Sunday

Today I had a very lovely day. It was Sunday and such I did not plan to do anything useful. However my brother in law and his wife invited me and my lady friend to a birthday brunch in Manhattan which we gracefully accepted.

This was the first time they met my friend so naturally she was a little apprehensive but the whole thing went very smoothly, we had a great time, we had good drinks, good food and a lots of very warm conversation.

Even though this was a French restaurant the food I had was not really French. I had chicken paillard that I don't know what means but it was still good. The only French thing that I had was liver pate as appetizer. And, the others had no French food either but we still enjoyed the ambiance.
So we tried to order everything with a French accent.

The rest of the day before and after brunch I spent with my friend which was very pleasant.

Something else.

In the past few days I have been working on fixing our accommodation in Budapest during our upcoming Spring trip. We made some arrangements before but recently I was given a great website and that was very helpful in finding better places. So we eventually decided on one place, contacted the owner, received some information and today we finalized the deal.

In accordance with the contract we had to pay a deposit and that through PayPal. I think I might have used PayPal once in my lifetime but it turned out I did have an account. So I used my credit card which was already on file and forwarded the payment. There is nothing unusual about this because millions of people are using the PayPal method.

But what was good that after I submitted the payment I received two phone calls from PayPal. One automated and one from a live person. They just wanted to verify if my transaction was real and it was really me who made it. The security of this system made me feel pretty good. I was glad that somebody was looking out for my money.