For our Graybo and our Kate, both of whom will be heading to Hungary at some point this year. Ordering soup is an important skill, as Hungarian soup is cheap and comes in copious quantities, and is delicious to the point of being better than any soup you ever tasted. If you’re lucky. Soup is leves [levesh], and plural is levesek which is the heading it will probably be under on the menu. Here are the main types of soup:

Gulyasleves [gooyash-levesh] = goulash soup. You really can’t go to Hungary and not try this; it’s nothing like the meat stew that is described as goulash in english-speaking countries: not a stew at all, but a rich soup, with much emphasis on the paprika. One variety is bogracsgulyas [bogratch-gooyash], which means it comes in a small cauldron, although the literal translation of bogracs is kettle.

Bableves [boblevesh] = bean soup. May be listed as Jokai Bableves. Smoky, creamy soup which often has large lumps of pork fat in it. Still nice, though.

Raguleves/csirkeraguleves [cheerka-ragu-levesh] = chicken soup, slightly thicker than a broth, usually has a lemony flavour, and yet more sour cream. Did I mention the sour cream? There will be some of this in anything you order. This soup may be described as tarkonyos, which means tarragony. One of my favourite things. This could also be pulykaraguleves, [poika-ragu-levesh] which would be turkey.

Hagymaleves [hojma-levesh] = onion soup. May be served cipoban, which means in a bread roll, which is a novel experience. Definitely point to this one on the menu, as a slight mispronounciation will cause you to order onion soup in a shoe.

Fokhagymakremleves [fok-hojma-krem-leves] = garlic soup. This stuff is amazing. It was the only good thing to happen to me in a town called Gyor.

Gyumolcsleves [joomolch-levesh] = fruit soup. This is served chilled, and has actual cream rather than sour cream in it. The usual variety is a sour cherry soup. Yes it’s a dessert, but it will be listed with the soups and served as a starter.

And now some manners:

In Hungarian, there isn’t really a sentence structure equivalent to I would like the goulash soup, please; you just have to make a polite face while telling the waiter what you want, which will probably be lost on them anyway, and certainly won’t be returned.

Here’s what you say: A gulyaslevest kerek [o gooyash-levest kayrek, where the o is as in hot]. This means I want the goulash soup. You put the t on the end of the word gulyasleves to mark it as the object of the sentence, but really, don’t worry about this, just do it.

When the surly waiter brings you your soup, you can say koszonom [kersernerm], which means thank you. All of these hungarian words are supposed to have accents on them, but I fear that WordPress will just explode, so go with my phonetic renderings instead.

There are occasional readers of Rise whose hungarian language and soup skills are far superior to mine, so do check the comments box for addenda and correctia.

Baby's age: -112 days

Yesterday afternoon I had a stitch-like pain in my right side, which lasted until about 11pm. The books and websites all reassured me that this was normal: caused by the stretching of the uterine muscles. I would have thought this should be a more gradual and less painful process, but in fact it all seemed to happen yesterday, rendering me fairly immobile for most of the evening. I don’t suppose I have felt the last of it.

Meanwhile the biggest concern on my plate is how to earn money and bring up a child, after my 6 months’ barely-paid maternity leave is up. For those who are unfamiliar with the system, the deal in the UK is that for the first four weeks of maternity leave, you get paid 90% of your salary. You then receive just over £100 a week for 22 weeks, which takes you up to six months. During this time, your employment contract remains intact; you have the same entitlement to annual leave, pensions etc, and you are guaranteed to be able to return to your old job.

At the end of the six months, you can opt to take another six months off, but this will be entirely unpaid. Again, your contract of employment remains in place, and you can return to your old job. You just don’t get any money. You can of course go back to work at any time during this year, and then you would be on your previous terms and conditions, provided you did the same work.

At the end of the year, your options are to return to work full time, to negotiate part time hours, or to hand in your notice. Read the rest of this entry »

Blogging about blogging is something I find quite tediously dull. Some of it is interesting: the social effects of blogging, by which I mean switching off your computer and meeting people in the pub: that’s quite good. But those posts about today I decided to redesign my site by moving the menu bar four pixels to the left and altering the background by one shade of blue, which may perhaps be of use to some geeky bloke with too much time on his hands (e.g. Pete) somewhere, are definitely the ones I skip when they show up on Kinja.

So today I am going to point out to you that this week I have migrated Rise from MT to WordPress. I don’t know if I like the WP interface better or not, but if it saves me a bit of spam it will make me happy. When I say “I” migrated, obviously I mean Pete did it.

I then spent yesterday afternoon importing posts from all my older blogs, starting right back in June 2001 on The Umbrella Stand, and selecting only those particularly juicy or writerly or milestoneish ones, and categorised them under reposts. This process was in some parts quite traumatic, and you should be happy to know that a lot of the nasty stuff has not been included; I re-read it so that you don’t have to.

Some noteworthy points:

• I have been blogging for nearly five years. Longer than Pete, the same length of time as Anna.
• I used to post two or three times a day, and over 90% of it was garbage. The whole exercise has made me wary of ranting posts, which generally turn out to be incoherent; and keen to avoid content-free rubbish like memes.
• I have blogged in so many different places that it was quite hard to find it all. Some posts had to be pasted in from blogger, some from the old Uborka archive pages, some could actually be imported from the three different MT blogs. Now it is all together under one roof, and there will be no more of this spreading myself out or jumping from blog to blog. Rise is where it’s staying.

Dear Uncle John

I was surprised and very sad when mum called to tell me the news about Aunty Audrey; I really think I had expected her to go on forever, and it comes as quite a shock. She was so full of enthusiasm and kindness and generosity; and always so hospitable, especially when I was a hungry student in Leeds, and you used to feed not only me but all my housemates as well on Sundays. Yesterday I was thinking about how she had introduced Nick and me to yorkshire puddings, at the bungalow in Filey. In fact a lot of my memories of her seem to be related to food, and I’m glad I’ve got some of her recipes, in her inimitable, illegible scrawl! I will miss her very much, and I’m sad that she didn’t finish the shawl she was knitting for her great-great-nephew.

I will be coming up to Leeds on Friday to be with you and say goodbye to Aunty Audrey. I’m glad you’ve got your family with you at the moment, and I’m sure they are taking good care of you. I’m thinking of you and sending my sympathy.

Lots of love, Karen

Karen with a secretive look:…and then I went to Waitrose to pick up some ingredients that I need for dinner…

Pete: Is it Mexican?

Karen: How did you know?

Pete: You always make that face when you’re going to cook Mexican.