The other side of the Hungarian postcard

Postcards are superficial.

On one side of a postcard is a sanitized photo of some aspect of the country, and on the other side, in the limited space provided, is a terse comment about "having a lovely time, wish you were here".

Postcards are for tourists.

Blogs are for Expats.

I suppose this  is about ones personal pros and cons of relocating to Hungary. I will start by saying how I came to want to live here. I am English but I lived in north east Scotland from 1997 to 2011. I was self employed in Scotland, repairing electric appliances, mainly washing machines. For some years I have suffered from back pain, not helped by having to move heavy washing machines around several times a day. Doctors were not interested in investigating this so I could never get a referral to a specialist or whatever. Trade was also on the decline, as a lot of people no longer get things repaired. They perhaps get an extended warranty for a few years then when that runs out and the machine fails they throw it out and buy new. I didn't do extended warranty work, as I preferred being paid by private individuals rather than companies.
Both my parents died within the 3 year period 2008 to 2010 so my brother and myself had to sell their small bungalow in Nuneaton. I would not have wanted to be too far from them when they were alive and I did have to drop  everything and go down to England a few times when one of them (or in one case both of them!) was in hospital or seriously ill at home.
I started thinking about the possibility of buying a house somewhere cheaper than UK, renting my cottage in Scotland and using that rent money as my main income. I also wanted to buy an additional investment property to give a second source of rental income. This would probably be a flat in a big city somewhere. I considered France, Austria, Germany, Bulgaria, Portugal and Hungary. I chose Hungary because it seemed to offer the best compromise on house prices, infrastructure, living costs and weather. I would have preferred France but the living costs would be too high for my tiny income.
OK, I bought my house in Hungary. It is in the middle of a nice village but it is what would be called a croft in Scotland or a smallholding in England. It is a 3 bedroom house with 1.5 acres of land, a large barn and other agricultural buildings. There are several big walnut trees, some pine woodland and hundreds of Christmas trees. I've always liked wildlife and nature and there is plenty here. I don't always see the animals themselves but their prints and other evidence of their activities can be seen. There are woodpeckers, tiny black squirrels, lizards, deer, pine martens, wild boar, snakes and all sorts of different insects and bugs. I take my dog for long walks around the village and there are lots of dirt track roads offering peace and tranquillity.
The Hungarian people are generally polite, helpful and respectable. There is much less vandalism, graffiti and yob behaviour than you would find in most parts of UK. At the same time, they don't seem very foreign. They dress much the same as Brits, have similar hair styles etc. and some Hungarians I've seen in the supermarket look so British that I have sometimes listened in on their conversations! Apart from a couple of exceptions they have always proved to be speaking Hungarian. 
One of the main attractions for me was the low population density, meaning you rarely encounter major traffic jams or big crowds. There is also much less vehicle pollution than in England. I can take the motorway from my area to lake Balaton or Budapest and it's like using the UK motorways when they first opened and there were less cars around.
Hungary has proper seasons, you know it will be cold in winter but you also know it will be warm in summer. I got fed up with cold, wet summers in Scotland. Some years I needed to wear a sweater for 50 weeks of the 52.

If that was the shiny side of the postcard, we now come to the other side, the cons. I think most people find, like me the Hungarian language is the biggest challenge. It is a very difficult language, as most words are unique to Hungarian. In my area hardly anyone speaks English and they are not even very experienced in deciphering Hungarian spoken badly. If you don't use perfect pronunciation they won't even recognise you are speaking Hungarian! In UK we get to hear English spoken badly a lot, as there are always plenty of foreigners around.
Next we come to red tape and paperwork. Simple tasks like opening a bank account or buying a prepaid sim card involve reams of form filling in Hungary. For any visit to a bank you really need to allow at least an hour. Buying a vehicle and transferring the registration is also a complicated, expensive process and has a deadline you have to meet, you get fined if you take too long.
Next we come to attitude to animals. Here in the village, dogs and cats are not regarded as pets. Dogs exist to guard your property, cats are there to keep down the mice and other vermin. Dogs live outside in all weather and are often kept chained up. They have kennels but bear in mind that it can go down to -20 C in winter or go up to +30 C in summer. I take my dog for a walk every day but I never see any of the other villagers walking their dogs. Several times I've been shouted at because the other dogs bark when they see Charlie, my Basset Hound. This can get quite noisy in parts of the village where there are a lot of dogs, hence the complaints. I sometimes take him in the car to a quiet lane so we can avoid walking within the village but on one such trip I returned to the car to find the passenger door glass had been smashed.