What happens when your greatest neighborhood draw is a grocery store with a huge parking lot.

How can anyone resist?

A few weeks ago, Lyla and I began seeing signs for a mysterious "Foka es papagaj show" (seal and parrot show) all over our Tesco parking lot. These posters included embracing seals over a sour-faced parrot, a tricycling parrot, and a dancing seal. Clearly, we were intrigued. Soon, a large tent popped up in the side parking lot. Even greater intrigue now plagued our tri-weekly Tesco jaunts.

Finally, we found a time that we could attend, and pranced about Budapest happily informing others that we would be busy on Saturday morning because we were going to a seal and parrot show in a giant tent in the Tesco parking lot. It sounded so ghetto, and so very magyar, that we could not resist. We even delayed our trip to Tata by several hours in order to attend what we figured would be an incredibly interesting spectacle.

So on Saturday we headed over, took our spot amongst the families with small children, and were amazed. There were parrots riding tricycles, singing, and hoisting the Hungarian flag! There was a parrot napping in a baby carriage being pushed by another parrot. There was a 350 kilo sea lion, one that could eat a ball to perform magic tricks, and glorious amounts of ball-balanced-on-nose action. My favorite, though, was a little parrot who hopped into a car and bit a button to make it move forward. When he let go, the car stopped, and he hopped out, looked under the hood, poked around for a bit, and then, having fixed the car, hopped back in and drove it perfectly the rest of the length of the table.

The show seemed, to our best guest, to be organized by an Italian family of seal and parrot trainers. The show began with a slideshow, organized on powerpoint, of the now-giant Sonny the sea lion as he was raised from a baby. The announcer, the wife of the main parrot trainer, was a total ham. She would coo "Amazing!" "What a great mechanic he is!" and "Parrot kiss!" with such fervor that Lyla and I giggled every time.

After a full hour of amazement, the show ended and we tramped outside, to be greeted by the trainers and the discovery that we were running rather late for our train to Tata. But Tata, my friends, must be a whole other entry, both because it is late and I am tired, and because Tata deserves its own entry. So for now I leave you with this...

Papagaj puszi! (That means parrot kiss.)