What Kassai Did, part II

So I spent Thursday and Friday pestering my contact teacher via sms, until she called the school and sent over Pali, the school’s handyman. I like him because when he talks to me (in Hungarian, of course), he doesn’t really expect me to understand anything, but he still slows down and repeats things, and acts like a proud father if I do catch on to something.

In about two minutes, he had the gas and the boiler turned on, and everything up and running. I mean, as ‘running’ as anything gets in this flat. Then he launched into a long description about why the shower doesn’t work, of which I caught about every third word. This is a classic example of my understanding of Hungarian:

What I did understand: “Kassai... Lucza... pénz... mint a bojler... fal... régi bérház... komplett rossz. Azt érted?”

Which translates as: “Kassai school and Lucza (I think she’s the owner of the flat) are fighting about who’s going to pay for the repairs, just like they fought for months before someone gave in and paid to have the boiler replaced (and only then after I was almost gassed to death) but it probably can’t be fixed anyway because the problem is inside the wall which is made of concrete block, and these flats are just too old, the whole thing is bad. Understand?”

So I’m back to where I left the flat last June: almost everything impossibly broken. But fun to struggle against. Home sweet home.