The Rug Whipper

Laci and I walk Ati three times a day through the maze of paths and streets that connect our neighbourhood. Living in a neighbourhood built during Hungary's communist period, we experience our streets as variations on a theme, pachelbel's cannon for the eyes - each block outfitted with 5-storey buildings, a school, at least one shop, a playground, and standing lonely outside each building, one of these. 

Having not seen them before I had imagined they were exercise bars of a bygone era and I guess Laci found this amusing because he never corrected me. But this morning I was set straight. With the baby down for his morning nap I heard the thunderous clapping coming from outside our first-floor flat. I raced to the lodga to investigate. There, on the park bench outside...

I learned that my 'exercise bar' had another life. It was the proud holder-upper of heavy, trodden, dust-filled rugs - where the shag underfoot was dragged for a proper spring beating.

When I first arrived all was still. A rug lay in waiting and a paddle nearby. I ran inside for my camera and when I got back a man was hard at work beating the living daylights out of his dining room floor.

Meet Ferenc - willing teacher and master rug whipper - who explained in immaculate English that today he could beat the rugs as he pleased for on  this particular morning his wife was not around to tell him how to beat the rugs.  

He also explained that it was a task to be performed with the utmost of stealth for if he lingered too long at the rug-whipping bar his racket would alert neighbouring women who would surely come out of their homes, rugs in hand, asking if Ference would also kindly whip their rugs clean as well. It quickly became apparent why.

Whipping rugs is hard work.

Really hard work!

And so the seemingly abandoned exercise bars are not so forgotten after all... but whoever hangs out near them does get a workout.