A Bird Park and a Bit of Keszthely

If the title of this post, “A Bird Park and a Bit of Keszthely,” about my afternoon today, makes it sound like I had a bit of an empty afternoon, good. That’s what I was going for.

If it didn’t sound like that to you, read on. You’ll find out why it should sound like that. Big time.

But before getting into that, allow me to pause and say — you can’t stop me anyway, so you might as well let me — that I will be leaving Keszthely tomorrow morning. So there’s a summary of my time in Keszthely below.

When I got back from my morning trip to Szigliget Castle and had a quick langos lunch near the bus stop, which was only a short distance from my hotel, it was still early afternoon. (The reference to my hotel might sound like a non sequitur now, but you’ll see how it fits shortly.) That gave me plenty of time to do stuff. I didn’t do much.

Bird Park

If you read yesterday afternoon’s post, you might remember that a combination ticket that I bought for Festetics Castle included five other sites. One of them is what they call the Bird Park (Madárpark in Hungarian). I said then that I didn’t go because a) it looked like a long walk from the other sites and from my hotel; b) it was too hot for a long walk; c) the reviews of it posted to Google Maps disparaged it; and d) the pictures users posted of it on Google Maps looked bleak.

But I also said that if I were looking for things to do today, I might go there. I was looking for things to do this afternoon. I went there. It was about a 45-minute walk from where I had lunch. Because lunch was close to my hotel, even if I did nothing else in the afternoon, I also had a 45-minute walk back.

Going there was a mistake. The lousy reviews of the Bird Park on Google Maps were too generous. And the pictures didn’t make it look bleak enough. I feel for the birds in the Bird Park almost as much as I feel for the visitors who made the mistake of visiting.

There are some pictures on the Bird Park’s webpage. Don’t believe them. They’re a scam. Well, they may be real, but if so, they’re taken from places visitors aren’t allowed to be. What’s more, they must make very creative use of framing and cropping. (The webpage is a part of the Festetics Castle website.)

I hope that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, if you click on the link for the Bird Park, you’ll get a “page not found” error because they shut the Bird Park down and moved the birds to somewhere more humane.

The Bird Park is small. Ever since I was a kid, and throughout my adulthood, I’ve had a very weak throwing arm. Nevertheless, I think I could throw a baseball a fair portion of the length of the Bird Park. Certainly not all. But probably more than half. And I feel confident that I could throw one most, if not all, of the width of the alleged park.

The birds are kept in small pens. Two of the pens have a low, wire-mesh fence. The mesh has intersecting vertical and horizontal wires. The wires aren’t fat. I didn’t try it, and I’m going only for memory, but I think if you took a Canadian or American quarter, held it vertically and on the same plane as the fence, it might just barely fit through one of the open squares in the mesh.

One of those two pens held a bunch of chickens. The other had a rooster.

The few other pens in the Bird Park had the same low wall of wire-mesh fence, but attached to that and rising above it was another mesh that fully encompassed each of the small pens. The higher, encompassing mesh looked similar in size to the wire mesh, but it appeared to be made of, perhaps, nylon string.

Because of that mesh, apart from the chicken and rooster pens, it was impossible to get a decent picture of any of the birds without getting the mesh in the picture.

There were, if I remember, three small pens that each held a peacock or two and maybe a peahen. There was also a slightly larger pen that held a couple of white swans and a few other waterfowl.

There was another small pen with a sign that provided a picture and species name of the bird that was supposedly in there. The bird in the picture was somewhat colourful, but I couldn’t see it. There was a little bit of vegetation in the pen. The bird might have been hiding. But there wasn’t a lot of vegetation, and I looked hard, as did a father and son who were there at the same time as I was. They too gave up looking.

About the peacocks, in my travels, I’ve been to several places that have peacocks wandering around freely. I don’t remember where, but if you find the search box on this blog and search for “peacock,” you’ll probably find them all. I think I wrote about the peacocks at every place I saw them.

Perhaps the peacocks in those other places had their wings clipped, but not at the Bird Park. I don’t know. But surely clipping their wings would be more humane than keeping them cooped up in pens that looked barely large enough for the peacocks to spread and strut their tail feathers if they were ever so inclined.

Besides, in addition to the meshes enclosing the pens, a much larger mesh encloses the entire Bird Park. Yes, it’s that small. And I had to walk through a series of two doors to get in. Those guys weren’t going anywhere even if they were let out of their pens. Although, considering the conditions they’re kept in, they probably talk amongst themselves, squaking between their pens, plotting their escape.

About the pictures on the webpage. None of them shows any mesh. In one of the pictures, there’s a young girl in a pretty frock sitting at the edge of a pond. In the pond, there are two black swans and a variety of other waterfowl. That couldn’t happen in the real Bird Park as it is now.

I didn’t see any black swans, just two white ones. They stuck to the back of their pen. As I said, that one was a little larger than the other pens. I had to use a zoom a bit stronger than the optical zoom on my iPhone to get a decent picture of them. And I didn’t see as many other waterfowl as were in the picture on the web.

And the pond? The one in the picture looked much larger than the one in the swan pen.

And here’s the thing. The Bird Park is located at the far end of a large, scruffy field behind the building housing the hunting and model railway exhibitions that I visited yesterday.

There’s plenty of room to enlarge the Bird Park to some multiple of its current size. Give the birds some space. Let the peacocks and peahens wander around. Sure, it might then be too big to enclose the entire Bird Park in a giant mesh, but what’s the point of that if they’re also going to enclose the birds in individual meshed pens within it?

Seriously, if they’re not going to expand it greatly, shut the whole thing down. I’m not a PETA person. I greatly enjoy zoos that treat their animal charges well and have decent, good-sized enclosures. But the Bird Park was indecent.

Regular readers know that I seldom say anything negative about any of the sights I see. When I do, it’s usually a mild criticism. I very rarely am this negative about anything, in this journal or elsewhere (except maybe about Donald Trump). But I really hated the Bird Park.

Rant over. On to pleasanter things.

A Bit of Keszthely

As I mentioned above, I had a 45-minute walk from the dreaded Bird Park (sorry, I forgot; rant over) to my hotel. I mentioned in a previous post that my hotel is right beside the lake. And there’s a park to one side of my hotel, also along the lake. As well, I knew that the walk would take me along Keszthely’s main street and through another park.

It had warmed up a bit from the pleasant temperatures of this morning. But there was still a breeze, and the temperature, although warmer than I would have liked it, was still within the easily tolerable range.

I decided to take a stroll, maybe do a little sitting, and try to pack up all of my cares and woes. Here I go, singing low. Bye, bye blackbird. Well, except for the singing low and blackbird parts. I don’t sing. Period. And I didn’t see any blackbirds. So there were none for me to say goodbye to.

But I did try to pack up all my cares and woes. I usually fail at that. I try to pack them up, but, despite all my travelling, I’m still a lousy packer.

I’ve walked along Keszthely’s main streets a few times while I’ve been here, but I can’t remember if I’ve talked about it. Rather than going back and checking, I’ll potentially repeat myself.

It consists of a few blocks of a pedestrianized shopping street. The street is paved with attractive paving stones. There are two rows of trees down most of it. The stores and restaurants along it all appear to be independent, not chains. It’s very low-key and very pleasant.

I just looked it up. Wikipedia calls Keszthely a city, not a town, of 20,895 inhabitants. But it has more of a town feel to me than a city feel, especially its main street. And 20,895 residents? Pfft. We have neighbourhoods in Toronto with that many people. So, I’m going to continue to call it a town. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s a satisfying town.

About those two parks, I should say that most of the dwellings, shops, and restaurants in Keszthely are a few blocks back from the lake, with parks between the centre of town and the lake. My hotel is one of the few buildings by the shore, although there are some further along the lakeshore, but even farther from central Keszthely.

Of the two parks, the one closer to downtown is a large, mostly wooded park with a tall gazebo that is a dome sitting on pillars. I spent some time walking through that park and sitting on one of its benches.

The park beside my hotel is a little more varied. In addition to some wooded sections, there are a couple of statues and a small amusement park with a Ferris wheel and a kiddies’ merry-go-round. Plus, the park has a street with some food stands, restaurants, and tchotchke stalls.

The park fronts on the lake. I strolled along that for a piece, and had another seat on a shaded bench with a view of the lake.

Then I walked the short distance to my hotel, and here we are. At the end of my Keszthely stay.

Keszthely Summary

I enjoy Keszthely, but I don’t love it. It’s a likable town. I stayed, as I said, by the lake, which is a few blocks back from the built-up area, so I didn’t spend as much time in the central part of the town as I normally do elsewhere. The lake is pretty, but not spectacular.

There’s not much touristy stuff to do in Keszthely. The Festetics Palace is grand and certainly worth a visit. And the exhibitions associated with it (except, of course, you know, sotto voce: the Bird Park) are enjoyable or interesting or both.

There are some sights I intentionally didn’t take in because they didn’t interest me. I found some small museums on TripAdvisor that didn’t appeal to me. The reviews of them were generally mixed, at best, and the subject matter didn’t entice me.

Reviews on a couple of them mentioned something to the effect of, “This is one of the seven small museums available on a combination ticket.” I didn’t see all seven on TripAdvisor, but when I was walking down the main street today, I saw a sandwich board advertising them.

The seven museums are:

• DOLL MUSEUM (NATIONAL COSTUME)
• HISTORICAL PANOPTIKUM
• SNAIL SHELLS PARLAMENT
• MUSEUM OF TORTURE
• TOY MUSEUM
• EROTIC PANOPTIKUM
• COLLECTION OF SIGHTS AND KITSCH MUSEUM

As I said, I read about some of them in reviews on TripAdvisor. The toy and doll museums are what the name implies. Someone said that the collection of sights and kitsch museum was like a small flea market, but without the sales. The erotica museum is, according to what I read on TripAdvisor, a wax museum of medieval erotica. The snail shells parliament sounds really weird. Someone built a model of the Hungarian Parliament building out of snail shells. The reviews say it’s in a dank basement inside a highly reflective glass case. I didn’t read anything about the historical or torture museums.

None of that interested me. If it interests you, you might want more time in Keszthely than I spent here.

The three nights, two and a half days, were about right for me. I was desperately looking for things to do this afternoon, so a half day less would have been fine too. Then again, if it hadn’t been so brutally hot the first day and a half I was here, maybe I would have strolled around more and filled up the half-day that I just suggested I could give up.

And tomorrow, it’s on to my next city in Hungary.