Pannonhalma Abbey, aka Heaven

So, after the afore-mentioned crappy week, I decided that leaving town and travelling was a necessary part of every week if I was going to maintain my sanity. Megan had said there was an old abbey nearby, and I wanted to do some shopping before our Autumn Break trip, so I convinced the girls to go to Győr and Pannonhalma Abbey with me. Well, Megan went to Budapest for a teaching seminar and Maggie wasn’t feeling too hot, so it was just Angie and me. We set out at 9am but the train was late and then was broken and so we had to get off and wait for the next one, not getting into Győr until after 11. Oh well, we were out to have fun. However, neither of us really wanted to spend money, so we wandered around the streets and through the market, where I picked up a new necklace pendant and Angie got a basket, another step on her way to becoming Hungarian. Everyone has baskets when they go shopping.

We went into a beautiful church and walked through town, eating our picnic lunch on a bench on an island on the middle of the river, then wandered back through town (stopping at McDonald’s for a coffee and a coke) before heading to the bus station to (unsuccessfully) find the bus to Pannonhalma. No problem, I also had the train schedule, and so we caught the next train. We made it to Pannonhalma with no problems, but once we got out of the station, we had no idea where to go. We tried talking to the station guy, but he completely ignored the fact we were standing there for at least 5 minutes, and so we asked the only other human in sight, who happened to speak some English and told  us the abbey was about a kilometre up that street yonder, at the top of the hill. As we walked toward that street, we caught sight of the abbey on the hill, and both got excited. It was big and pretty. So, we walked and walked and walked (significantly more than a kilometre, mind you) up the hill and to the visitor center, where the prices listed for the various tours were less than appealing, especially since we had missed the day’s English tour. But, we were able to use our International Teacher Cards to get the student rate and joined the Hungarian tour with English guidebooks. It was really nice—a thousand years of history and an old pretty church and all of the attention to detail that is completely lacking in the modern world.

The church was great, the history was nice, we saw the first written record of the Hungarian language... and then we went into the library. I swear to you, we thought we’d died and walked into Beauty and the Beast’s heaven.

The pictures don’t do it justice. It literally took my breath away.

But anyways, it was awesome, and of course the tour dumped us in the gift shop, which to be honest was a bit disappointing—not the best postcard selection and no pins... but oh well. We wandered around the rest of the grounds, since we had 20 minutes or 2 hours til the next train, and figured we wouldn’t make it down the hill in time for the first one. There was a botanical garden, a millennium monument of the first settlement of Magyars in the region, and a chapel which was sadly locked. We decided to head down, only to find the 3-story staircase that lets you out of the abbey/visitor center locked. The visitor center was closed, and therefore we were locked in. Lovely. What do we do? Hop the fence, of course!

We walked down to the train station, where the conductor guy decided to talk to us this time, and even managed to give me a 33% off discount on my ticket (since I don’t have my 50% teacher discount card, apparently because my school is sticking to the rule that you don’t get that til you’ve been here a year...) anyways, we still had an hour til our train, so we wandered back towards the town center to find some place to get a drink since we hadn’t had anything since lunch—the market was closed, so we found a bar.  We enjoyed that adventure and then slumped onto the train for home, arriving back in our flats around 930.

A great day, and a definite mood lifter. Traveling reminded me of why I enjoy being here, why I put up with the insanity that usually constitutes my weekdays at the schools, and how incredibly fortunate I am to have this opportunity.

Bottom line: Pannonhalma Abbey’s library is spectacular.