Telling an anecdote

This is the payoff lesson: every thread from past-tense, verb-prefixes, sequencing-a-story, and reported-speech-and-clauses comes together here to tell one real story from start to finish, the way you'd actually tell a friend what happened.

Notice how much of a good anecdote is reported speech: Azt mondta, hogy... carries almost as much of the story as the events themselves — people talk about what other people said constantly.