3.

FAMILY

In most families there are two children, a mother, and a father. Of course, it’s difficult to tell,
because there are families with more than two children and many couples get divorced.
I think my family is an average family model: my mother, my father and my elder brother.
My parents live in Budapest in a block of flats. They live on the 11th floor.

My mother is an average height woman. She is very careful of her appearance. She is young
for grandma and quite slim too. She has a round face with a small turned-up nose, a thin lips
and hazel eyes. She normally has good sight but she wears glasses for close work and reading.
She works for the Tax Authority. She is an excellent cook and holds the family together. For
example she often organizes big family lunches or dinners. I have a strong sense of family,
which I have inherited from my mother.

My father is his early fifties and he works as a lorry driver. He is rather tall, and he has a
square face and light brown hair. In a lot of people’s opinion I’m just like my father, because
we both have green eyes and characteristic pointed nose. He is not a typical man, so he is
interested in clothes and even chooses clothes for my mother too.

My brother is two years older than me. Although he has his own flat, he lives with our
parents. The main cause is that, he works a lot and he doesn’t have enough time for cooking,
washing and other housework.

I moved from my parent’s house about 5 years ago, when I got married. My husband is 29
years old like my brother, and he works as a lorry driver like my father.
In my family, as usual my mother does the housework. She cleans the whole flat, washes and
irons the clothes, washes up, and does other household chores. As my father works for a food
company, he often brings food at home, and my mother doesn’t have to cook. I think in most
families the housework is done by women, and men often do the masculine jobs, for example
repairing. However, nowadays women work a lot, often more than men, and I think men help
their wives with the housework more and more. My husband and I work every day and we go
home late, so we clean up the house together at the weekends. Usually he does the vacuum
cleaner.
My grandparents don’t live with us. My grandma on my father ‘ side lives near my parents in
Budapest. She lives alone, because her husband died when my father was a little child. Then
my grandmother got married again, but her second husband died too. We visit her and help
her with everything we can. I really love her. My granny cooks the best meals in Hungary!
My mother’s parents live about 3 hours away in Nyíregyháza, so we visit them quite rarely;
unfortunately we only visit them on celebrations. They are very nice, too, and I spend my
almost summer holiday there with my brother when I was a child.
My four cousins and my uncle and aunt live in Nyíregyháza too, but we often keep in contact
either by e-mail or letters and occasionally we even chat on the Internet. If our grandparents
were alone and couldn’t care about themselves, me or any other member of the family would
allow them to move to our place. Old people often choose to go to an old people’s home, if
they don’t have relatives or don’t want to be a burden on their relatives. If my grandparents
want to go to an old people’s home I would try to dissuade them from doing it, but of course I
would respect their decision.