I was wandering through Bulgaria the other day (as one casually does) when I was handed a flyer by a rather estranged lady. She was marching towards Mitch and I waving this piece of paper as you might expect a black and white film star to wave a hankie at their departing loved one on the train platform and laughing [perhaps inappropriately?] to herself as she handed us this sheet of paper. On it, I was presented with a selection of consonants in a seemingly random order and three big numbers; 90%, 20,000 and 500. It turns out that, with this piece of orange paper I could save ninety percent, cutting the price of the product from 20,000 Forint to a mere 500 - quite the saving, by any standards. Trouble is, I had no idea what in the name of Satan's fetted foreskin it said. There were no pictures. There was no map to the store, nor a store name itself. Could I buy this lady? Would I want to, moreover?

This, as many things do, got me thinking. Hungarian is a language unto itself - dissimilar to all other European languages as it doesn't share a indo-european root, I have absolutely no idea how to speak it. I can just about pronounce certain words, but I honestly stand more chance of understanding something written in Cyrillic than I do of comprehending this one. I didn't like this: as someone who can speak more than one language to a reasonable degree I found I was out of my depth. French allows me to understand Spanish, Italian and Portugese to a standard and Dutch and German seem to fill in each other's blanks if said quick enough and in a more local accent. Not that I would want to learn Hungarian, mind, just that I don't like not being able to understand anything.

I still don't know what I could save on - I carried the flyer round in vain for a good few minutes in the hope that I would be able to find a shop with a similar offer emblazened over the fronting before I got bored and decided that it would be much more use in the bin to be used as a tramp's napkin. (Would a tramp use a napkin? Answers on a postcard, please.) I guess I'll never know but then that's what life's about, maybe; the little mysteries that keep you thinking.

Gaz out.