Day 244 The Journey

12.30 Szolnok Train Station
So, that it is the last time I wait here on my own. It is cold and smells damp. No cigarette smoke, but the remains of decades full of burnt aroma locked in the walls, the floor, the ceiling and the whole structure of the building finally covered up by the caring semi-briskness of the charitable public ban. I can still smell the millions of cheap chopped tobacco leaves’ die-birth into imprisoned private breath before freed through lips, nostrils or both. Its long-term marriage with the spilled beer, wine, and spirits in the dark hug of sudden freedom for their crippled infants with that heavy aura of poverty and homelessness replacing the sharp smell of industrial bleach… Freedom comes in all sorts of shapes and colours. My generation has been learning this since 1989 and my parents’ and grandparents’ generation since 1949. This station is a reminder of the soc-real Eastern Block architecture: big, rectangular and grey, hopelessly grey. This is the hardest place for me to wait. It feels like sitting in the past, with thousands of ghost and those from my family who was killed and beaten during the communism. That was a different kind of ‘the dark hug of sudden freedom’, but resulted in the same: poverty and homelessness. But this a whole different story to write about.
Next time I will wait here with mum after graduation on the way home to The House with The Garden, and maybe that would be my last flight for this year. And we won’t care about the ghosts, the greyness and the smell, we will be happy to get on the last train of our journey and start our old life anew.
4.50pm Ferenc Liszt International Airport Budapest, well-known name: Ferihegy
I’ve been reading Lori Wick’s Sophie’s Heart on the way. It is about a well-educated Christian woman leaving her native Czechoslovakia in the late 1980’s in the hope of finding a better life in America. It brings back memories of my own quest moving to England in 2000. Both of us as housekeepers and to attend to children. The only difference is that I never intended to stay and deep down I never intended to be swept off my feet, therefore my story concludes for the near future that as Vondores I am hoping to nurture Glocal Trinnovation and live in The House with The Garden happily ever after.
11pm London
I am back in the flat with a nice cup of tea. Quick chat, when I learn this week we (our flat share) represented ourselves in Hungary, Switzerland, France and Leeds. And most importantly no sign of mice in the flat for over 2 weeks. How cool is that!