Day 50 – June 4 Saturday

5.50am & the sunshine streaming in the Kikinda windows.  Caught up on sorting photos & updated a few days of blogging before a great brekkie of fresh eggs & bacon.  Then out to the weekend farm to pick more cherries & strawberries.  Katalin picked a big bowl of strawberries while Antal watered his vegetables & sprayed the grapes.   There was a some rain while we were away that plumped them since the other day & they were nearly all ripe, so up the ladder & I picked all the sweet cherries from the top of the tree, Tereza  picked from the lower branches then we started on the sour cherry tree.  Two boxes of sweet cherries & three boxes of sour cherries. It was time to go home as it was  getting too hot, around 30C today, with humidity, there has been storms most afternoons.

We had the chance to catch up on Skype with Monica & Charley (Unfortunately not with Jackson & Austin) & later with James.  Next Sunday we will be at home (hopefully), it is unbelievable, it feels as though we only just planned this trip.

This afternoon Evike & her 2  boys came over & took us to the Kikinda Museum, it is only about 100m from the apartment, everything is so central here.  The main attraction is the skeleton of Kika, the mammoth, died in a bog 50,000 years ago & uncovered at the local ceramics factory clay pit.  The skeleton has been copied in fibreglass & stands in the open courtyard of the museum.  We ventured inside & watched a 17 minute 3D big screen video projection on the story of this mammoth & how it came to meet its death & subsequent discovery (in English).  Very interesting & some of the 3D animation was very good.  Next we saw the display of the actual bones discovered – it is one very large animal & the display case is well done.  Further on the museum covers recent history with old farm artefacts & clothing, plus displays from both world wars, all very interesting.  In the corridor are displays from recovered artefacts from the stone age, then the bronze age, then the iron age, including pottery, jewellery & skeletons.

The museum was formerly a prison in the Second World War & in the courtyard is a memorial to 39 partisans executed by firing squad in the same courtyard.  The building also still has the doors to the small solitary confinement cells lining the corridors.

We sat out in the plaza for a while watching the world go by.  Nearby in the plaza is the protected winter roosting site of a family of long eared owls in a few tall, old conifer pines.

Back at the apartment Tereza did some washing & then it was dinner time but we ate so many cherries & strawberries that we could hardly eat.  Amazingly a little bit of cherry picking got Ron so tired that he couldn’t even finish writing – he is out to it.