Quiz Night at the Caledonia

Four us from the Dunabogdány Cricket Club decided to form a pub quiz team a few months ago to play at the Thursday night pub quizzes conducted at the Caledonia, our local Scottish pub. These pub quizzes are a lot of fun in a friendly atmosphere. They started in the UK, but from what I can tell they have been catching on all over.

We’re pretty good too: in five outings, out of fields of 12-20 teams, we have placed in the top three all but once, when we came in fourth. So this means we get to bring prizes home, like cases of Scottish stout or Russian champagne, which seems to serve as a fairly adequate justification to our loved ones for wasting our Thursday evenings in a pub. It’s really work that we are doing, when you think about it.

We have a suitably dumb pub quiz team name: “The Sons of Richie Benaut”. I don’t know what we do if we need to grab a chick as a substitute player one day. Here they are, looking appropriately cerebral:

Adrian

Steve

Mike

3 Magyars, 2 Brits, 1 Aussie, 1 Yank, and 1 Finn. I didn’t post a picture of myself because you already know what I look like. Zsolt, the waiter took a group shot but it didn’t turn out well as it’s as dark as the bowels of Loch Ness in there, but they smiled in that one.

We have maybe a little bit of an advantage over some teams, since not only are questions asked in English, the native language of maybe half of the participants, they are also skewed somewhat towards the anglosphere, all four hemispheres of which are represented on our team. But there’s usually a tricky Hungarian question that only Steve and the natives get, and a couple sops for the various Euro carpetbaggers who turn up. Anyway, aside from having a good geographic mix, our realms of knowledge complement one other pretty well. Mike answers the serious questions. Steve answers the less serious question, and is a whiz on pop music circa 1950 to about 1985, as well as with the movie round. Adrian is up to date on the week’s news, and knows a bit about kangaroos and tennis. I sort of fill in the gaps. I’m supposed to field USA-oriented questions too but I’ve been getting these all wrong lately.

One of the unfortunate aspects of the quiz night is that we have to purchase beer, or else Patrick, the owner of the Caledonia, will throw us all out on the street. But we don’t drink them, of course. The competition is always just a few brain cells behind and we’ll have these dumped into the potted plants, or on each other, as soon as no one is looking.

Actually, we have a cozy relationship with the Caledonia, since Patrick sponsors DCC, which means for every forint we spend at Caledonia, we get a kickback to buy wickets and googlies and stuff. So, while we may look like a pack of pub wasters, in reality we are more of an investment cabal.

Howard the quizmaster comes around to take our entry fee and distribute answer sheets.

We start with the picture round. Name that city based on a grainy picture of a famous landmark. I grab the paper, because I studied architectural history at Bryn Mawr, I’ll have everybody know. And then I promptly give it back because some of these are really hard. The magic of Google enabled me to find some similar images, posted below. Answers at bottom, and remember I’m doing you a big favor because these are bigger and more colorful than what we got.

A

B

C

D

E

F

On to the general knowledge round. Only a couple are tricky. Name of John Glenn’s spacecraft. That’s mine, but it’s been a while since I saw the Right Stuff. I know that it’s a Mercury, but I don’t know what its mother called it. I think it was the third launch, so let’s say Mercury 3.

What was Justin Timberlake’s first band? Hmmm, we know it’s a boy band, but we don’t know too many boy bands. Perhaps this is a badge of honor. We know it’s not Boyz2Men. We know it’s not New Kids on the Block because those guys are all middle-aged Oscar-winning actors now. So that leaves us with the Backstreet Boys. Younger ears at the neighboring tables overhear our struggle, chortle softly.

Now it’s the current events round. I haven’t been following the news so much but Adrian’s been mesmerized by CNN all week. Libya, Ivory Coast, Gorbachev tribute… boom boom bang…

Science round: Mike's chemistry degree has us in good standing with the first few questions. Then: “How many teeth does a normal adult have”. The entire room goes silent as tonguetips march across molars and bicuspids. 32. Okay 32. But Steve wasn’t having any of it. Steve only has 28. Heated words are exchanged. He said "normal adult", Steve.

The thing with Steve, though is you have to know when to listen to him. “How many legs does a lobster have?” Six. Eight. Steve shushes us. He was at the International Lobster Exposition in Slovenia last year where he learned, as the rest of us have not, that a lobster has 10 legs. How the heck did it get 10 legs? It doesn’t matter, just write it down.

Music round. Out come the speakers. There are a few those Golden Oldies from the early sixties that you have heard a million times but probably don’t know who sang them, unless you’re Steve, who racks up a few more points for us.

Then I hear the words I have been waiting for: “For the next musical selection, instead of the name of the artist or band, I would like the name of the composer…” Finally, I get to show of! Violins: Doodoodoodleodoo-du-du-du. The Four Seasons. Vivaldi. Rats! Everyone knows that. But the next one is a little harder. Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Probably not too many other teams got that one.

Movie round: Audio clips from mainly unfamiliar films, most of which Steve has seen. Some of them are musicals. West Side Story I get. Another is Chicago, which seems to pop up in every pub quiz we attend. There was a period of a month or so a few years back when Moni would watch Chicago every freaking day, and I thought I might lose my mind. But now it’s paying off handsomely.

Now it’s time to switch sheets with another team and do the scoring. We learn that Justin Timberlake’s first band was something called N’Synch. John Glenn’s Spaceship was Friendship 7. But other than that, we are not doing too badly.

And indeed it turns out that other teams also found the questions difficult.  The lowest scoring teams really had low scores. And as the team names are read off in ascending order, the scores aren’t increasing very quickly either. 3rd prize is read off – a round of drinks on the house. The 2nd prize winner is revealed and it’s not us. That means that we have won something better than having our entire beer tab for the night paid off, and what could be better than that? We don’t know because we weren’t paying attention when the prizes were read off! Except for Adrian:

“We won a car”

And he wasn’t putting us on either, with 43 points out of 60, the Sons of Richie Benaut have won a weekend car rental  for use anytime in 2011! That’s great, we can gather up 5/11 of our Cricket Team and go someplace. Like Dunabogdány, for example. After we find a designated driver.

Answers:
A.    Stockholm
B.    Dublin
C.    Damascus
D.    Sofia
E.    Mexico City
F.    Dresden

Hiking the Danube, Part I

In the depths of the long winter, I had an inspiration. Why not, when the weather gets nicer out, hike the entire length of the Danube? Not all at once. It is a long river (nearly 3,000 km, depending on which alpine spring you take as its source). 3,000 km would be a bit of a stretch for one day. But as a long-term project, say, over say 5-10 years?

Other people have done it, or more typically biked it, since there have long been (several) trails for bikers and hikers through the German and Austrian sections – with lots of interesting scenery in both countries. EU funds have been helping extend the trail the rest of the way to the Black Sea—taking in Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and maybe a bit of the Ukraine. Budapest is right in the mid-point. We could do the close parts in day trips, and the further parts on weekend or longer trips.

So it’s not entirely unrealistic. Moni likes to walk. Folti likes to walk. I like to walk. It makes beer taste better.

But on further reflection, there’s no reason not to rent bikes on some parts, and cover a lot more ground that way. Also, maybe we only have to trek a big chunk of the Danube to feel good about ourselves. Let’s not worry about Bulgaria and Romania right now. They are far away, and are not going anywhere. In fact, let’s not worry about anything, let’s just start walking and see what happens.

So here we are setting out, northwards, on the first nice Saturday in April, from Hungary’s ridiculously oversized Parliament building, built for a much larger country. Fortunately this appears modest in comparison to the cyclopean Imperial architecture in next-door Vienna. You can just make out the Chain Bridge in the background. I need to start taking the good camera on these hikes.

This used to be a sidewalk we are standing on, but someone in the government got a bunch of EU money, paid his contractor friend or brother-in-law a great deal of it to paint a yellow line down the middle, and now it is part of the International Danube Biker/Hiker Trail. 

And we crossed the Margaret Bridge. Most bridges in the world have two ends, but this one has three ends. Does anyone know of another bridge that has three ends, and that isn’t a highway overpass? Serious question!

As you can see, it is still under renovation. This, like most major public work projects in Hungary, has been a highly prolonged, controversial, and contentious affair, because of all the pork to be made off of them if you are connected. Immediately before construction commenced a few years ago, the government suddenly announced, “By the way, guys, the actual price tag is going to be about 50% percent higher than the already quite steep one we have been quoting throughout the planning phase.” The joke at the time was that they had previously forgotten to include the cost of actually renovating the bridge into their calculations.

We walked up the length of Margaret Island, which, as one of the world’s great urban parks, deserves a blog post all its own at some point. It has some of the only medieval ruins remaining in Budapest, and some very big old plane trees.

Crossing over to the Buda side of the Danube on the northern end of the island, we make our way up through Old Buda, which has some charming neighborhoods, some of which I hadn’t had a look at before. This part of the Danube embankment is called the Roman Baths because the Romans used to hang around this part of town. Today it retains something of a boardwalk feel and on summer nights it’s fun to sit by the water and munch on grilled fish that was trucked in from somewhere else.

Past the Roman Baths, we are up by the city limits of Budapest where the terrain opens up. The Bridge in the background is the bridge that whatshisname tried to get named after himself. If it had simply been a matter of getting this part of the bridge between the Buda bank and Szentendre Island named, the whole thing might have flown, but the other half is a longer and taller bridge over the main shipping channel, and you can’t just go naming those after every clever foreigner with a TV show.  

It’s one of these new types of cable-stayed bridge that look like white harps that are popping up everywhere. I saw one in Jerusalem too, where there’s no river to cross so they had made one into a highway overpass just to show they could do it.

I have mixed feelings about this bridge. It’s an integral part of the still-incomplete M0 ring road that will help shift east-west traffic around the city, instead of through it. But not having a ring road has also been one of the major reasons Budapest is still relatively free of sprawl. Once we are outside the city limits, patches of working farmland show up fairly quickly. Had we hiked the same distance to the west, instead of the north, we would have found ourselves in the vineyards of a respectable wine producing region (for white wines).

Toward late afternoon, we find ourselves near the old town of Szentendre. And it’s time to have lunch. Folti, leashed to the table managed to upset the entire contents thereof when she lunged out to bark at some passers by. But it was OK, the waitress had more beer in the restaurant and the passers by recovered their normal blood pressure. We took the commuter train – Szentendre is the last stop – back home. In Hungary you can take dogs and pretty much any animal you like on public transport with you, although you are supposed to muzzle them and punch them a ticket.

But the next weekend we were back again! Resuming where we left off. First we made our way through Szentendre’s cutesy downtown. This is the place you take visitors to Budapest to see a typical small Hungarian town, and consequently, it’s fairly touristy, although Budapesters like it too. A couple overpriced coffees later we are back on our way.

North of Szentendre, the path takes us through a couple of small semi-rural, semi-commuter towns. Where you can meet, for example, semi-rural, semi-commuter goats. “Get the leash on Folti quick, or it’s going to get ugly.” Although if push comes to shove, I think Folti can probably outrun a goat after picking a fight with it.

Actually, I come up this way by bus or car fairly frequently, because we play cricket at one of the village soccer clubs up this way. And this is why I was surprised that I hadn’t noted earlier that for a good stretch of several miles, the bike path is shunted along the busy main road that runs about 50 m from the river. If you are a hiker, you can choose between the sidewalk with cars and trucks whooshing past you, or you can bushwhack either through the floodplain of the river bank, which is full of fallen trees and unfortunately, garbage (I thought this was fun because it reminded me of exploring such places with my friends when I was 11, but Moni thought it was spooky) or some farmer’s fields on the other side of the road, which we also followed for a while.

Until we arrived at Dunabogdány, to our empty cricket oval, from where we took the bus back. And the next day I came back to the very same place to play cricket, which is why there are cricketers in the pic to liven it up a bit.

So, there we were – 32 kilometers in two hikes, without too many blisters or sore muscles. Not bad, but will need to up that to at least 20 km per outing to call it serious distance hiking. I am having second thoughts about the Danube project though. I have done some additional research and it looks like other substantial parts of the trail might also run along these main roads. Also, there’s a fair amount of industry along the river to ruin the view.

I think there are a lot of interesting parts of the Danube to hike, and there will be more Danube-hiking posts from other segments, but as a long term start-to-finish project, what is starting to look like a better option is the Blue Route – which is the oldest long-distance trail in Europe and takes in some of the most scenic parts of the country. Sort of like the Appalachian Trail but with a lot more places to stop for a beer.