Yesterday, we went to the little market near our apartment. I’ve gone four or five times during our week in Budapest – getting breads, yogurt, and even Hungarian sauerkraut. This time, we were hoping for a few pastries and breads. The bread stand was made of clear plastic, so you could see the different offerings. Most of them were labeled, though with Hungarian being so dissimilar from other languages we know, we didn’t know what any of the words meant. I spotted one label that had a word similar to the Russian word for ‘poppy seeds,’ and it was in front of a poppy seed pastry, so it seemed like the labels were appropriately placed.

B wanted a vanilla croissant, and I saw a small bread in the shape of a mini rolling pin that I wanted to try. The label read ‘akcio,’ as did the other small breads like it – some with sesame seeds, some with cheese, and my original plain ones. B and I debated how to pronounce the word, and we decided on ‘ah-k-tz-ee-oh,’ just when a woman in her 40s walked up to the counter. She said some things in Hungarian, but in the middle, we heard the word ‘akcio.’ It sounded like we were pronouncing it correctly!

When it was our turn, we walked up and asked for an ‘akcio,’ and the lady looked at us in complete befuddlement. I held up one finger, to indicate that we only wanted one of them, lest she give us a bushel. She responded with a question for us, which we thought might be an inquiry into which of the breads we wanted: sesame, cheese, or plain. Since we didn’t know any of those words, I just said the one word I knew, which is ‘small’ (pronounced ‘kitschy’). She still look confused, but she pointed to a small-ish bread loaf, and I agreed.

On the way back to the apartment, I said to B, ‘Maybe we confused her because the word akcio means bread as a whole?’ If that were the case, we would have been asking for bread at a bread stand and not specifying what kind! Silly Americans!

So, when we saw our host at check-out, I asked her: ‘What does akcio mean?’ And she said that it meant… ‘sale!’ We had come up to the lady at the bread counter and asked her for one single sale. Good job, us! No wonder she thought that we were crazy. Our host had quite the laugh, and I hope that the lady did too. We wouldn’t want to think that we were only amusing to Polish shop-keepers.