18.

Services

There are several services in the world, such as restaurants, banks, hairdressers, dry-cleaners,
patrol services.
People are usually in a hurry and they don’t have time to wait for meals in restaurants. They
go to self-service restaurants, which don’t offer many kinds of dishes, but the service is quick
and the food is acceptable. There are cheaper and some more expensive ones. You can buy
your food at takeaway restaurants if you don’t have time to cook but would like to eat at
home. Fast food restaurants are very popular but not so healthy.
Many students complain about the canteen food, saying that it is tasteless and full of fat. I
think the situation is not that bad. The kitchen provides food for several hundred students a
day and can’t afford to use the best ingredients. There are some dishes that they cook really
well.
In Hungary the number of foreign restaurants is growing. There are more and more Chinese,
Greek, Italian, Turkish and Arabic restaurants. You can also find other international
restaurants, mainly in big towns.
It’s much cheaper to do all the work yourself and with the help of your family and friends, but
you might not be so satisfied with the result. Employing professionals is quite expensive but
they work faster and better.
At the post office you can buy stamps, envelopes, cards. You can post letters and parcels, pay
your bills, transfer money.
Banks offer a wide choice of services. They deal with savings, payment services, lending,
insurance, foreign currency exchanges, leasing, giving advice on investments. Nowadays
more and more banks provide telebanking services. It means that people use their phones or
the Internet to give orders to the banks to carry out different kinds of business transactions for
them.
Patrol services are ambulance, police, fire service and auto club. Ambulance callable in 104,
police in 105 and fire service in 107 in emergencies. In Hungary these services are not so
quick and modern. Auto club helps the motorists in default.
If we have a broken pipe in the bathroom, we should call a plumber. If we buy a new cooker,
we will need to call an electrician or a gas-fitter to install everything according to the legal
standards. This is very important because otherwise these appliances could be dangerous. We
take the car to the mechanic if it does not run well, we call the painter if we want to renovate
our home and the carpenter if we need new furniture.