Egészségedre!

Glühwein in Wien

2010-01-12T16:56:00.005+01:00

Part of what students visiting Europe are supposed to do is travel around to the capitals and impressive cities of all the relatively nearby countries. Sometimes I feel guilty that I am wasting this golden opportunity to do so, but I don’t usually go about experiences in a typical fashion, and don’t usually regret it. Plus, Fulbright doesn’t give us that much money ;) As I see it, traveling around to the major cities of Western Europe will be feasible later in life, tentatively with my cousin KRV when she is studying abroad in Paris. Being able to really explore Hungary from the inside is something that very few people ever have a chance to do. That doesn’t mean I won’t make use of the Hungarian bus company, strangely named Orangeways, to do at least some bouncing around. Before the holidays, two Fulbright friends I crossed the Austrian border to spend a day in Vienna, which also goes by Wien, Bécs, or a handful of other names, depending on who you ask.

This was, by no means, a typical Viennese daytrip. Both friends have already been to the city more than once in recent years, but the last time I was there I was two. My eyes have probably seen the Hofburg before, but I don’t remember it; imperial grandeur doesn’t leave much of an impression at such a young age. In any case, this was not the day to make up my long absence. Crossing the border into the other side of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire (Oszták Császárság) suddenly made all things Hungarian that much more interesting. We were craning our ears to identify all the Hungarian tourists (there were many) and were seized by a desire to speak Hungarian all day long. In fact, it was probably the most successful day of Hungarian conversing we did all semester! Nevertheless, I did manage to pick up three words of German: banhof (train station), gesselschaft (society), and gürteltasche (fanny pack, hahaha!). I also learned that “ei” makes the “i” sound while “ie” makes the “e” sound, “w” is “v,” and that crazy symbol, “ß,” is like a double “s.”

So how did we spend the day, exactly, if the historic sites and museums that I am usually drawn to were not on the itinerary? We killed a good hour in the beginning trying to figure out how to get around from Point A to Points, B, C, D, etc. I have to admit that, until I started going to Montreal with a Vassar family during my junior year, I was a hopeless urbaphobe. Navigating the public transportation system in a foreign city, particularly one where I do not understand the language, is not something I could have brought myself to attempt. The lesson in getting around was preceded by a much more basic one that I still seem to not have learned: how not to get run over by the tram. I am spoiled in Budapest that the trams run in the middle of the road, not right along the sidewalk close to absent-minded pedestrians. I nearly got myself run over TWICE. Disclaimer: There was no glühwein whatsoever involved in these tram incidents. The wein came shortly after, once we arrived at the Christmas market, Christkindlmarkt, by Vienna’s city hall. It was still super early in the afternoon, so the place was far from hopping, but we got some wein and wurst there and then strolled into a café for dessert. From there, we walked from the back to the cathedral area, critisized the small Hungarian holdings at the international bookstore, and hit up another Christmas market by Freylung.

(Going to the Christmas Market was sort of the point of the trip, and I am glad we went, but it is totally overrated. The Budapest poser market at Vörösmarty Tér, pictured below, is nearly identical, and probably cheaper!)

The day-trip to Vienna nearly turned into a two-day excursion, thanks to two different mishaps. As the end of the day approached, I was apparently not adamant enough that it was time to abandon the frivolities and head back to the station, hence the sprint to arrive at the bus at 6:58, two minutes before departure. Great, we made it on time, but get this: somehow I purchased the return tickets for the wrong DATE! Had there not been a handful of empty seats left on the bus, we could have spent another 24 hours in Vienna and maybe then I would actually have seen all the standard sites one is supposed to visit in the city. I guess I will just have to go back again in the spring ;)

Heritage Speaker

2009-12-12T08:46:00.003+01:00

I wake up every morning and thank the good Lord that Hungarian is my first language. Okay, that is an exaggeration, but trying to relearn some of the Hungarian that I have forgotten is certainly helping me appreciate how difficult it is for people to learn this language as adults for the first time. Frankly, I am not sure I could do it if I were in their position. Although my language challenges here are much less daunting than my colleagues’, there are certain quirks and obstacles that come with being a “heritage speaker.”

Heritage speakers are people who learned a language growing up at home, and have varying levels of proficiency. (First encountered this term two weeks ago, and my friend sort of uses it as an epithet). I fall in the category of speakers who “have full oral fluency” – well, almost – “but their written literacy was not developed because they were schooled in English.” Ding, ding, ding! Hence, my vocabulary of nouns and verbs is even greater than I realize sometimes and I can converse and make myself understood relatively easily, but my heart sinks at receiving an e-mail in Hungarian with more than five lines of text and I can’t even spell “goodnight” properly!

Although I resented it on-and-off at the time, the few years that I spent Saturdays mornings in Magyar Iskola/Hungarian School are invaluable to me now. I would be a full rung lower on the heritage speaker ladder if I had never learned the rudiments of Hungarian reading and writing there. Granted, the Hungarian alphabet I learned was three letters shorter than it is now and tacked x and y at the end before they conformed to the rest of the world and put it before z and zs, but 41 out of 44 letters ain’t half bad. Besides, two of those new letters are lame! They have decided that the best way to achieve the American “j” sound is “dzs,” which is at least useful if cumbersome, but this “dz” one is totally pointless.

As I mentioned in my previous post about language, Hungarian is nearly 100% phonetic, which theoretically makes spelling super-easy. But believe me, there are still plenty of places to go wrong. The two gaps in phonetic spelling are the distinctions between j and ly anywhere in a word, or i and y and the end. I have a tendency of leave out j’s all over the place. (My friend is super-smart and noticed that “éjszak” [goodnight] without the j is “észak” [north], hence my mistake for that particular word.) Double consonants throw me for a loop, and usually I try to overcompensate my inclination to use them by editing too many of them out. There are a significant number of words whose pronunciation I slightly misremembered, especially an extra suffix squeezed in somewhere, or accented vowels (e.g. e vs. é or ö vs. ő). Ironically, this means that I pronounced “pronounce” wrong until I saw it in writing last week!

Then there is the fact that I never actually learned Hungarian grammar. This is the part where people who learned Hungarian in school have a whole lot more going for them than I do. Apparently Hungarian has NINE locative cases. Most of these I use properly without thinking, but when I resurrected my Hungarian from hibernation back in August, it seems that some of these cases stayed asleep. I feel pretty stupid that I have regularly been saying the equivalent of “to” instead of “in” by leaving out a simple “n” at the end, using the –ba or –be suffix instead of –ban or –ben. Thankfully my friend gave me a hard-core grammar lesson one night and corrects me every time I leave off that pesky ending. Monday we are going to tackle “meg-” and “el-” prefixes on the beginning of verbs.

The final curveball is that Hungarian, like most other languages, has a host of regional variations. In other words, I speak like a hick. Okay, that is an exaggeration, too, but I did not realize that I had inherited so many regional twists. Both sides of my family are from historically northern Hungary, so the Hungarian I learned is thoroughly Felvidéki. I had no idea that the imprint of this would be noticeable, especially buried under my American accent, but it is. My Virginia friends will be delighted to know that I practically use the Hungarian version of “y’all,” saying “nekiek” instead of “nekik” for “them.” There must be dozens of small things like this that I am clueless about. So far, then, the greatest language obstacles I am having here deal not with the struggle to learn more of the language, but to unlearn parts of it, rather, figuring out which things that I say are Felvidéki quirks, not standard Hungarian, just so I am aware.

To improve our Hungarian, my friend and I have been holding self-imposed Hungarian days once or twice a week when we can manage it. These are never successful enough to have us speaking only Hungarian, but it’s the effort that counts, right? The low-stakes conversational practice is great, and we are totally cool with correcting each other. This week we even watched a movie in Hungarian, from which I learned how to say “comrade” and “the international situation is intensifying.” Our efforts also extend to Gchat, where nearly 50% of our conversations are in Hungarian. I throw in harder words to expand her vocab, and she corrects all the spelling and grammar that I FAIL at. Also having her translate a different Hungarian Christmas carol each day as the holidays approach :)

Finally, I share with you all some of my favorite and least favorite new words. I have developed a strong disdain for cognates in general, especially those that replaces perfectly suitable Hungarian words or employ sounds that are not natural to the Hungarian language. Hence, tinédzser, the Hungarian phonetitization of “teenager,” drives me crazy. I get a kick out of some attempts of Hungarian to come up with nouns for words from other cultures, specifically chopsticks (which translates to eating rods/wands), igloo (ice hovel/shack/shanty), volcano (fire vomiter!), and kilt (Scottish skirt). I like to think that my vocabulary is improving now that I know the words for only child and nuclear weapon, for example, not just kid and sword. Now if only I could force myself to read more Hungarian...

Debrecenbe kéne menni

2009-12-01T07:40:00.005+01:00

I hate placing cold calls to family friends – hate it! – but have had to do that a lot lately. The conversation goes something like this: “hi, it’s me, …. yes, I know you haven’t heard from or seen me in six years, …. yes, I am in Hungary…. no, my parents are not …. yes, they are fine,” and then somehow we make plans to me to visit a few weeks later. Having to do it in English would be bad enough, but in Hungarian over the telephone it is ten times worse.

Just because making the initial call is super awkward, it doesn’t mean that the actual occasion is all that bad. A few weeks ago I visited Kati néni, who was our neighbor in New York City for a few years. The church on E 69th St. has a townhouse sort of smooshed into it, with the lower level for the caretaker, some ambiguous space in the middle for the church office, and the upper level for the minister. We shared a 16 sq. ft. backyard, where we engaged in the most Hungarian of traditions together: szalonna sütés (more on this later). What I really remember most about growing up with Kati néni as our neighbor is that we used to watch Supermarket Sweep at her place when my parents had to go out. Seeing her brought back a lot of memories for both of us – of New York City, church events in the Kossuth Hall, and even my little childhood doll that I brought along, named Paprikás Lily.

This past weekend in Debrecen I had to make another cold call, this one to my mom’s cousin Vitéz Laci. The only number I had was for his wife’s cell, so it took a bit of work to explain to this woman who I was. The main purpose of meeting with Laci was to see his father, Mityu bácsi, my grandfather’s brother. My late grandfather, his brother, their late sister looked eerily alike. Mityu is a tanner version of my grandfather with white hair and a mustache, and Irénke néni basically looked like my grandfather as a woman. I was concerned about meeting with Mityu bácsi because his memory is leaving him; he was clearly a little confused at points, but seemed totally with it at other moments and only suggested that I meet with a long-dead relative once. The train ride back from Debrecen was kind of depressing because seeing him, looking and acting SO much like my grandfather – same eyes, same face, same walk, same sense of humor – was such a tease. They gave me one of my grandfather’s old Bibles, translated into Hungarian by the famous Reformed theologian Károli Gáspár (the namesake of the university I teach at) and published in 1898. Wow.

The rest of our time in Debrecen was great. I went with two other Fulbright girls from Budapest to belatedly celebrate the birthday of the one Fulbright student that is based out there. The train ride out, on a full train with not enough seats, was pretty crazy. A little wine helped pass the time, once we got this random guy to open the bottle for us by pushing the cork in with a key. (My friend’s boyfriend had suggested placing the wine bottle inside a shoe and banging it against the ground to build up pressure and pop the cork – Hungarian physics – but we tried it on the balcony the next night and it definitely did not work.) We accidentally chose the perfect weekend to come to Debrecen, during the annual goose festival. We saw Hungarian folkdancing, heard awesome Csángó drumming (from an old Hungarian tribe that now resides primarily in Romania), and had stuffed cabbage made with goose. The festival took place in the city’s main square, home of the Debreceni Nagytemplom, the unofficial capital of the Reformed Church in Hungary. I went to church there on Sunday with Anna, a fellow pastor’s kid who spent part of her youth in Perth Amboy, NJ, with her family before moving back to Debrecen for college.

Our last night in Debrecen we went out to the great forest, a UNESCO site, for szalonna sütés, the great Hungarian pastime that I mentioned above. The Huffmons, a Fulbright family from South Carolina in Debrecen for the year, joined us for this grand occassion. Szalonna is basically a giant slab of bacon with a ridiculous fat-to-meat ratio. It took a while to get a fire going in the damp woods, but between Robin’s Girl Scout experience and my Lewis & Clark fire-building skills we got it going eventually. What you do is cut yourself a nice square of szalonna, score it, put it on the end of a stick, and hold it over the fire. In a matter of minutes it will start to cook, and you just hold the dripping fat over a piece of bread (sometimes layered with some onion and vegetables if you are feeling healthy) to create “zsíros kenyér,” usually translated to English as dirty bread. Along with this artery-clogging dinner I had my first (half)shot of pálinka, a strong fruit brandy that Hungarians usually make out of plums, apricots, or peaches. In Hungary, everything is better with pig fat.

Debrecenbe kéne menni
Pulykakakast kéne venni
Megállj kocsis lyukas a kas!
Kiugrik a pulykakakas!

We should go to Debrecen fair
We should buy a turkey hen there
Watch out driver, don’t be jerky
We might lose our perky turkey

Photo credits: Adee Braun and Scott Huffmon

Buda Buda Buda -- PEST!

2009-11-30T15:31:00.008+01:00

Caryn and Kristina’s adventures in East Central Europe continued the weekend after Prague with Caryn’s whirlwind visit to Budapest. Since her bus got in late Sunday night and left first thing Wednesday morning, we really only had two days to see things. We zigzagged around the city to the Parliament, Chain Bridge (Lánc Híd), Castle District (home of the Royal Palace, Matthias Church, and Fisherman’s Bastion), St. Stephen’s Basilica, the Jewish Synagogue, Heroes’ Square (Hősök tere), and “Memento Park: Remains of Communist Dictatorship.” See below for a virtual tour!

The highlight of the visit was going to Széchenyi Fürdő, a neo-Baroque thermal bath, apparently the largest in Europe. (They had dolphin gargoyles, my new favorite mythical creature after first seeing them at Budapest’s Roman ruins, Acquincum, and again in Prague.)

We made sure Caryn could sample a handful of Hungarian foods, specifically gulyás (goulash), töltött káposzta (stuffed cabbage), and paprikás (the mushroom variety, even though csirke/chicken is the most common).

Wish we had had more time, but it was a great visit!

Czech it Out: Prague

2009-11-18T09:01:00.005+01:00

It was around this time six years ago that I got to know my friend Caryn, one of the little first-years on the high school fencing team when I was a senior. Never could we have imagined that we would be spending weekends together in Prague and Budapest. Caryn is studying abroad from UConn this year through the CIEE program in Prague, Czech Republic, and I had the pleasure of visiting her there in early November.

It is surprising that I have never been to Prague before, since I have almost been a handful of times. When my family traveled to Hungary six years ago on vacation, we were supposed to have a layover there for a few days but it fell through. The purpose was not a fancy European vacation – I have never been to Western Europe – but to see the city where my dad went to college/seminary for five years. It took a few years after the intended trip, but now I have finally seen it.

There are a handful of long-distance bus companies that have routes making stops in capitals and major cities. The Hungarian line, un-Hungarianly named Orangeways, gets from BP to Prague or vice-versa in a survivable six-and-a-half to seven hours, with a stop in Pozsony/Bratislava in between (note: bring a Euro coin so you can use the bathroom at the bus station!). I got into Prague on Friday night, just in time to catch one of the final metros from the bus station.

About two full days to explore a whole city: GO! After waking up on the late side, Caryn and I set out for Old Town Square, the heart of Prague’s Old Town (duh). The coolest thing there was the famous astronomical clock, which has nearly a dozen hands to track everything from the normal minutes and hours to the times of sunrise and sunset and phases of the zodiac. On the hour, the clock puts on a little show, with the ringing bells, chiming statuettes, and a rotating show – reminiscent of “It’s a Small World” at Disneyland or the scene in the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie – of a skeleton, the twelve apostles, and a Turk appearing before two windows. Within a matter of seconds, the creepy little display is over. Also decorating the clock area are depictions of four vices: greed, vanity, death, and the ominous Turk.

Next on our tour was Charles Bridge. Part of the effect was lost with half of the width of the bridge closed off for renovation, but it was still a lovely stroll with a nice view. The bridge leads us to Prague Castle, where we spend the bulk of the day. I learned the full story of King Wenceslas being murdered by his brother Boreslav (I love a good Cain and Abel, Remus and Romulus story), and saw some fancy cathedral work with gorgeous windows. Either there or in a nearby chapel we heard a whacked-out story about some saint whose tongue, they thought, had been mysteriously preserved in the tomb, but they discovered later that it was parts of his brain – ew. We toured the Royal Palace and saw the famous site of the Defenestration of Prague (reprise of AP Modern Euro – thanks Mr. O’Brien!) and lovely vaulted ceilings. Last stop in the Castle was the Golden Lane where they had an awesome exhibit on weapons and armor (fencers are suckers for that kind of thing) and a house where Kafka lived for a while. As if that weren’t enough for one day, we finished up with a walk through Wenceslas Square, home of the mounted statue of Wenceslas that will come to life and save the Czech people if disaster strikes. It was also the site of protests during the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Unfortunately I was about a week and a half early for any 20th anniversary activities…

The historical adventures continued Sunday with a visit to the City of Prague Museum. We heard that the National Museum was a bit of a joke, with its fine collection of rocks and dusty stuffed animals, but the city museum was a great alternative. Learned about a handful of the different peoples that had lived in the Prague area over the centuries and the archaeological challenges of tracing that many hundreds of years of history. We experienced a 3-D tour on video of a big diorama of 19th-century Prague, and were dismayed to discover that the 20th-century history of the city is apparently not important enough to include in the museum.

The final day I spent mostly at Vysehrad, the city’s old and historically ineffective fort . I took a tour of the casemate, surprisingly not quite as cool as the Casemate Museum at Fortress Monroe in Hampton, VA, but still appropriately dark and creepy. Before heading out, Caryn and I walked through the cemetery, final resting place of a host of famous Czech people.

The thirty or so words of Slovak that I know did not get me very far in the Czech Republic. After watching Czecho-Slovak Super Star on TV with my cousins in Komárno I got decently good at distinguishing between Slovak and Czech, but that still doesn’t mean I understand any of it. A few syllables, especially for nouns, cross over from other languages, but not much. The consonant clusters in Czech are CRAZY; my favorite word is zmrzlina, ice cream. Say it: zmrz.

Over the Border: Slovakia

2009-11-16T12:35:00.008+01:00

One of the best aspects of being here so far is that the ratio of time I spend between Hungary and Slovakia is the opposite of my previous visits to Europe. I had never gotten to spend more than a few days at a time in Hungary, since 90% of our family is over the border. I am glad that it is close and I can visit them easily, but it is nice being able to spend the vast majority of my time now on the Hungarian side. So far, I have visited Slovakia three times already.

The first trip was at the very end of September to the vicinity of Kassa/Kosice, to see my dad’s sister and her family. Since my mom’s family is from there and my dad was the pastor there before my aunt (not to mention that it where my parents met and lived together for a year and a half after they got married), it is home base for us over here. My grandfather’s ashes were taken back to Győrke to be buried. I had the chance to come then four years ago – the rest of my family all did, including my brother – but for some stupid reason I decided not to. So I made the pilgrimage out now to the big hill overlooking the village, and wished that my Vitéz cousins were there too. Usually in NJ we go out to the Perth Amboy waterfront and throw flowers in the water to remember him. I really hope they can come out here at some point to see the place where Nagyapa grew up. Pictured here are the parsonage in Győrke where my parents lived and my aunt now lives, the cemetery, and a few shots of Kassa's pretty city center.

A little over a month ago I made my first trip up to Komárno, the Slovak half of the previously unified city of Komárom, to visit my cousin Zoltán and his family. My aunt Márta was born before WWII while her sister and my dad were born after, accounting for the big age gap between me and her two sons that are my cousins, who have kids that are closer to my age. Komárno, unlike Kassa, is still a very Hungarian city, with everything written out in two languages and many people skipping over the Slovak text to get at the Hungarian (see one example below from Rima Szombat). My cousin’s wife teaches Slovak there, as a second language since in this part all of the schools teach primarily in Hungarian. She has a hard time of it, since many of the students actively resist learning Slovak. (My grandfather, we are pretty sure, knew plenty of it, but he would never admit it. When my mom's cousin moved to the States about 18 years ago she stopped using Slovak altogether, using Hungarian at home and learning English, so when she finally went back to visit this summer it took a few days to come back to her.)

Two weeks ago I took the train up to Komárom again and then hopped in a car wtih Zoltán’s family to Jesenske/Feled, the village that my aunt Márta lives in. The last time I was here we hit a pheasant on the way and my dad tied it to the roof of the car and brought it with us. (For years at church camp they have been teasing me that we hit a peasant, but fácán and paraszt are quite different). Márta has been out to the U.S. twice, once with her husband when I was a kid, and again five years ago after her husband has passed away. The second visit was during my freshman year of college, so she lived in my room and stayed for about four months. She got to celebrate Thanksgiving in America and was even around when my grandfather passed away that Christmas. For her 70th birthday earlier this month she asked for a big armchair with a footstool, since she had fallen in love with recliners in America. This is them:

The timing of this visit to Feled coincided with Hallottak Napja, a day when Reformed and Catholics alike go out to the cemetery to decorate the graves of their relatives. My father’s ban on Halloween (we was disappointed his first year at Princeton Theological Seminary that all the decorations weren’t for Reformation Day) sort of made late October holidays irrelevant, but now I have a cool memory to associate with it. Being there on that particular weekend meant that I got to go on a grand tour of village cemeteries. One of them, in particular, had a very curious arrangement between the Slovak and Hungarian sections, the Catholic and Reformed sections. Seeing all of the cemeteries lit up on the drive back at night from the roadside was really cool.

A trip to Feled, near Rima Szombat/Rimavska Sobota, also means a visit to the Poznán/Ibos family home village of Balog. We never spent much time in Balog and I can’t say that I really like going there. Two of my dad’s cousins, Zoly and Yoli, are pretty cool, but his godmother is crayz and the way they adore Béla (my dad) in this town is just WEIRD. When he comes home, they broadcast her sermon in church on freaking television (so in a twisted way,we joke, my father could be called a televangelist). The last time I was there they had a disznó tőr, pig slaughter, so I got to witness how it is done and what a pig looks like on the inside (do you know where your kolbász and szalonna come from?). There was no pig-killing this time, but we did see the 13 pigtuplets that one of swine just had.

Back in Komárno, after the drive back from eastern Slovakia to western, I met up with my cousin Feri’s family. His two daughters, Lilla and Juli, are just a little younger than I am. We took a short trip to Esztergom, historically the seat of Hungarian Catholicisim. The main attraction, of course, is the basillica. The crypt of dead cardinals under the building wasn’t all that interesting, but the view from the tower at the top made the whole trip worth it. We climbed a standard stairwell followed by TWO separate spiral staircases to reach the top. Up there, you find a magnificent view of the Danube and the city. The view speaks for itself:

The final adventure of the weekend it too twisted not to mention. Hungary has a version of the H1N1 vaccine, while Slovakia does not. My cousin Feri, who is a cardiologist over on the Slovak side of the border, wrote out a prescription and decided that we should pick it up on the Hungarian side where the train station is. The plan was that we could smuggle the shots back over with us, and he would vaccinate us all at home. I know he meant well, but being skewered by my cousin was not on my priority list. For better or for worse, he wrote the prescription out wrong and it fell through...

After five days in Slovakia, all I thought was home sweet Budapest. I came back with quite a haul of homemade gifts from the various villages I visited: 2 jars of peach preserves, a jar of pickles, a jar of blackberry jam, and various baked goods. In Győrke the load was even heavier: a jar of honey (they keep bees!) and a bag each of apples, pears, and walnuts, all of which I had helped gather than morning out in the garden. More adventures to come over the border at Christmas!

Clapping in Unison

2009-11-16T12:34:00.002+01:00

Wow – it seems that this blog has a wider audience than I thought! My mom has heard about details that I have written here but hadn’t actually gotten around to telling her from family, friends, and colleagues. It’s nice to know that you all are interested in what I am up to this year. To give you a little more context, I thought I’d write a little bit about some of the major everyday differences between living here and living in the States.

Bathrooms. Toilets have almost universally replaced outhouses, a major improvement from my first few trips to our home village out here, but frequently still have an “observation deck” and a chain or string that releases water from overhead. What we know as a bathroom is usually split into two separate rooms: the WC just for the toilet, and the fürdő szoba (literally the bathing room). No waiting for family members to get out of the shower already if you need to pee! Bath tubs are one of the few things that are larger than in the U.S., but it is very rare to find mounted shower heads. It is usually this hand-held hose contraption instead.

Money. Inflation in Hungary in the course of my lifetime has been insane. I remember being here in the mid-’90s and ice cream costing 2 forint a scoop, compared to around 150 forint now. The 1- and 2-forint coins don’t even exist anymore. The exchange rate has been hovering around 180 forint to the dollar since I arrived, so to get a rough price you knock off two zeros from the price in forint and divide in half to get the rough amount in dollars. Imagine thinking in terms of 2,000 forint for dinner. Money is much prettier here than in the U.S., with a range of colors to distinguish the bills. 500 bills are pink and feature Rákoczy Ferenc, my uncel’s favorite Hungarian. 1,000 HUF bills, the most common, are blue, 2,000 brown, etc. Coins come in sliglhtly differnt denominations than we are used to. The 200-forint coin, roughly equivalent to the obsolete dollar coin in the U.S., is currently replacing the 200-forint bill. It and the 100-forint coin (probably the most-used, unlike our half-dollars) are these awesome two-tone coins. For some reason they break into 20-forint coins instead of quarters. Cross the border in any direction and the currency is completely different. Slovakia somehow managed to get itself on the Euro, reversing a decades-long practice of Hungarians crossing the northern border to get stuff cheaper there when the Slovak crown (yes, they were called crowns) prevailed. Euro bills come in different sizes by denomintation, which bugs me since the bills don’t stack nicely.

Grocery shopping and eating habits. Almost everything is available in the bigger grocery stores or at Tesco (the European version of Wal-mart), but for a price. Jars of peanut butter or salsa, packages of Betty Crocker brownie mix, all cost around a whopping $5 each. Some things, inexplicably, are just not sold. My amazing uncle was kind enough to send brown sugar and chocolate chips so that my friends and I could make real cookies. We planned an entire occasion around it. I’m not sure why, but so many relatives and acquaintances that I visit here are amazed that I cook for myself. They all ask whether I can’t eat at the büfé (cafeteria) at the university. Really, folks? We were thrilled as seniors to have our own kitchens out at the TH’s and not have to eat at ACDC anymore. My definition of “cooking” probably isn’t the same as theirs, but I guess people here learn later in life how to feed themselves. Lunch, rather than dinner, is the main meal of the day around here. A “proper” lunch involves soup and a hot meal, not the cold sandwiches we favor back home. They are more likely to eat our lunch-type stuff for breakfast: cold cuts, cheese, tomato slices, and kifli (rolls).

Hygiene: People just don’t shower or wash their clothes as regularly as back home. The latter is excusable, considering washing machines are smaller and take longer to run here and there are NO DRYERS, but there’s less of an excuse for the former.

Miscellaneous: People stop randomly while walking in the middle of the sidewalk. The traffic lights turn yellow before they turn green. Some of them have countdowns so impatient drives know how long they have to wait. A deck of cards is 32 rather than 52, and only goes from seven to ace. There are four suits -- pumpkin, acorn, green (leaf), and red (hearts) -- and no red/black color split. The face cards here are the lower jack, upper jack, king, and ace, with the ace featuring a woman and four of the suit symbol -- go figure. Hungarians seem to be incapable of/not interested in clapping spontaneously. Instead, they clap in unison. It is a little creepy.

Békéscsaba

2009-10-25T22:16:00.003+01:00

During one of my first weekends in Budapest, the Fulbrighters decided to get together and go to a wine festival in the castle district. It was incredibly overpriced, tourist-oriented, and, not being a wine drinker, only valuable because the ticket price included entrance to the Museum of Budapest History (typical me, I know). A few weeks later we decided the give the “festival” label another try at a chocolate festival, but it turned out to be a big advertising scheme involving very little chocolate. Yesterday in Békéscsaba at the Csabai Kolbász Fesztivál, we finally found a festival that largely lived up to its title.

Now, this festival is popular enough that MÁV, the Hungarian state railway, added a special train just for this occasion. It included all of the elements of the Hungarian festivals I have enjoyed in America: lively music (frequently with accordion), too many hungry Hungarians, and large quantities of pork. I mean all of these things in the best sense.

My primary Hungarian festival experience came from the annual Magyar Fesztivál in New Brunswick, NJ, a hotspot for Hungarian immigration to the United States throughout the 20th century. When I was a kid we went pretty much every year; we were still going to NJ on an almost weekly basis at that time and my uncle lived on Division Street just a few blocks away from the main drag. I think I wore a pleated skirt and an embroidered Hungarian blouse nearly every time, and probably took my little doll, Paprikás Lily, along. Although I have only gone to the festival two or three times in the last decade, my Hungarian Reformed church in Connecticut hosts a picnic every summer with at least eight different kinds of Hungarian food, red and green decorations, and plenty of local Hungarian-Americans coming out of the woodwork.

Békéscsaba did not disappoint. We caught a few minutes of the kolbász-making competition inside the city’s sports arena, wrestled through the line to snag some excellent kolbász and bread for lunch, walked by all of the usual festival craft booths, and tried kürtös kalács (sort of like fried dough made on a spit) for the first time. We missed the Slovene pig slaughter (disznotor) that morning, but I have already had the privilege of witnessing a pig slaughter six years ago at the home of my dad's cousin Zoly. Next to the sport arena there was a fencing club (yay!), so I popped in to watch a few minutes of épée. Late in the afternoon we saw some great pig-related slogans on t-shirts and aprons (“Ez nem a te napod” – “Today is not your day”), a guy carrying links of raw kolby around his neck, and plenty of jubilant dancing folks (not to be confused with folk dancers, which we did not see this time).

I have to mention that one of the primary reasons one of my friends wanted to go to this festival is because there is a historian named Békés Csaba. His name, like the town’s, would very roughly translate to “Peaceful Chuck.” I can’t imagine giving my hypothetical child the same name as a town, but I am a big fan of Békés Csaba right now. He is one of the editors of The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents, which has a pretty extensive preview on GoogleBooks, enough for me to be able to read some entire documents without preview restrictions getting in the way. Primary sources: success.

Festival: success.

Vagaries of the Hungarian Language

2009-10-25T19:22:00.006+01:00

My Berlitz Hungarian phrase book wasn't cutting it. Sure, it’s a good laugh to learn how to say “Can I have that flambéd?” or “I’ve got rheumatism” in Hungarian, but I will never use either of those phrases. I decided to go for the real deal and get myself the new Akadémiai Kiadó English-Hungarian AND Hungarian-English dictionaries. So on Monday afternoon I set out for Alexandra, the B&N of this part of the world (the Border’s is Libri, or the other way around), to make my momentous purchase, only to learn that the 20% off sale had ended THE DAY BEFORE. But I pulled a fast one on Alexandra: they were still on sale online, for 33% off instead of 20, and shipping was free!

The result of this purchase was inevitable: I have become an even greater Word Nerd. I even bought the abridged version so I can carry it with me basically everywhere. Since Gil’s apprentice training at the Omohundro Institute last year I have venerated Webster’s 11th edition, but I never sat down to actually read it or took it on vacation; with these I do. If you have never seen the PBS cartoon “Word Girl,” which Ben introduced me to last year, it is worth a quick search on YouTube. The heroine defeats bad guys with the help of big words that confuse and distract them. Unlike Word Girl, though, I do not have a monkey sidekick named Captain Huggyface.

Below are some of the words I have learned over the past few weeks, for your edification and entertainment. Many thanks to friends who shared some of these words with me. Formula: English word = Hungarian word [= literal English translation]

eggplant = padlizsán (pronounced “puddly John”)
interview = interjú (LAME)
quiz = kvíz (LAME)
bowling = bowling (this was a HUGE disappointment, because I know that it used to be called “kugli”)
jobbágy = serf = better bed (huh?)
jobbágyfelszabaditás = empancipation of the serfs (it is astounding how many times there are entire phrases that the opposite language can encapsulate in a single word, even a super-long one)
fültisztító tampon = q-tip = ear-cleaning tampon
csempéz = to lay tile, but csempész = to smuggle; a critical distinction when reading a movie abstract

Things I like about the Hungarian language:
- nearly 100% phonetic
- emphasis is always on the first syllable
- it has cool double letters like sz, cs, ty, ly, and zs

Things I dislike about the Hungarian language:
- it is an agglutinative language, which means that you glue on additional suffixes to change the meaning of the word; this is usually interesting and pretty handy, except that you can get some immensely long words with really complicated syllable breaks (and I think the word “agglutinative” sounds creepy, like the "Ugric" in Finno-Ugric language groups, the oddball classification to which Hungarian belongs)
- despite the fact that the language is phonetic, I seem to be unable to spell; double consonants (espcecially l’s and t’s), and sneaky letters like y and j keep throwing me off
- some genius decided to reverse the y and the z on the kezboard; this drives me crayz!
- it has uncool new letters like “dzs” to get the American j sound for words that should not exist in this language, like “dzsusz” (juice) and “Dzsenifer” (Jennifer); they should just stick to calling juice "–lé" and naming their girls Zsuzsa

The problem with encountering so many new words each day, of course, is that I forget the majority of them in a snap. The inaugural word in my new dictionary was “affair” – don’t ask why – and within less than 48 hours I had completely forgotten it. Luckily, a fellow word nerd remembered after a few minutes of pondering that it was “viszony” [spelling corrected; thanks Les]. Time to get myself a füzet (notebook) and start writing these suckers down.

Despite the extreme frustration of knowing that I spoke this language better when I was six years old than I do now, and despite the fact that I hate talking on the phone in Hungarian (why is it ten times harder than in person?), relearning Hungarian will undoubtedly be one the most valuable elements of this year.

American Weekend

2009-10-18T23:15:00.002+02:00

It was a very American weekend. It all started on Monday, when I received a suitcase from the United States of America, brought over by a guy from church named Tibor. My request list for my mother was pretty strange: normal things like sweaters and Sudafed, but also zip-lock bags, a vegetable peeler, a fitted sheet (the ones here are terrycloth for some reason), Fig Newtons, and some Betty Crocker brownie mix. I busted out a baking pan yesterday afternoon, and took Betty’s brownies bowling. Hungarians used to have this awesome word, “kugli,” but they just call it “bowling” now, too. So we went bowling, and ate brownies, and I even ran over to the McDonald’s next to the bowling lanes to buy milk to go with said brownies. The night before a bunch of the Fulbrighters got together for tacos (flour tortillas! chips! salsa! oh my!) and planned for Thanksgiving. A very American week overall, then; I wore a striped button-down shirt.

This may sound vain, but I miss my clothes. It may feel like an Eleanor Roosevelt or a “Mary & William” t-shirt kind of day, but there is nothing I can do about what’s at home. There’s more to that than clothes, of course. I sincerely miss some of the most mundane aspects of my former life: being able to start the day at the gym, being able to make banana smoothies for breakfast, having baby carrots with lunch, filling just about every gap of time with historiography reading, and procrastinating from historiography readings by hanging out with historians and complaining about historiography. It was a lifestyle I had pretty much perfected by spring (with the glaring exception of making adequate thesis time) and one that I did not get to enjoy long enough. Maybe I will go back to it. I knew I would miss people and places, but these ordinary things I took for granted.

Every Fulbrighter, I imagine, has to ask the “what the hell am I doing here” question at least a few times during his/her stay. In the very beginning, it was multiple times a day. Now I am asking myself again, since I can’t use “trying to get settled” as an excuse for things anymore. A friend of mine has been doing a Fulbright ETA in Chile since March. I remember hearing about her struggles in the beginning: feeling like she wasn’t doing a good job teaching, feeling like she was wasting a year, unsure how things were going to work out afterward. Now she is the one hearing me out on these things, and going on and on about expanding boundaries or something like that. Geographically? Culturally? Absolutely. But other boundaries? I sort of scoff. And then feel guilty about that. Because, even though I am admittedly a pretty good choice for my actual job here, there are so many people out there that would get so much more out of this experience. Part of my defense is simply remembering that my experiences, like at college and camp, are very different but just as rewarding as the ways others lived them, a reality that I generally do not regret. But sometimes you have to wonder…

Comments: I have been grading a lot of TOEFL practice essays, and writing comments at the end. If I over-critique these blog entries I will never actually post them and you will all suffer from an information black hole about my whereabouts and misdemeanors (hah!), but forgive the bad organization of this one.

Szeged & Ópusztaszer

2009-10-18T22:40:00.005+02:00

Sometime last June my friend Kate and I journeyed from Williamsburg to Staunton, VA, part of a historical mini-road-trip to visit the homes of Virginia-born presidents. After stopping in at Woodrow Wilson’s birthplace we went to the American Museum of Frontier Culture. There you see all the phases of American frontier life unfolding in Turnerian glory as you walk from farm to farm. This past weekend, on our first monthly Fulbright weekend excursion, I think I found Hungary’s hyper-nationalist version.

That Friday we caught an early morning train from Budapest’s Nyugati Pályaudvar to Szeged, the sunniest city in Hungary. We overdid it a little on the institutional visits (okay, more than a little). Our first stop was at a bilingual high school, where we sat in on a class. It was pretty amazing to see how the students in the math class I visited had to learn double the vocabulary, to know what a factor and a power, for example, are in both English and Hungarian. It was a nightmare for the teacher to find the proper translations for all of these things, and aside from calling “negative” numbers “minus” instead he did a great job. Okay, one institution, not bad. But then #2, the library of the University of Szeged. Really nice, centralized library as far as Hungarian libraries go, but to a group of students and professors that pretty much spend their lives in major university libraries in the U.S., it was pretty pointless. And the daughter of one of the Fulbright exchange teachers TOUCHED THE BOOKS in the rare book room – nem szabad! #3 was even better, the dentistry faculty of the University. At that point, we had pretty much stopped asking why.

There were two things that gave this final, pointless visit an ounce of worth. First off, an American Studies professor at the University had been on two Fulbrights to the U.S., the second to the American Hungarian Foundation in New Brunswick, NJ. My aunt’s godfather happens to run that organization. It turns out that my late grandfather invited the guy over and took him around the city in his light blue Pontiac that we posthumously named Jancsi. The guy had even met my dad and visited our church in NYC; I was probably in the parsonage next door or at school down the block. Small world! The University of Szeged was also the home institution of Albert Szent-Györgyi, the guy who discovered vitamin C. Sure, when we think of vitamin C we think of oranges, but if you know anything about Szeged it is probably that that is where the famous paprika comes from. Yes, vitamin C was first extracted from Hungarian peppers. And yes, the paprika that the fine people of Szeged put in their Pick salami is what prevented them from developing scurvy during the winter. No kidding.

As for Ópusztaszer, the National Historical Memorial Park, pictures will speak much louder than words. The park features regal busts of old Hungarian kings, a panoramic mural of the “honfoglalás” (the conquering of the Carpathian basin by the Magyars), historical exhibits inside wooden yurts, and recreated village houses from different periods in Hungarian history. The exhibits inside the museum reminded me of the kind you find in old natural history or local history museums, like ones I visited in Hastings, Nebraska, and Isle of Wight County, Virginia. One pair of galleries had recreated street scenes from a nineteenth-century small city and market village. Mannequins creep me out so this was not my favorite room, but we saw a magnificent old poster for a “kerékpár iskola,” a bicycle training school. The poster shows Victorian-looking Hungarians practicing how to ride a bike in a large room covered wall to wall, ceiling to floor, in red carpeting to break their fall. Best image ever.

Despite some of the boredom, we had plenty of laughs those two days. For a few weeks now one of the Fulbrighters has been planning a screenplay based on our experiences this year, and this weekend gave us plenty of fodder. The director of the Hungarian Fulbright Commission looked like a bona fide ticket-checker in his navy blue jacket. The majority of our laughs came from a book titled “Vigyázz, Angol!,” a slang phrasebook for Hungarians trying to learn English slang. Anyone who has seen the Monty Python clip on the Hungarian phrasebook can imagine how problematic this could be. A handful of sayings in that book could earn the utterer a cold glance, slap in the face, or maybe even a prison sentence. Needless to say, it was hilarious, especially when we lent it to two of the people from the Fulbright office to peruse on the train ride back. The best moment: “Douche bag? It must be from the French…” Priceless.

Disclaimer: I am switching between Hungarian and American keyboards multiple times a day, so please forgive typos that involve reversed z’s and y’s, vowels with accents, or incorrect punctuation. (All other typographical errors will still result in a one-third-of-a-letter-grade reduction.) Parentheses are one place over, the question mark is the third key to the left of Shift rather than the third, I have no idea where the exclamation point is, and the y and z switch are driving me crayz!

Introduction

2009-10-18T20:42:00.004+02:00

I had a very hard time thinking of a title for this blog. Before I left William & Mary this summer, I had the opportunity to work as the head residential program assistant for the National Institute of American History & Democracy (NIAHD), a fancy name for a fantastic pre-collegiate program in early American history. One of the field trips we took was to Rosewell, the ruins of an abandoned plantation on the York River in Gloucester County, VA. I scoffed at a melodramatic line in the brochure about the ruins exhibiting the “deep scars of history,” but here I am borrowing the phrase. It seems fitting to describe Hungary, which is very visibly scarred, physically and psychological, by its past. This is the point where my historiography professor would chide me for reifying Hungary itself.

The Hungarian Fulbright commission contacted me in the middle of June. I had given up on the grant a month before and had begun the arduous process of searching for teaching positions in a bad economy. Luckily, I got to abandon that search. For the next nine months, I will be teaching two courses on American culture each semester at the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church and working at the educational advising office of the Hungarian Fulbright Commission, assisting Hungarian students who would like to pursue higher education in the U.S.

I should probably explain why I chose to apply to spend the academic year in Hungary. I have been here before, multiple times, but never spent more than a few days in Hungary at a time. My father was born and raised in former Czechoslovakia, in a region that used to be Hungary before World War I. My mother is Hungarian-American; her father was also born and grew up in former Czechoslovakia and, although her mother was born in the U.S., her maternal grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Hungary. My father is a Hungarian Reformed minister (Calvinist), and became the pastor in the village that my maternal grandfather’s family is from. My mother was visiting relatives there, fell in love with the minister, and after a few years they got married. My mom moved to Slovakia not knowing any Slovak, and they lived there for a year and a half waiting for the paperwork to be processed for my father to leave communist Slovakia legally. They moved to New Jersey, then to New York City.

The world I grew up in was Hungarian-American. Early on I spoke only Hungarian, picking up English from Sesame Street and school. When my mom’s best friend babysat me and my brother, Attila (yes, like Attila the Hun), my mom would leave lists of Hungarian words that might help us communicate. There are no longer Hungarian residential enclaves comparable to Chinatown, but it was entirely possible to live in New York City and interact primarily in Hungarian. The church that my father was the pastor of does not even hold English worship services. Our neighbors were Hungarian. My best friend, Linda, was Hungarian. We went back to Györke frequently when my paternal grandparents were still alive.

When I was seven we moved out of New York City to Fairfield, Connecticut. The Fairfield/Bridgeport area had boasted a significant Hungarian population until quite recently. The first few years there, mainstream America and my Hungarian identity coexisted. The church was, and remains, bilingual, holding both English and Hungarian worship services. We continued going to Hungarian school on Saturdays until I was about 13, to learn the basics of Hungarian reading, writing, history, and culture. March 15^th was as big of a deal as the 4^th of July, and had better songs and costumes to boot. But demographic reality hit Fairfield in much the same way that it is hitting other former clusters of Hungarian-American population. Chain migration continues, but only weakly, and subsequent generation Hungarians are much more mobile now than they used to be, like all other Americans. I would not be surprised if the most vibrant Hungarian-American communities outside of Cleveland are retirement hotspots like Sarasota, Florida, and the Bethlen Home in Pennsylvania.

So what does the weakening of Hungarian-American community in America have to do with my decision to spend a year here? I am not sure, really. Because I was earning my teaching certification, I did not have time to go abroad during my junior year in college, so for a while I saw this year as an alternative JYA. What I am actually trying to accomplish here this year is also unclear. Of course I am teaching my courses and advising at the center, but I am also here to improve my Hungarian, learn some history, visit family, and make a cultural connection, whatever that means. Hopefully this blog will help me reflect on what I am learning, keep you all posted on what I am up to, and get me to practice writing so I don’t get rusty being away from grad school. I will probably write infrequently, write too much when I do, and switch back and forth between colloquial and obnoxious academic prose, so please bear with me and enjoy the ride.