Today we shifted to a suburb of Budapest. It was one of our shortest drives ever at 29 kilometers so we took our time getting ready- to avoid rush hour in Budapest. Ton was looking for an opportunity to do some grocery shopping so luckily just as we entered Szentendre we saw a Lidl. 45 minutes later and 21,000 Forints poorer we were on our way to the campground.
Despite our late start and shopping stop we still arrived at the campground well before noon. Szentendre is known for its porcelain, and as a bit of an artists town. While it is decent sized, Ton told me it was a three hour town. So we decided to take it easy for a while before heading into the town about 3 pm.
While it has always been Hungarian for a 200 year period it was the center of the Serbian minority in Hungary. A lot of the local heroes are Serbian, and a lot of the street signs are in Hungarian and Serbian.
It was a cute town with a lot of interesting shops. We were enjoying just wandering without a plan. The porcelain museum we wanted to visit was closed, but there was a lot to look at. It is on the day trip list from Budapest so there were quite a few other tourists also poking around in the shops.
As we were walking up one of the nicer streets we were suddenly confronted by a man and a women in leather vests, black pants, with copious tatoos and piercings who blocked our way and hit us with a blast of Hungarian. I shook my head at them and tried to move on, but they blocked our way again and hit us with a louder blast of Hungarian. Now I was annoyed, but I saw a bunch of equipment and I could see just around the curve a bunch of people dressed in WWII clothing and a truck from that era. I looked at Ton and said, oh this is a movie set. Then the two intimidating people smiled, and apologized in English saying that they thought I was Hungarian (I take that as a complement)but the set was live so we couldn’t go on.
Later we wandered by the set again, and they were done shooting. Our two leather clad guards saw us and waived us up to take a look. They had converted that part of town to a French village from WWII. We think the film is French as a lot of the crew were speaking French.
We were wandering down another street in parallel with a guy with a beautiful and frisky golden retriever. After a few minutes of sharing the road, he looked over and asked where we were from. We replied the US and he asked what state. When we said Oregon he said Portland? It turned out he was a Hungarian-American who had moved back to Hungary when he retired.
We spent about 20 minutes talking to him about the US, Hungary, and traveling in Europe. He was particularly interested in our impressions of Romania, as he said there is a large Hungarian minority in the country. He gave us a couple of ideas about places to visit on the rest of our visit here.
In the end Ton was right it was a three hour visit. But it was a beautiful town, we saw a movie being made, and met an interesting American expat. Another good day in Hungary.