LawReader : OUR MAIN - LAW DIGEST INDEX : LAWREADER TIPS & TOPICS : MORE HOME PAGE - 2006 : LawReader Goes to Europe - see pictures : My adventure with the Gypsy lady and the metric system on a hilltop in Budapest:

On top of castle hill overlooking Budapest we stopped to take in the view of the Danube running through the beautiful city below. The street was lined with vendors selling various types of souveniers, drinks and postcards. One of the vendors stalls had a display of hand made photographers jackets. You know one of the khaki colored sleeveless jackets with lots of zippered pockets that all the tony war correspondants wear on CNN while missles fly over their heads and shock and awe demos are going on over their shoulder?

Well I guess I felt that reporting from a foreign land entitled me to wear such a badge of journalistic professionalism. Move over Wolf Blitzer..LawReader "Buzz" Billingsley is on the job kind of a thing.

Well as you soon learn, all clothing sizes are metric, and then because it is Europe they resize everything anyway. I picked out a jacket that was about a 40 centigrade or was it a forty centimeter...hell I can't understand the metric system..but it looked like it might work. I picked it up and asked the elderly gypsy woman how much it cost, and she said something like "15,000 fingerpots"...after some mental calculation I figured this roughly meant $17 dollars give or take a Euro or two.

Gwen wasn't looking so I knew I could quickly purchase this and she would never know of my extravagance of investing 15000 fingerpots into a poorly sewn jacket without sleeves.

The old woman would have none of this of course. She looked at my belly and shook her head and said "four x"...Now I admit to wearing a 1X or extra large jacket, but my pride wouldn't ever allow me to put on anything which contained four x's. I argued with her for a few minutes and finally compromised on a 3x size jacket...some compromise I gave away two x's and she only yielded one x. So to get her approval and to persuade her to take my 15,000 fingerpots, I put it on...and found that if I don't zip it up it looks pretty good...but if I need to ever zip the thing up I will have to go back to that hilltop in Budapest and find that Gypsy and admit my vanity. Oh well I can avoid that by leaving the thing hidden in the back of my closet and only wear it in my fantasy world where I mentally reside as a very thin war correspondent. (Whenever Shelly wants something from me she always calls me "Slim". I wish more people would humor my vanity like she does. I bet she will like my Hungarian jacket!)

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