House Blessing Party

Sunday afternoon we invited many of our new friends to our apartment for American coffee and Hungarian cake. We wanted to thank our friends for helping us get started in our new country and to ask them to join us in praying a blessing over our new home. We had a great time together. Hungarians are used to much stronger coffee than Americans drink, but that is what we know how to make, so we served American coffee and our guests were kind enough to drink it. We all really enjoyed the Hungarian cake. There is a "cukrazda" (a kind of pastry/coffee shop) just two blocks from our new apartment. We are told this is the best cukrazda in Debrecen and from the delicious cakes we ate on Sunday, I can believe it. One was a yummy moist black forest cake and the other was a yellow cake with a fabulous fruit and cream filling (see top picture). I (Nancy) was so proud of myself for successfully ordering the cakes earlier in the week. No one spoke English in the cukrazda, so I wrote out in my best, very basic Hungarian that I wanted two cakes for Saturday. Then I pointed to the ones I wanted. It worked! The cakes disappeared in no time.
The pictures of the flowers are just a sample of the gifts our guests brought to our party. It is traditional to take flowers to a party and we received some beautiful, frangrant ones. The best part, though, was when the entire group joined in prayer over our new home including the INSTE office. Michael Gulyas prayed the blood of Jesus to cover our home and Ed Courtney (pastor of the International Church) prayed God's blessing over all of us. What a happy day!