Round 2 - October 2012

Winner - Zoran Spisljak

Zoran Spisljak, affectionately known by friends and family as the 'Beast from the East' or 'Big Z' was born in Serbia and was later adopted by the Welsh. He has been in Hungary for the last 4 and a half years, working as football coach with Debrecen and Ujpest FC. Between jobs at the moment he spends his hours analysing every single football match on TV (and I mean every one!), exploring the bars and restaurants of Budapest, taking part in his wife’s Zumba classes and when he can, bossing the Celtic Old Boys around from the back four!  Always up for a challenge and a lover of monologues, and being made all the braver by a few glasses of wine, he agreed to take part in the Gift of the Gab, and if you don’t like his stories, just remember it’s for charity!

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Round 2 Competitors

Attila István Szabó  has a degree in Electrical Engineering. In reality, he never got excited when he was  told  how he could check the difference between a normal line and a line with  bad soldering.So, after two and a half years, he left his job as a service level manager and took a different route. He went to prison… to join Willy Benkő in training inmates at the Kozma street prison. He went to the Budapest Toastmasters Club to improve his presentations skills (he's currently the President). And he started his own Hungarian public speech training course. On summer weekends, he earns a living by emceeing  weddings. He also works for a law office as an IT specialist...just for fun (and for a living as well of course).  When he got the call to fill in for Hans at next Wednesday’s Gift of the Gab, he wasn't sure. But he said yes anyway. After looking up the meaning of 'godsend' in the dictionary, he realised that Mary was happy with his answer.

Tim Child is the Managing Director of LBS, a language and business training services company based in Budapest. He is a former Director with a large UK company and rashly entered Gift of the Gab in exchange for Mary Murphy agreeing to wear orange plaits at the next St Patrick’s parade. Having studied past form he feels he needs to declare an Irish connection and is happy to say that he is 1/32 Irish. He also feels this may be his biggest mistake since agreeing to allow the BBC to follow him around for a year with a camera in a 1999 docusoap; but then it is all in a good cause.

Emese Dobonyi is Hungarian and lived in Zürich for 12 years. She has travelled a lot for different volunteer projects all around the world (mainly in Europe, South America and New York). For 20 years, Emese was a humanist activist and volunteer worker in her free time. She spent four years in Ghana and used work for Swissair.  Now she works as a masseuse and organizes exhibitions and takes part in art works to decorate ruin pubs.  She has also organized different projects in Hungary like the Center of Cultures in Budapest and The World Without War Foundation. She published a neighbourhood newspaper in Zürich, organized festivals and different fundraising events for fundraising in Zürich and in Budapest and also took part in the organization of the leaving peace sign in both cities.

Ken White is a 40-something Geordie who is not afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve and is terrified of public speaking but was roped in to doing GOTG after a few too many glasses of wine. He really must learn to say no to women after too many drinks!!!
However, wanting to face all his fears head on this year, he is looking forward to the challenge and, whatever the outcome, is happy to be involved. After living in Budapest for 10 years, Ken has finally stepped out of his cocoon and joined the expat world, first with Baby Blue Banana English language event organising and then as editor of the daily.hu.
Ken is looking forward to working alongside the other speakers in October, especially the masseuse as he feels he will need to be relaxed on the night.