Notalab

continues...... Travel. Sarmalek [SOB] an old Soviet fighter airfield is now used by Ryanair amongst others for cheap flights from Western Hungary to UK and other European destinations. The new motorway section is nearing completion and will make travel East/West faster.

If I'm boring users and using up valuable bandwidth with my input then please let me know and I will desist.

dixieflyer

You certainly are not boring anyone,all information is interesting and necessary if one is to take such a step after all there is no going back at our age,thankyou for your input!

Notalab

..... The weather. Last Winter was mild with little snow and the lake remained ice free, followed by a very hot Summer. This Winter saw a few weeks of Snow on the ground over Christmas, the Lake froze over with the usual winter sports/activities taking place but it has been almost temperate and dry for the last few weeks so guess Winter is over.
[I've dug my garden over in the last two weeks ready for planting to give you an idea].

I will post answers to any questions asked [if I know the answers of course]
but am away 14th to 19th.
Regards......

Notalab

....... still a bit of a suppy problem with regards to goods but the situation is improving. Fine displays in shops for example glass shower screens but non in stock and 6 week delivery from Germany via Budapest .
New and better outlets are opening up all the time, eg., C&A.
Competition is being introduced with regards to telecommunications so prices should come down with a better service. Having said that I am happy with t-mobile and t-online, reliable and fast service with English speaking help telephone number.

I'm just putting things down at random as they flit through my mind....
Half hour pedicure costs £3. A good meal at the village restaurant with a half litre of wine and fizzy water is about £5 to £7 depending on menu.
........

waffen

Hi guys, i happen to be a native hungarian, i hope you don't mind if i add a few remarks. i understand this board is mainly for british expats and i must confess i'm shocked that there are people who are seriously considering to leave their civilized home country and relocate to hungary.
As long as your biggest concern is the weather it's fine but believe me this is a sucky place to live. Words fail to express how much it sucks. As a tourist you may even find the basic services satisfactory but spend a little time here and you'll see that something is fundamentally wrong.
The country is barely functional, government lost its legitimacy and credibility, you are taxed to death (approx 50% of your income in total), corruption and crime levels have skyrocketed, local currency devaluating rapidly, health system is in a horrible condition and so on. You may say that those issues are more or less present in most countries but then again, hungary is different.

Even if you get along with all the global problems above, certain difficulties present themselves on a more granular level. One of them being the gypsy matter. As you probably know the gypsy is the biggest minority of hungary, optimistic estimations put the size of gypsy population to 1 million (10% of the total population) and exponentially growing. Unemployment is over 90% among them, most of the violent crimes are committed by gypsies, and the law enforcement, having no political support whatsoever, is unable to handle them. Any attempts to integrate them in the past decades have failed (and believe me previous administrations have pumped billions into the various gypsy programs). They now freely roam the countryside (lake balaton area included) and keep the majority population under constant terror. If you think you have seen enough racial tension and demographic problems in the UK you'll think it again.

Almost all the people i currently know (mostly IT dudes and their families) are about to leave hungary for the above reasons. Surprisingly enough, their primary destination is the UK If you are young and educated enough you have now no other option but pack your things and just leave and never look back.

And no, i'm not being pessimistic. These are the facts.

But anyway, welcome to hungary.

Notalab

Szia! Waffen,
I'm not sure that we are living in the same country
Whilst I bow to your native understanding of life here, I think like art, the situation is in the eye of the beholder. I thought for a moment that you were talking about the UK. For the 60 odd Brits I know at this end of the lake, life is generally fine and I know of no crime against us [mainly pensioners] except for one break in and one non-violent bag theft in the last two years. People are kind, generally helpful and friendly. I have just been back to the UK for 5 days and the sheer numbers of people and amounts of traffic made me want to get back to Balaton as fast as I could.
Waffen, your English is excellent and can see why you personally would want to work in the UK with your obvious linguistic skills but for me the pleasure
of going to the Post Office for example today and not having to queue for service and then driving into town for shopping with ample easy parking...... Life here for us is of good quality and generally stress free.
Heló!

Ray51

As hundreds of years of chequered history have shown ,
( some ) Brits will ( and do ! ) go AnyWhere , for better or worse , but : who's to judge ?
From this observer's corner , certainly , the number of Hungarians around here , in self-styled Capital of EUrope : has increased dramatically in recent few years , even the number of Magyar-registered cars...
...and I won't bore anyone with laments about the omni-present revolting "Tzigani" beggars , allegedly hungarian and/ Transsylvanian (? ) , in traditional garb , mouths laden with shiny gold and handing out little leaflets in 3-4 languages , openly asking us all to hand over " few Euros " ...
Some new EUrope , indeed !
And so : I now much look forward to more and new adventurous threads , in the style of e.g. Retiring to Kosovo , Tchetchnia for me , Why not Republika Srpska , Moldavia paradise , Any meetings in Tirana , Banja Luka , Yemen , Visa for Metohia , where to settle in Wojwodina , beers in Ossetia , italian restaurants in Skopje , vets in Darfur , nightlife in central Jo'burg etc...

waffen

Szia Notalab
i'm happy to hear that you enjoy this neighbourhood and i do hope that it will stay that way. I think your community is way isolated so i don't expect you to have a deep insight into the current state of hungary.
I was born and raised in budapest and have been to a few places around the globe, including the UK. Although London itself is sort of crowded, 30% of the city is green area, it's just terrific that the squirrels eat from your hand in larger parks. I just loved to sit in the Kensington Park and feed them. In budapest you have nothing to feed but stray dogs and an army of homelesses. The air is so polluted that it has exceeded the alarm values many times over, in any other EU country it would have triggered a smog alarm a long ago but not in hungary. There isn't a single building in this damn town that wouldn't be tagged and graffitied all over. And the amount of dogshit...
Another thing is, the slums and gypsy ghettos are in the heart of the city (inner districts like 7, 8, 9) while in most capitals they are at least restricted to the suburbs and the city center is a safe zone.

It's great that you find hungarian people kind and helpful. I don't have much experience with village people but folks in budapest are everything but kind. They just hate each other and it shows in everything from aggressive traffic behaviour to everyday communication in shops and offices. Hungarians are also special in that they hate each other wherever they are in the world. Other nations at least stick together and protect their kind but the hungarian takes every opportunity to hurt or screw or rip off his fellow hungarian.

Although i have 20+ years left to be a pensioner, i'm looking for a place to settle down with my fiancée. This country is a disaster and i don't want my kids to grow up here.
Thanks for the compliment concerning my english but it could be much better. Back in the 80's when i was going to high school the only foreign language officially taught in schools was russian. So i mostly watched beavis and butthead to improve my english

waffen

Ray,
those folks are gypsies indeed, predominantly from hungary and romania. As long as begging they don't do much harm (not considering the damage they do to the reputation of those countries) but let me just quote from today's news for you:
"80 yr old woman brutally raped and robbed in Tarnaörs (a village in Heves county).
The 20 yr old offender was taken in custody. He smashed the door open at 3 a.m, ripped the clothes off of the old lady with a butcher knife in his hand and raped her. Then he took her 11.000 Ft (approx 40 EUR) and made her make a coffee. The old lady managed to escape, the neighbours called the police. The intruder was still in the house when the police arrived."

We have basically two problems here: 1. in most cases the police never arrives or if they do it's way too late 2. this is not some occasional story from a tabloid, in fact a day without news like this is more than rare. The old lady can even condiser herself lucky that she survived, victims of senseless gypsy attacks, esp. elderly people are generally not that lucky.

ladybird13

Hi there,
I found this thread looking for foreigners who moved to Hungary, notably for people who moved outside of Budapest so I was very excited to find this conversation about how Brits find living around Lake Balaton.

I am a Hungarian female, 31 yrs old and have been living in London for 8 years now. I kind of got 'stuck' in the UK after completing my MA uni degree in Comms and PR as after graduation I found an Agency job straight away. I have never worked in Hungary but now having worked for almost 5 years as a PR consultant in technology in London and having traveled to the US and Western Europe regularly I find myself rethinking my life in the UK and more importantly the quality of life in the UK. After 2 months of house hunting just outside of London I started to realise that we might be making a huge mistake and instead we (me and my English partner) should consider relocation to Hungary.

Waffen probably thinks I am mad but the truth is that even though my life is considered great by my friends and relatives in Hungary: I have a good job that pays well, I travel a lot, I have a lovely boyfriend and we are planning our life together right now - the reality is that the UK is very expensive and compare to so many countries in Europe, the cost of living, the cost of buying a house just don't live up to the quality of life here that you would expect hence so many Brits moving away to France, Spain etc. (my boyfriend's parents moved to France 4 years ago)

We made an offer on a 30's purpose built 2 bedroom flat in North Kingston a few months ago which got accepted. The flat was on for £265,000. Just after a day, we got gazumped straight away (don't get me started on the English property system, for Hungarian's the non-existence of any type of regulation in the process is not comprehensible) so to cut the story short, we didn't get the flat and now reading the gloomy reports of how the British economy is going to the red this year I am thinking thank god we didn't max ourselves with a mortgage like that in such an uncertain market.

So now I am thinking, what were we actually doing? trying to buy a flat that was a shoe box for ridiculous amounts of money, mortgage ourselves to the max with monthly payments of at least £1500 even with a 10% deposit plus of course living expenses etc when in Hungary you could get a mansion for that money. For 100K you can get a lovely 4-5 bedroom house with a massive garden. we have our family around, the schools are still so much better (whereas in the UK if you want good schooling you move to a shoe box in a nice location like North Kingston or pay 15,000 a year for private schools) and despite Waffen complaining about the Hungarian health care system I am not sure if he is right... When I had a knee injury about 5 years ago I would have had to wait 9 months on the NHS to get specialist treatment so I got it done through private health care insurance. I still sometime call my GP up in Budapest if I have a problem rather than going to the GP here as most of the time it's a waste of time etc.. My mum normally waits for max 2-3 for an *** scan for her back where in the UK there is at least a 3 months wait

Trust me Waffen I know how it is in Hungary (I have been listening to the constant negativity and moaning from my relatives and friends) and although I am really grateful for what I achieved so far in the last 8 years in the UK both in my professional and personal life (without knowing anyone and just through my own efforts) life can't be about just working your socks off. We are obviously in a stage when we are thinking of starting a family and we both started to think that we will get a better quality life back home if we can set up a life where we still have some working links with the UK. I know lot of things are still premature at home but I still see the change even though that I do get frustrated about customer service and other things. I realise the whole thing will be hard especially for my English partner but I bump into Brits in Hungary all the time and they wouldn't move back and the value of having time for family is what this should be about really.

so if you have managed to read through all this I would like to ask Notalab which are those villages around Lake Balaton where all these Brits live and have you ever bumped into younger couples? oh and very importantly is broadband everywhere in the Balaton region?
I know loads of mixed couples in Budapest but we may be brave enough to try the countryside.

Thanks for your tips in advance.

Notalab

Hello Ladybird13. You are probably the sort of person that we Brits who have come to Hungary to live would ask questions of and not the other way
around. The 60 odd English speaking people whom I know who live around the Western end of the lake are in the main retired and a lot have migrated from Spain for various reasons. Some are spouses of Hungarian emigrees from 1956 who have returned with their English partners. Yes of course 100K would buy you a substantial family home and like me I'm sure that one of the reasons that people move here is because with 1/6th of the population of the UK, there is not the pressures associated with too many people chasing too little in the way of resources. I agree with you about the medical situation. The day after we arrived my wife fell and broke her wrist. We did not have European Health Crds at the time so I took her to the Hosptial in Keszthely where she was seen by a doctor in 10 minutes, xrayed, xrays interpreted by a specialist and then plastered up and out of the hospital. total time about 1 hour! [As you are probably aware tho' I think the Hungarian health service is in a bit of a parlous state with regards to funds] I did not mind paying the £60 for that kind of service. Of course it is easier living here for us as the cost of living is less than UK. I have Hungarians living both sides, could not ask for nicer neighbours and the children are polite, respectful and a delight. We have Broadband in Balatonszentgyőrgy and I belive most villages are 'in the loop'. There are Brits living in most towns and villages around the south end of The Balaton and around 30 of us meet up once a month for a social. I will try and PM you.... Regards,.....

ladybird13

Many thanks Notalab for your post and also for the PM, but since I have just registered I am not able to use the pm functionality yet.

haha - I know what you mean that you should be asking that questions but I was asking them from my boyfriend's prospective of course.

we are going home in August and planning to get a car and drive around Balaton for a few days. I am very curious to see how the region is developing as I haven't been to the Lake since I moved to the UK but I used to spend all my summer holidays there as a child and I have a lot of nice memories.
Since all these ideas are in my head only at the moment I am excited to see if they are realistic at all. I would be interested in meeting up in August if you are around or even attend one of your socials
Happy Easter!

Notalab

Not a problem..... keep in touch.
Regards.......

thecolonel

What is the Hungarian tax rate on someone receiving a UK state pension and residing in Hungary ??

Notalab

Greetings Colonel, I don't quite follow the question. ..... Being EU then double taxation rules apply.... ie., my Military/CS/Old Age Penions are taxed at source in the UK and are therefore free of any Hungarian tax.