Going Hungary

Just back from a business week in Hungary - Budapest and Debrecen. (ehhh where?) Sound people, interesting buildings, wacky language, but the food.... I eat most things and even look forward to airplane meals but in the last week i had 2 of the vilest eating experiences ever. In the "executive" staff dining room of a certain university we were served up a soup of extraordinary awfullness. It was white luke warm and anemic, with large circles of red (i presume paprika based) fat floating on top. Like the surface of Saturn. At the bottom of the bowl various white beans/veg/maggots, i dont know which, tasting of mush. - 2 spoonfuls were enough before moving on to the main course. Innocent looking and harmless i thought - potatoes and meat. But the potatoes- cut up small were cold hard and tasted of detergent. Nestling on top, the meat. Supposed to be veal, it was grey and blubbery, drizzled with a white sauce which i last saw as a special efect in 'Alien v Predator'. I made the mistake of turning it over to find it attached to a piece of carpet tile.

The conference dinner the previous evening was held in a grand hall with the lights turned low - the reason was soon obvious. The main course consisted of a portion of stodgy unadorned white rice, a scoop of potato straight from the workhouse and various 'types' of stringy meat and rubbery veg in a highly toxic luminous Paxo type orange crumb. I've never known my appetite to disapear so quickly. The slab of Victoria sponge that followed could have been used to build a bridge across the Danube.

The Eastern Bloc stereotype of a large fiercesome woman in rather grubby kitchen overalls dishing out dollops of watery slops in a bleak functionalist white tiled canteen has not gone away.