The Holiday

Okay, well, on the 18th, I had just come back from Hungary because my father had bought a holiday home there and we stayed there for two and a half weeks. I didn't do too much there at all really, so finding something interesting to say about my experience there, other than the beauty of the house was not entirely easy for me.

The most interesting thing that occurred.

1. The Hunt for a universal electrical plug adapter

• Well, when we got there, my father said that the universal plug adapter that we sent him the previous time he was there did not work. I wondered what kind of plug system this country had if the plug adapters that we sent him with did not work at all, and he was unable to say, and to some degree he was contributing to the illusion that Hungary had a plug system of it's own, individual to the country and electrical goods from other countries could not be used here unless you change the plugs on them completely. I tried fitting my two pin shaving plug into the plug socket and it seemed as if it did not fit. Anyway I had no way to recharge my iPod and no way to recharge my mobile phone, so something had to be done about it.

• My father, my mother and I the next day took the car around to the various shopping places, first of all an electrical shop in a shopping arcade, and they told us that they didn't sell universal adapters around there, and we were unlikely to find them, but we could try the computer shop upstairs. So we did, I didn't think we were in luck, the owner of the shop said we were unlikely to buy a universal adapter around here but he did get a British adapter with a computer he once bought and he might still have it around at home, and we could come back next week to see if he had found it.

• Well, we went along to the InterSpar supermarket, and I found there a peg where universal adapters were normally placed when sold, it had the label on it, and what happened of course was, they were out of stock, but we could perhaps come back next week and try, but nothing was certain. As it went, he recommended that we try the shop that dealt with photograph development, and well it also dealt with computers and this was to be found in the entrance hall of this large shop. We got to the place just in front of the cash tills, and discovered that the shop was completely empty, maybe it had never opened yet or it was being refurbished and we wondered how the man working in the supermarket could not have known this.

• My father had the bright idea of actually checking with a shop where he bought a television for the new home, and so they didn't have a universal adapter and they sent him to another shop elsewhere and there my father actually bought one. We were surprised and it wasn't cheap either.

• The Blowing Of a Fuse: That night I recharged my iPod, and by the following morning, the fuse in the adaptor had blown.

• Manifestation of Peace through my iPod: That day, I had requested peace within and around me in my meditation and later that day, while on the train to the city of Budapest, I turned on the iPod in order to listen to some music and then the thing suddenly shut down for about three minutes and then turned on again the MP3 track list on my iPod had erased itself completely not enabling me to access the tracks on my iPod at all, although they were still there locked away in the hard disk, but the iPod simply didn't register the fact that they were there. So in relation to my desire to listen to my iPod and live my holiday around that, I had peace from that.

• The Hunt For An Electrical Fuse: The following day we looked for another fuse, and we tried a hardware shop, and they didn't have any or they didn't have the right one. The next morning I realised that my electric shaver was running down and there was no more power for another shave. My father told me that I could just fit the plug into the plug socket, well I tried that before and it didn't fit properly and also he noted that the universal plug adaptors that we sent him with some months earlier didn't work either. Actually these did fit in when you gave them a push fearlessly, I suppose they relied on being flexible a little, but this wasn't like the British 3 pin adaptor where you fitted it in, and I thought of the possibility of the two pin plug breaking easily, especially since through childhood, I have had a track record of breaking many many things, so I fear it unwise to try out anything technical when it came to belonging to anyone else, such as my father.

• So the shaver plug fitted, and it turned out that the plug sockets that they had were not special to Hungary alone, but were just like the rest of the European mainland.

• My father went back to the electrical shop where be bought the adapter from and they sent him onto a shop somewhere around the corner half a mile, and there they had a fuse, it was the same type fuse generally, but not of the right length, and we didn't know if the plug adapter had space for a fuse of only one length or more. But when we got home, it fitted, and that was that. But well, if you visit the Lake Balaton area, make sure that you come prepared with a universal plug adapter.

• The Ending: Several days later, we by chance found an electrical shop that specialised in fuses that was about a couple of dozen kilometres away from our home. Once I got back to England and connected my iPod to the computer, the track list was restored and it has been working beautifully ever since.