In Gyor Hungary with Japanese Friend

In Gyor Hungary with Japanese Friend

I rode the Danube River bicycle trail down into Gyor a couple of days ago with an Australian bike traveler. We soon parted ways upon entering the city as I had previously arranged to stay with my Japanese friend Yumi and her new husband A’kos.

Bicycle Luke, the Australian, had given me some Hungarian coppers before he took off to find a place to camp in the bush, and I scoured the town of Gyor for a payphone to make a call to Yumi from. In these modern days of cell-phones and credit cards, finding a payphone on and stretch of this planet that still takes coins is a miracle. I looked and looked around Gyor for one of these antique beasts of communication. I eventually found one and made my call. It went through and Yumi answered with a little Japanese “hello.”
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Wade from Vagabond Journey.com
in Gyor, Hungary- July 13, 2008
Travelogue — Travel Photos
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“Hey Yumi, its Wade. I am in front of some grocery store with a red sign downtown.”

She said that she would come and get me, so I pulled up a seat on a park bench and smoked a pipe of tobacco, as I watched the city’s bums laugh and joke with each other drunkenly in the streets. All of a sudden I heard my name called out excitedly from a little mouse voice in the distance.

It was Yumi.

Now, I do not think that Yumi has been properly introduced on VagabondJourney.com before, so I will take this opportunity to give her the welcome that she is due.

Yumi is a traveler who came from some nowhere city in the middle of Japan. She set off on her journeys at a young age and found herself learning to speak English in England and then in Canada. She has traveled through China, Tibet, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, worked on a fishing boat off the coast of Alaska, got silly and married an American navy boy from Texas, divorced the navy boy, kept traveling, met me in a market in Mendoza, Argentina in 2002, traveled with me to Buenos Aires and Uruguay, visited Venezuela, and somehow ended up married to a Hungarian and living near the Danube River in Gyor.

In the intervening years since we met in Argentina, I had visited her three times on my travels about Japan, and now I have holed up at her husband’s place in Hungary. They gave me a couch to sleep on with a blanket and a pillow, and I am very happy.

I found her husband, A’kos, a kind, provident man with a good sense of humor and some traveler tales himself, so we all drink beer in the evenings and mint tea during the day, as we talk about traveling, the people and the places of the world. We walk about the city at dusk and along the river trails watching teenagers get drunk and the sun set. Sometimes we meet up with their friends for beers in outdoor cafes or complimentary tea from the hippies at the Oriental goodies shop. Life is relaxed here. Hungary is good.

I will probably remain here for two more days and then begin my descent into Budapest. I have a Hobohideout traveling webmaster arrangement set up at the Loft Hostel, and I am hoping that it goes through. I cannot afford a bed in that city in summer, I know this, and I would like to stroll around old Budapest for a week or so before carrying on along the Danube south.

Budapest is also one of the last stops for a while on this journey East where I assume that I can easily find work. I am hoping to find a quick job where I can make up enough funds to carry me on through a quick run to Istanbul.

Ain’t nothing else for me to do but to keep on keeping on.

Bicyle journey to Gyor, Hungary:

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Links to previous travelogue entries:

• Friends on the Road, Bratislava to Gyor
• Nazis, Communism, and Wine in Moravia
• Hodonin to Bratislava- Bicycle Journey Day 12