"Szeged, 11.August 1999" a Szeged Travel Page by Andreaska

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for some real, useful information (and good photos as well) go to the <a href="http://www.szeged.hu" target="_blank">official szeged page</a>

Szeged, the first part:

I had been to Szeged before, beginning of March that year (1999) with the idea to travel to Greece via rest-Yugoslavia (or whatever this country was called at that time); though my plan didn't really work out - they sent me back in Subotica, the first town behind the border, when the visa control in the train discovered the illegal Austrian; well I should have known this as at that time the region was still very hot with Nato-fighting going on; anyway the guys from the border-police brought me back to the border in their age-old car and frankly, sitting in that wreck, now and then terrified by a loud noise, like an explosion coming from the insides of the car, I didn't even believe they would make it back the few kilometers, well they did and there they put me;
was quite funny to cross the border, because I had to queue up in a line of cars, yes really, there was no one else on feet there, so I walked to one of the lines of cars and waited for my turn to have the passport checked and whatever else they did; the car in front of me was driven by a young guy, beside him there was a nice-looking young girl and in the rear seat an older woman; while we were waiting I often looked at them - as there was obviously nothing else to do, and they also turned their heads and sure were talking about the strange guy standing there with his backpack in a queue of cars at a border control.
anyway when I had passed the checkpoint and had just been walking for a while, a somehow familiar car was coming by and stopped some meters in front of me, the young guy looked out of the window and asked me where I was going, ... so they took me to Szeged, I found out that they were a family, brother sister and mother and that their car was virtually filled up with smuggled cigarettes, that being the reason for their short excursion to the neighbouring country. we had quite some fun chatting, as very often the mother was the one who wanted to know everything about me but had the worst English of the three of them, so there was a lot of translating going on which always offers great entertainment with all the funny misunderstandings;
the guy btw was driving through Szeged like a madman, really I have never seen anybody shooting through urban traffic like him, he was quite good with his car though and I didn't really feel too unsafe, but was a bit relieved when they finally put me at the trainstation from where I got the next train to Budapest.

Szeged the second part:
when I came back from Istanbul in August that year (1999), I took a flight to Budapest and arrived there around the 9th or 10th of August, knowing that there would be a total solar eclipse on the 11th of the month; in some newspaper I had read about the path of the kernel shadow and that it would pass exactly through Szeged, so I decided to go there once again and spend some days down there; I was not alone, I believe half of Budapest and a lot of foreigners like me were going down by train, the cars were filled up, we were standing and couldn't even have fallen down if we would have liked, there was no space, ... in Szeged I decided not to take a room but camp near the town, I spent two nights there close to a wood within walking distance of the next supermarket;
the day of the eclipse was very strange for me, as I was staying in Szeged alone, I watched all the people walking by together, couples or families, nobody seemed to be alone, and then the sun disappeared, as if it wanted to add her part to my melancholy, well it worked; I was not in the mood to stay there any longer fearing that I would turn even gloomier, although the sun had come back quite soon; so I took the earliest train back to Budapest next morning.