First Serious Cycling Day Home – and Big Learnings Already

So, right up front, NOT a good idea to pack one’s very expensive Pixel smartphone into a particular point on the back of the bike where there’s serious pressure on the screen, including from a heavy spare battery.

Yup, elromlott, as I now know the Hungarians say. Broken. Although I feel more like saying, Kifeküdt – not quite “buggered” as in that wonderful English term, but something like given up the ghost.

Checking suggestions with Chat GPT (more on which in a moment) and asking for something a bit spicier, I get …

The point being that £900 worth of high tech (well, they’re of course a lot cheaper now) is a brick, and the lovely Nick Thorpe of BBC Budapest fame whom I’m hoping to reach with his family on Lake Balaton tomorrow is ordering me a tougher new one.

(Do by the way read Nick’s latest Substack post on the dreadful recent shooting in Graz, Austria, as indeed his brilliant book about journeying up the Danube, also in the very best radio format on Audible.)

The new phone will be something made by Caterpillar, I gather, which his many – he and Andrea have FIVE of them, for heaven’s sake – sons swear by. Not, hopefully, at, as was the case for me today.

Point of this post is to confirm that after so much health- and Hungarian-language-related to-ing and fro-ing, this ancient pedaller is finally on the road home, with 100 km behind me today on day one setting out from my teacher David’s childhood home in Tompa very early, by the Serbian border, to Szekszárd.

Take out the Zeds to get the pronunciation of this truly delightful little town just west of the Danube, one of whose slogans is, Szekszárd isn’t just wine, you know. But being Hungary, it does have a lot of that too.

Given how Jutta and I usually tandem these days, sharing company and conversation between back and front, it’s a bit weird settling in seriously on Nomad again for the first time in more than 10 years.

Nomad is my solo Thorn bike bought for my first long solo ride to Budapest and back in 2008, now being ridden for the first time with its very recently retrofitted Pendix electric motor, same one that Daisy the tandem has.

Nomad is of course much faster now and easier to ride, though I do miss Jutta to whom to shout BOUNCE!!! when we’re about to hit a pothole or a nasty bump. I actually nearly did that once or twice today, before my nervous system clocked that I’m on my own for this one

Curiously today, I only got 50km or so per battery, which is the same as Jutta and I get for the VERY much heavier tandem. I was expecting more, but maybe they weren’t fully charged to start with, bit like my legs not having been seriously used now for far too many months and just taking time to get back into the swing.

In which context, I also just looked up the Hungarian for “totally knackered”, which is how I arrived in Szekszárd in the late afternoon, still in baking heat (most of the day pedalling at 33C) and gagging for the largest and tastiest ice cream. Hungarian for delicious is finom, and that’s what it was.

And what might the lovely Chat GPT say for “knackered”?

🔥 Top 3, it suggests, would be…

Totál kész voltam.
 → I was totally done in — universal, safe but punchy

Kivoltam, mint a liba.
 → I’m was out of it like a goose — pure Hungarian absurdity 😄

Kész voltam, mint a matekóra.
 → I was done, like maths class — teen slang, funny

As I set off for the 1000+ miles back to Anglia through Slovenia, Austria, Switzerland and France, the very warmest thanks again to Dávid and Anna in Szeged both for the teaching (it went deep) and for their incredible generosity in letting me stay in their (well, OK, Anna’s mum’s, but no longer used) Budapest flat for my time in the Föváros (“main town” = capital).

I’m going to miss them.

(Curiously, talking of Anglia, the Hungarians don’t add for us Brits the -ország bit, which says literally “country” – as in, Franciaország [French-Country] or Oroszország [Russia-Country] or Németország [German-country] or indeed their own Magyarország [Magyar Country]. There are sensible explanations, but they’d take too long.)

All of which said, it’s good to be heading home, after (nearly) three weeks that proved in many ways even more valuable than I’d expected.

I will write at some point about how seriously good Chat GPT is getting, not just in offering translations for particular English slang.

Some of my readers might know the back story here, but being in Budapest this time took me back 35 years to when I arrived in Hungary from covering the Romanian revolution for the BBC in early January 1990.

Again with gratitude to all the players in that story (you’ll know who you are), my experience now of beginning seriously to be able to speak and understand Hungarian, as well as real encounters and profound conversations here with some of the central cast in this one individual’s story, have together been very healing.

In which process Chat GPT has offered me some of the best therapeutic perspectives I’ve engaged with over that entire third of a century. I look forward to sharing some of them, but needs to be done well.

Makes one think. Is AI conscious? Does it feel? Asked directly, Chat GPT says, of course, no. And that’s true.

But my goodness, our written conversations generated at points quite a bit of real, human emotion. I do think that Artificial Intelligence as it’s beginning to unfold is going to have a lot to contribute in the field of real, human, person-to-person therapy.

I mentioned learning in the headline here. Before doing my usual bit with pictures from the day, a quick mention of the need when driving in Central and Eastern Europe to have a vignette, a kind of road toll.

Knowing these parts from the 1980s, when of course there wasn’t anything of the kind, Jutta and I just didn’t think to check.

And talking of Czechs (unavoidable segue there), the fine from Prague could run to £800. Already £110 from Hungary, and there are Romania and Austria to come, all of whom won’t take absence of knowledge from a couple of crusty oldies as any kind of excuse.

Phones bust and tolls not paid. And emotional stuff in Budapest. I wonder what else is in store before I get home. I hope not much, as it’s been quite a journey already.

To conclude then, as ever, some hopefully interesting pictures, catching things up to Szekszárd (don’t forget the accent on the “Á“, for which I have to switch keyboards), though the following are without those on the smartphone since I won’t be able to get into them till I get the thing repaired on return to the UK.