Reality check I had in Szeged erep meeting

Day 1,196, 13:42 • Published in Croatia Romania • by alpho
Disclaimer : This article is mainly for Hungarian and Romanian players.


Before I talk about anything else I want to thank Murlockij for being the best of the best host for our international group and we are forever indebted to him.
Murlockij you rock!


Murlockij, the fella' to the right of the beer bottle : How can I prove that alpho has devil-horns?
Carpediem4life on the left : I need beer ... but I can't drink cause clawy tricked me in being the driver 🙁


Prerequisites for the meeting

Short story about me : In real life I'm a Hungarian ethnic with Romanian citizenship and in erep I was Romanian President, 2 times MoD, EDEN Supreme Commander, etc. so I was very interested in the live feedback from Hungarian players .. from Hungary towards me.


It's Friday morning, 25th of February. It's been snowing continuously for 2 days and it doesn't show signs that it will stop soon but still I get the call from carpediem4life early in the morning. He is the designated driver and he is ready for the snowy road ahead. Cool! I will actually make it to the erep meeting.

I was waiting for the second call from carpediem, a Hungarian who lives in Romania, to go to the pickup place near a major road intersection in Timisoara, my city. I received it a bit later then expected but it doesn’t matter. In the mean time I packed few items of clothing into my rucksack, dressed up and headed out the door.

I reach the intersection and in roughly 30 seconds carpediem calls me. I’ve never seen him in my life and neither did he see me before so it was a surprise. From his PMs I imagined an older gentleman but when he told me to look to the right I saw in a distance a dude probably a bit older then me. This is why meeting erep people in real life is always interesting because you never really know who behind an IRC nick or a citizen.

Next stop, getting clawy, another Hungarian who lives in Romania. We made our way with the Dacia 1310 (carpediem I hope I’m not wrong about the number 😃 ) through the snowy roads in the city and parked close to clawy’s house. The “Romanian” troops was almost ready to go. We needed to get at least a present for our host to be, Murlockij. Clawy got into the car, carpediem started the engine and we took a sharp left turn. We headed up the tramway, took a right turn and headed into the maze of small streets near the center of Timisoara. We parked near Maria Square, got out of the car and went on foot to a Hungarian bookstore. We bought a book that covers the work of Szekely Laszlo, a well-known Timisoara architect from the early 1900. We added a map of current Timisoara as a bonus.

We had to stop 2 more times in the city to be ready for the 115 km trip, once for carpediem to mail some forms and second time to get some gas into the car.

We got it all done and so we headed for the border. It was still snowing but fortunately the road was cleared and it was just wet, compared to the city where it was a mess of dirty snow, ice and water.

We started talking to each other, the 3 of us. I already knew clawy a bit from another erep meeting held last summer in Timisoara.

Our ice braker was… erepublik of course . We started discussing about multies/gold/Romanian and Hungarian society/other erep players/politics and anything else that you can think of and it’s related to erep. Time flied fast and in no time we reached the border and crossed it in seconds. Officially we were on Hungarian soild, “the point of no return”. From this point on we had just about 40 km to got out of the 115 km. The time flew even faster and in 30 minutes or so we parked the car in downtown Szeged. I have to be honest, I’ve been in Szeged 5 times in my life, but every time I just passed so it was a new thing to me. I must admit that it’s a great city, even if it was under 1 feet of snow 😛 .

Murlockij came to meet us and brought esafrany, who came several hours earlier by bus from Pecs, a city close to Croatian border, along with him. Our group started to grow in number.

Although my mother language is Hungarian, I live in Romania and have no Hungarian friends so for several hours I had to adapt to the way Murlockij and esafrany talked Hungarian. We had a coffee/hot chocolate in a beautiful coffee/cake shop.

Why we were enjoying our drink, Murlockij presented us the history of Szeged. I believe that his knowledge in Szegedian history alone surpasses all my history knowledge. It made us feel more connected to the city we were visiting.

Shortly after he finished his storyline he got the phone call from sekica18, a real life Hungarian woman that lives in Serbia for 20 years. I soon discovered that she has a sexy brain and that in a lot of ways we have the same view on erepublik and we have an affinity for erep meetings.


esafrany and Sekica18 : Fish'n'.... cheese!


Murlockij kindly became our tour guide and showed us the most important landmarks from the historical center of Szeged. Churches, towers, universities, communist condominiums and finally a restaurant that served fish specialties, some 100 m away from the Belvarosi bridge that connects the historical part of the city to the newer part.

We sat down in the restaurant and each of us ordered some sort of fish soup, fish file (I can’t really remember what did everybody order) or my personal favorite dish, to be different from the group 😛, beef in sauce with cream and dumpling. It was delicious. It’s a good thing I refused the fish soup cause I knew I would want to drink a lot of beers at the meeting and this would make my bladder full of… uhm.. “unwanted” liquids.

While we waited for the food to be prepared and served the members of the group started to defrost their tongues as well as their bodies. I accommodated myself more and more to the fast Hungarian speech and got more involved into the discussions. Murlockij of course tried his best to offer us the best atmosphere while esafrany and sekica18 told us more about the Hungarian and Serbian erep society. Of course I didn’t say anything about Romania since I was an undercover secret agent for the eRomanian Government.

We slowly dug in into the food while keeping the conversations alive. Now that was a good meal.

At about 18:00 Hungarian time, we finished the all out eating and resumed the site seeing. This tour was a bit shorter then the previous one and it comprised only in a short 100 m trip to the bridge mentioned before with an added bonus of a splendorous panoramic view from the top of the bridge around the nearby parts of the city. The Tisza river covered the whitened land with a twist of cold darkness and the streets lights got us back from the reverie to a more… erepublikan state of being.

We got back to the car and headed for the pension that Murlockij reserved for our group of 5. It’s a small but clean pension. I have to note that it had a warm fireplace that got us in the mood for a group pic.

We didn’t want to linger so we left our rucksacks in our rooms, called a 6 seated taxi and headed for the erep meeting.


The eRepublik meeting in Szeged

It was about 19:00 when we got there. The place is called Borpatika (wine) and it was close to Sorpatika (beer). Even though the meeting was held in a pub that was serving mostly wine, most of us, including me, drank only beer.

We went down the abrupt stairs and we found ourselves in the midst of the meeting. Most of them were already there and were overcrowding the tables and the chairs. The tables were organized in a T shape with us getting a seat close to the bar, the lower part of the T. It’s a bit different from Romanian meetings in Timisoara but hey, if it’s new it’s interesting.
For the first hour I stayed low and watched the ongoing communication traffic. Murlockij asked each and every one of us to stand up one by one and tell the others something about us . Frankly, I didn’t hear 95% of it . It was noisy and people were shy to introduce themselves. So I had to go and talk to them 1 by 1 and until the end of the meeting I managed to do that with all 25-30 erep players. With some of them I talked more then an hour and with others maybe 2-3 sentences.


Me on the left, AThompson on the right : Hey dude, could you please stop the world from spinning?

By roaming the pub I found out that AThompson was there (ex-Hungarian CP from last month) with his girlfriend. We had a nice chat about… universities, because both of us are attending to law school. We talked a lot more but can’t remember what exactly 😃.
I started drinking, 0.5 l pint of Arany Aszok beer until I lost the count. 280 forints a pint and that’s roughly 1 euro so it was fairly cheap.

As the time passed I managed to talk to all of them at least a few words. I watched for the general mood, friendships, groups of friends or “offensive” views.



Me and my pall Gregory Gallangher : alpho, I found Nirvana at last!

Zotza the ”Arulo” who told me that I should be afraid of the “invasion”, Gregory Gallangher, the current Hungarian CP with whom I had a liberating discussion over ethnic minorities, szekely and gypsy problematic and the idea about a massive international erep meeting to be held in Budapest in this autumn (that I really hope will be brought to reality if the inhabitants of Budapest will want it and work for it) all of this while he was buying me the beers 😃 , and all of you who are not mentioned in this article, thank you for the beer run and the wonderful time and the chance for me to take a glance at the Hungarian community or at least the most joyful part of it 😉.


And now the PS. for “teh” group :


Murlockij taking the pic : My baby group, how sweet


Once again, Murlockij (Szepen megkoszonok mindent amit ertunk megrendteltel es megcsinaltal) thank you!
esafrany – Can I offer you some tea?
Sekica18 – how’s the karma in New Zeeland?
Carpediem4life – glad to have you as driver … cause you drink a lot less then us
Clawy – stay “black” as always and never stop trolling the Hungarian politics (also be on the lookout for next Timisoara erep meeting that will come shortly)


All of the pics from the meeting and tour here



esafrany's article about the outcome of the meeting
Murlockij's article about his personal view on the second life - real life relation after the meeting


Yours trully, one player that remains in this game because his addiction to real life meetings,

alpho