Saturday 10 February 2007

In sickness and in health


Working as an English teacher should come with health insurance that would provide care with an English-speaking doctor. This is the second time I am sick since coming back from the States and yet again I'm not going to work and trying to find a doctor who'd speak some English and be willing to see my for a reasonable fee. I rang about 7 offices, 5 out of which ended up not speaking English despite being listed in medical care for English speakers for Budapest; the two other ones wanted to charge me a 100 euros or more for a visit and that I just wasn't willing to pay. I imagined Budapest, like Krakow, to be just crowded with all sorts of public healthcare offices - the question was how to tap into them and get to see a doctor without speaking any Hungarian. Well, people at a pharmacies and receptionists turned out to be very helpful pointing me in the right directions despite the language gap. After several bizarre Hungarian/English/bodylanguage conversations, I finally found a doctor who perhaps wasn't the nicest, but talked to me in Russian and doled out some medication (that hasn't helped that much so far). All free and in Russian - what else could you ask for?


The construction in our building has taken to the point of drilling all day from 7:20 in the morning and producing so much dust that you can no longer tell the patterns on our courtyard's tiles. We have for a while thought that the bills we're paying on our apt here are pretty high, but well, it turns out that they are usually increased for the time of construction to help pay for it. Not only will be most probably not get to see the effects of the noise that's kept us up for the past half a year, but we're actually paying for it as well!

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