled up (and using very colorful language) - was not such a good idea. Especially since, of course, someone at the meeting secretly recorded it, and soon Hungarians turned on their TVs to hear their prime minister detailing the ways he and his party had driven their country to the brink of ruin, and then shamelessly lied about it to stay in power: "We have screwed up. Not a little but a lot. No country in Europe has screwed up as much as we have... We did not actually do anything for four years. Nothing...We lied morning, noon and night."
Immediately there were demonstrations and calls for his resignation, but he didn't step down until 2009, clearing the way for the current bunch.
Are all politicians idiots or does it just seem that way?
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