I, Muehlenhaus. U, Riedermaus.

2005.VI.30 – Not much news here recently. But big news overseas! Birgit started her new job at Macalester College in St. Paul and is loving it. And I just found out I am going to be teaching a European Geography course at the University of Minnesota this fall! Finally, something other than being a TA. Though I have loved TA-ing, I have to admit that after four consecutive semesters, it was getting a bit tiresome to teach “Introduction to Maps and Geographic Information Systems,” etc. Plus, this is a topic that I’m really enthusiastic about, so I think it will be a blast! A lot of work too, but some tangential, three day a week responsibility will probably be good for me.

Classes have been going well. I’m beginning to realize just how much I’ve learned as the first three week section comes to a close. It still ain't smooth, but then again, neither is my English. Three more weeks to go before I will probably begin to forget it all again... merde. Or Baszki! Now that's more like it. But I am serious about stockpiling Hungarian media so I can't forget it that easily. I was watching Asterix and Obelix last night on my computer. That was surreal. The movie was in French and the subtitles were in Hungarian, but I started getting in the flow and caught most of it.I took a test today in school just so they can gauge my progress. I think it went well, but it was fill in the blank, and I often bomb such tests. Luckily a good chunk of the exam was essay, which is normally where I can let my imagination do the talking for me.

Yesterday I was just working like a mad dog. Today as well, but I spent a good chunk of the day walking to the Eastern Train Station (Keleti) and standing in line waiting to buy my tickets to Wien. I’m off to Vienna this weekend to visit my old Hungarian language classmate from 1998, Sissi. She and I were the only two students in the class for much of the year, and we became good friends. I can’t wait to just hang out and chat about life. Plus, Wien is by far my favorite city in Europe, if not the world, so I’m just happy to be visiting it again.

It is the end of the month and in many ways this terrifies me. I had so many plans, many probably grandiose, for the summer. I have only completed a few of them and I’ve decided to just complete a few of my initial plans well and worry about the others later. My Hungarian is really coming along well. I feel in the groove again this week now that I’m forced to only speak Hungarian again. As for my research, I’ve attempted contacting a few of the smaller political parties that I initially wanted to contact, but I haven’t heard anything back yet. I am going to keep trying and keep my fingers crossed! As for my preliminary exam, I have begun reading again after a bit of a hiatus due to exhaustion from the semester and foreign language learning. It feels good to be reading academic texts again, which actually scares me somehow.

That’s all for now. I’m off to Wien!

Oh yeah, one more thing. Nothing that anyone out there cares about or will notice, but it was driving me nuts. Now if you go to Ianville from my regular website and visit the house, the links aren't all broken in my office and I posted pics from around the world that you can access from the wall map. And I made it more aesthetically pleasing... I'm over my crayon phase, but after putting so much work into animating the small town, I'm not going to mess with that for a while. Sziasztok!

# posted by IanM : 22:24

2005.VI.30 – Not much news here recently. But big news overseas! Birgit
started her new job at Macalester College in St. Paul and is loving it.
And I just found out I am going to be teaching a European Geography
course at the University of Minnesota this fall! Finally, something
other than being a TA. Though I have loved TA-ing, I have to admit that
after four consecutive semesters, it was getting a bit tiresome to teach
“Introduction to Maps and Geographic Information Systems,” etc. Plus,
this is a topic that I’m really enthusiastic about, so I think it will
be a blast! A lot of work too, but some tangential, three day a week
responsibility will probably be good for me.

Classes have been going well. I’m beginning to realize just how much
I’ve as the first three week section comes to a close. Three more weeks
to go! I took a test today just so the school can gauge my progress. I
think it went well, but it was fill in the blank, and I often bomb such
tests. Luckily a good chunk of the exam was essay, which is normally
where I can let my imagination do the talking for me.

Yesterday I was just working like a mad dog. Today as well, but I spent
a good chunk of the day walking to the Eastern Train Station (Keleti)
and standing in line waiting to buy my tickets to Wien. I’m off to
Vienna this weekend to visit my old Hungarian language classmate from
1998, Sissi. She and I were the only two students in the class for much
of the year, and we became good friends. I can’t wait to just hang out
and chat about life. Plus, Wien is by far my favorite city in Europe, if
not the world, so I’m just happy to be visiting it again.

It is the end of the month and in many ways this terrifies me. I had so
many plans, many probably grandiose, for the summer. I have only
completed a few of them and I’ve decided to just complete a few of my
initial plans well and worry about the others later. My Hungarian is
really coming along well. I feel in the groove again this week now that
I’m forced to only speak Hungarian again. As for my research, I’ve
attempted contacting a few of the smaller political parties that I
initially wanted to contact, but I haven’t heard anything back yet. I am
going to keep trying and keep my fingers crossed! As for my preliminary
exam, I have begun reading again after a bit of a hiatus due to
exhaustion from the semester and foreign language learning. It feels
good to be reading academic texts again, which actually scares me somehow.

That’s all for now. I’m off to Wien!

# posted by IanM : 21:25

Okay, so what the fuck? Where the hell? What the… shit! It’s been over two weeks since I wrote. Well instead of doing the standard thing on blogs, where people begin to whine about how busy they’ve been and how bad they feel for not writing, I am going to just jump into what has happened recently. (Not because I’m any less whiney, but because I don’t have the time right now to write about how I haven’t had time. It defeats the whole bloody argument… though writing a tangent like this may as well. Oh well…)

So I went with Detti and Istvan up to see their property that one weekend, and then I stopped writing. Well, just to summarize, I had a blast with them, and they have some great property. Plus, it felt great just getting out of Budapest and seeing a naturally spectacular part of Hungary. I also enjoyed meeting Detti’s extended family a bit – including her step-father, sister, brother-in-law, and a couple of friends. It was really fun.

We ended up going to a little pub called the Calgary that night. It was surreal. Very surreal. It is run by a woman named Wiki. Yes, this stands in for the American Vicky and the Hungarian Viki. No one is quite sure why she changed her name. One thing is for certain, she is a hoot! It was the only pub open for kilometers around at 9:20 on a Sunday night, and she was just opening it. The place is stuffed with knick-knacks that look like they belong in Canada but that are definitely from other countries. It is so cluttered with dusty and moldy junk that it instantly sent my body into shock, as I felt I was drinking in a crappy antique store. The bathroom has one of those cheap plastic accordion pull doors. There is an old ratty piano that a famous, now full-time drunk, Hungarian pianist is often found playing at for more booze, all night. There are only four or five small round tables in the whole joint, crammed between fake Victorian floor lamps and shelves full of moose postcards. One of them is the non-smoking table. If you smoke, you can’t sit at this table, even though the bar is the size of a Trabant and everyone else in the bar can smoke. Above the bar hangs a sign asking patrons to smoke as little as possible, but one can hardly read it due to the fact the paper has been yellowed through years of smoke. The seems about as effective as putting a sign saying “Please rape and pillage as little as possible” above the door to a monastery frequented by Vikings. The pub has all Canadian Warsteiner signs everywhere, but they don’t serve the beer when they are out of it. So we ended up drinking Stella Artois or something of the like. Detti ordered orange juice, but the bar ran out. So Wiki left the five of us (two of Detti and Istvan’s friends too) at the bar with two confused younger women sitting at a table, and told us to watch the place. A half-hour later she came back with a pack of smokes for the other patrons, orange juice to sell to us, and some other goods. This place was brilliant!!! The coolest thing is that it is just across the street from where my classes are, which I didn’t know at the time. So if I ever get really down and out I can go there late at night and listen to the piano man play all night until they close after the sun comes up, and then I’ll go to class. Right, right…

Monday I met crazy Gabor and had my first day of school. I already wrote about that…

Tuesday I met with a 15 year old know it all. It was great!!! She had been in the Internet café a week earlier and was looking for people to practice her spoken English with before taking an official exam of some sort. I was leaving for Miskolc but told her I could meet the following Monday. On Monday she backed out, but I agreed to meet on Tuesday. I told her I was from Canada, because there was something in her know it all 15 year-old eyes that said she hated anything not British. Everyone knows Canada was British, so I figured that would save me. I guessed correctly. She had a fiery temper, as her father was Greek and is now a postal employee in Hungary – something that may not have the stability or pay of being a postal employee in, say, Greece. Anyway, we chatted and I asked her a few questions, and then she wanted to role play a few sample test scenarios in her book. They were really bizarre! Here is an English book for advanced middle school students, and they have skits about catching your boyfriend or girlfriend with Playboy or Playgirl magazine and confronting them about why they don’t think you are pretty enough. It was fucked up! I suggested we change to another one that the teachers would be more likely to test her on, after all the Michael Jackson jury was huddled up at this time, and I could just imagine the Stassi U.S. customs agents arresting me upon my return with insider information that I had been speaking about Playgirl magazine with a 15 year old Greek in Hungary. Yeah, that looks fishy. I even have to admit that. But the book didn’t have anything that wasn’t about a boyfriend and girlfriend, which led me to believe that I made a major mistake when I was 17 and in Hungary. If I wanted to hook up, I should have gone to English class! Anyway, we digressed to politics and her future, as I was trying to ask her questions that a teacher might actually ask. The problem was, she had a lot to say and just kept going on about her bad self, and it was starting to feel more like a therapy session than an English lesson, and let’s face it, one might do an occasional English lesson for free, but to listen to someone talk about how great they are and how all Americans are the scum of the Earth costs something. If I wanted such a schizophrenic mix, I would have two televisions going at once, one with Fox News (how great they are) and the other on Al Jazeera (all Americans should be tapos-ed into the ground). But I did take something fascinating from this rather banal two hours of my life. Teenagers in Hungary have changed drastically since I was a teenager here, and I think it may have a lot to do with the success of Western modernity. Let me try to explain… skip the next paragraph if you could really give a shit!

Basically, teenagers in 93/94 were rebels of a serious type. In retrospect, I see them as largely the people that embraced and ushered in the positive and negative aspects of capitalism. They were largely poor, down and out, and hated the old ways of socialism without understanding the new ways except for what they saw on MTV programs like the Real World and Beavis and Butthead, which was pumped into the country largely cost free via satellite dishes. I remember being witness to debauchery and vandalism of the crudest sort. It was a mix of capitalism and pure global recession. Nirvana and grunge bands filled the air, mixed with Iron Maiden, Ace of Base, Crash Test Dummies, and Body Count. The world had not been completely gobbled up by neoliberal capitalism yet, but it was in the process. The world here, and in a way in the U.S., was schizophrenic. The old order of things had just crumbled, not blown up, and no one knew what had been real and what might be the future. Schoolmates started huge brush fires near my house several nights a week just to see the fire trucks pull up. Phone booths were frequently being lit up. School dances became mini-riots, with urinals being ripped off the wall. The police were the scariest bastards in this new system, often wolf-whistling at teenage girls as they drove by. Rebellion against everything was the way of the world. The Soviets and Russians sucked. The West was cool, but no one knew what it meant nor could afford the lifestyle. Teenagers hung out in huge class-sized cohorts and just went crazy. They were into everything. They didn’t hate anything in the West as much as they were curious about how it really was over there. I don’t know how often I just sat around drinking wine in two-liter bottles explaining the differences between Hungary and there – which at the time were endless.

Now, however, from meeting this girl and several of her friends, the students remind me of the kids I hated when I was back in American high school. They are informed by the major media and global entertainment outlets about how the world is, and they believe it. So they hate the U.S. with a passion now, without actually knowing much about it. (This has been the fate of many Western Europeans in general over the years. Instead of trying to understand how it works, they simply note the negative differences between their societies and the U.S., and critique it to hell, before going out and consuming it wholeheartedly.) So this girl – which is awkward to write but since she was only 15 it is fitting – she hates the U.S. Never wants to go there, thinks all of the people are stupid (mind you, I was Canadian), and hopes it suffers. There is no curiosity about it, it is just what the European media has largely trained her to believe. Meanwhile, she likes watching a lot of television – so I guess she is probably absorbing American neoliberal culture without even knowing it, which is exactly where the power behind U.S. modernity lies, in covert manipulation of people’s minds. But at the same time, unlike Hungarian youth that I met growing up in the early 90s, she has absolutely no loyalty or understanding of Hungary’s recent history. She was born in 1990, so instead of reacting like my older friends who lived in the old system, she simply thinks that “Hungary sucks.” She was appalled by my wanting to live here, and she dreams of studying to become a doctor in Switzerland and settling down in the south of France, which seems equally naïve to me as a 15 year-old girl in the U.S. saying she wants to be a marine biologist. But worse, she doesn’t seem to even comprehend that Hungary has undergone an insane amount of change since she was born. She was derogatively comparing Hungary to Western European countries as though it is just messed up because it isn’t as “nice” as those places. This terrified me somehow. Perhaps I’m off my rocker, but the fact that she subscribes to the fact that Hungary is on an equal grounding as those countries in the global market and was dispensing the neoliberal mantra that those who want to prosper can… well, I felt sorry for Zsolt and Misi, the guys I spent my youth with. These people, and others, were just happy as hell to have more opportunity to study and be what they wanted when they grew up, and to be able to buy a car. This girl takes it for granted and acts as though Hungary has always had this. I suppose this is natural, but it was just depressing. The youth here may be becoming as banal as the youth everywhere in the Western world I fear, and I came to realize through this English lesson that the radical, confused and carefree youth of Hungary were perhaps one of its greatest assets! But if I’m sounding like an old and bitter person saying, “In the old days…” Well, to be honest, I think I have become one. Tough shit, I suppose.

I studied Hungarian like a bat out of hell the first week of school. Then my father-in-law, Rolf, and wife’s cousin, Thorsten, arrived for the weekend. We basically just walked around all day sightseeing, as many of the pictures hopefully illustrate. We also sampled wine, beer, and watched the beginning of the dullest race Formula One history.

I had a great time with Rolf, and it was really great getting to know him away from Minnesota and the rest of the family. Things are always a bit less stressful for me in smaller groups. I hadn’t know Thorsten much at all before this meeting, and it was with him that I bonded most closely. Finally, someone else who knows my in-laws very well from an outside perspective – he was raised in Germany and would only meet up with them about once a year. Plus, he is just a really cool, honest guy that I could relate to. So we ended up hanging out until about four in the morning both nights he was here. We just had incredible discussions about psychology, neoliberal politics, European bias toward the U.S. – he lived in North Carolina for a year, which gives him far greater insight on differences between European culture and American culture than anyone I know – and our personal histories, etc. Brilliant!

My relatives left Monday morning and I went to class as slow as a salted slug. I came home and slept Monday away until around 6 p.m., when Krisztian called because they were making the big move to their new home! I went over to help Nori and Krisz, and several large people (read: gargantuan brutes) from my parents’ workplace in Miskolc, move a washing machine, refrigerator, heavy duty wood bed, several large cabinets, and a plethora of other things to their eighth floor (ninth floor in the U.S.) apartment. It wasn’t that bad actually. Quite a bit of work, but the move went fast. I brought a bottle of champagne, and Nori’s parents had some homemade wine from Happy, Hungary (i.e., Boldog, Magyarorszag)!!! The Polgarmester might think about marketing that name for tourism purposes. At any rate, the wine would make anyone happy, especially after hauling all those things up the stairs. Krisz, Nori, and I ordered pizza and sat in their new apartment watching Cool TV. Their place is incredibly nice. After all of their hard work, and once the wood floors were redone professionally, it looks like a state of the art new place! It is a new place, totally rewired, all new appliances, including a toilet, and fresh paint and wallpaper everywhere. I’m really happy for them and excited, as I can’t imagine not being as happy there as anywhere else in Budapest. I’ve heard a rumor that the trolley outside is a bit annoying at times, but luckily I think that stops running at around 11:30.

Then Tuesday morning, my friend Klaus arrived from Denmark. I spent Tuesday wandering Budapest and stopping at local, small, cheap watering holes catching up with Klaus. After 12 hours and far too many pints, we crashed at around one in the morning. I have to admit, school was hell that Tuesday. The weather continues to be wicked hot and drinking copious amounts of beer is never advisable in such conditions. Besides, I’m getting too old for this shit. Once in a while, okay, but it is amazing. It’s not hangovers or anything that makes me not want to stay out late; it is the fact that I would much rather be in bed than out all night. Or writing for my blog, etc. Still, we had fun. We hung out in Budapest the whole week before going to Nyekladhaza for the weekend. In Nyekladhaza I did laundry, as I was really starting to stink. We went swimming a couple of times in the lakes and also went to Miskolc for an afternoon. We hiked up to the television tower and also bumped into a jukebox, which will become the theme of a future blog on cultural imperialism and the self-discipline that Foucault talks about as it affects northern Europeans – hopefully with commentary! : )

Other than hanging out the whole week there are only a few points of interest. First, on Thursday night we hustled our butts off to catch a boat on the Danube. My long, lost friend Levi from the dormitory in Pecs called me and told me that there was a university reunion boat cruise on the Danube for only $5. It occurred to me that I had never been on the Danube, because I was too cheap to ever pay for a real cruise. But then I found out that the boat left at nine. We were at my apartment at 8:50. We walked quickly to the tram, went one stop, got off, and ran up and down the shoreline looking for Dock 8. Only a few were numbered, but we figured it out just in time. We ran up to the locked gate, and with a little negotiation they allowed us on. We spent the evening going under the bridges, looking up at the Palace, Parliament, new theatre and museum complex, and drinking Zwack Unicum and Hungarian beer. It was great meeting up with Levi again! He’s such a good guy. And I’m really happy for him, as he is doing what he studied to do, in his home village where he always wanted to live. Basically, he is the regional coordinator for development. Ironically, his Ph.D. work is/was about what someone in this position should do and how to do it. He started writing the thing before he got the position, as he used to work for one of the major party’s youth newspapers. He noted that putting his theory to practice is not going to be easy, as people are involved in the real world. If only some of the Marxists back in my department would learn that. I had a blast on the boat, but with only three hours of sleep every night that week, and having spent every afternoon in the sun hiking up and down hills, and the evenings drinking far more than I usually do because I was with a Dane, I was exhausted.

Classes sucked all week, because I was tired and not spending the time I should have been on studying.

Friday was supposed to be a simple day of class, seeing the Terror Museum, and hopping on a train to Miskolc. The Terror Museum was state of the art and brilliant! I really liked how they didn’t just emphasize Nazi terror, as Western museums always do, particularly in the U.S., but also the damn commie bastards. In a way, it was biased, as it really ignored the Hungarians’ role in sending over 800,000 Jews to the concentration camps, but like I noted, since there is so little officially kicking the communist system to the curb, it was great to see that emphasized. I’ve never seen such a clean and well organized museum. Music played throughout the whole place, creating emotional peaks and troughs, and there must have been about 500 flat screen monitors in there, making for great presentations. For any complete non-Hungarian speakers out there, they also had loads of English documentation in every room too. Great, great experience. I’ve never been in a museum that forces you to be in a claustrophobic elevator with other numerous other people, while a person explains how the secret police executed people in the basement of the building. It was a long trip, let me tell you!

Basically, we didn’t catch the early train to Miskolc, as there were people hanging out the doors. Several cars were locked from the inside, and the passengers in those cars were not letting other passengers in. It was a nightmare. There were about 50-100 people that couldn’t get on the train, even though everyone had tickets. There were no conductors around to make people open their sparsely populated cars, and because of the heat and a variety of alcoholic beverages flowing around, people were getting antagonistic, shouting at one another, etc. We decided to wait and take the next train. It turned out the next train was at 8:15. Then it turned out that it wasn’t a “fast” train, so it took an extra half-an-hour. It was a long day. We arrived in Nyekladhaza at around 10:40. My anya, true to form, had a ton of great food ready for us! She’s such an incredible person! I don’t know how she does everything that she does – cooking, washing, cleaning, working, gardening, swimming, putting up and taking in a shit-head foreigner that comes out of the blue once every four years, etc. I feel so lucky I met this family during my lifetime, and particularly Anya! I’ve never met anyone that doesn’t like her.

Adi and Viki were around and it was great seeing them. It just felt good to get out of the big city and relax in the countryside. Nyekladhaza was having its “Lake Days” but we avoided the hoopla of such a small town festival and just chilled in the garden mostly. Talk mostly centered around Anya, Adi, and Viki’s upcoming trip to Croatia. In fact, it is almost all they talk about, and I can’t say I blame them from what I’ve heard.

Klaus and I arrived back in Budapest Sunday afternoon at around 15:30. We went to a pub, talked, want back to my homestead, dropped our stuff off and then went to a restaurant to eat. He paid, which was nice. Then we met up with Istvan and Detti who had been back in Hungary looking into buying property neighboring their great parcel to give them access to a road and perhaps even natural gas. Luckily, some of the neighbors that initially did not want to sell are now willing to sell, but they may be asking for more than the land is worth, and it sounds like Detti and Istvan are still kind of confused as to what capacity they will ever use the land themselves – e.g., cabin, summer home, real home, etc. I know this gets repetitive, but it was great seeing them! Seriously, I consider them just great friends now and I’m always pumped about hanging out even for an hour or two.

Klaus left Monday morning. We had to share a bed, which is not a big deal normally but when the apartment is over 30 degrees and you are sleeping next to a warm body, it can be somewhat uncomfortable. My roommate had been back for the weekend, though at Lake Balaton Saturday morning through Sunday evening, so he was in his room. I only saw my roommate for a total of about 15 seconds on Monday morning. He woke up at five in the morning or something and was out by 5:30. He had to go back to Hamburg. We said hello as he was heading out, because my bed is adjacent to the door, and I asked him if everything was okay, he said yeah, we shook hands, and I wished him a good trip. Then he was gone… like a ghost.

Klaus and I woke up at seven thirty after being out until two in the morning. He was tired and grumpy and thought he could stay in the apartment until 10 a.m. or so, as his flight left at one. I was grumpy too from a long week and not enough alone time for an introvert. (For example, today I have spent the whole day on my computer doing things for the past 12 hours and listening to my music (Ennio Morricone, Dionysos, French musicals from the 60s, Green Day, and Sigur Ros) and I am now feeling totally refreshed! Yes, I am an antisocial bastard that needs alone time and lots of it. But I still had fun even without last week.) I reminded him that I have the only key to the apartment and therefore he would need to leave with me. This did not rock his world. But we left in time for me to show him the Radisson and for me to try to find him a shuttle bus to the airport – but they never answer their phone. From the Radisson I figured he would be able to get a cab or a shuttle bus, and they all speak English. We said goodbye, hugged, and I went to class.

Exactly like the week before, when my in-laws left, I largely spent Monday sleeping. I couldn’t really function as I was so run down from being around people. So I did my homework and just watched a lot of Hungarian television. Last night I watched “King Arthur” in Hungarian on my computer… legally, of course.

I fell asleep quickly and deeply. At three in the morning or so, the phone rang. It was Birgit. She just needed to talk. And really, I did too! I was so glad she called. We hung out on the phone for about an hour-and-a-half and had a deep and thorough conversation we haven’t had in a long, long time!!! It was incredible! Even though I still didn’t get much sleep last night, the conversation energized me throughout the day. It is now tomorrow, 00:07 June 29, 2005. I’m still not tired. I am going to run to the café to post this stuff soon.

Today, Tuesday, June 28^th… I went to class. I then met with my history professor’s daughter, Liz, who just arrived in Budapest with her friend from Prague via overnight train. Liz and her friend were very friendly people and I enjoyed having lunch with them. They are only here for a couple of days, so I don’t expect to see them again, but I attempted to show them where a few of the better museums are and then led them to the tram to take them toward the castle. Liz’s mum is one of the best professors I’ve ever had and also just an incredibly nice person; so I’m glad I could be of some assistance to her daughter.

I came home and took a cat nap. I was awakened by my cousin Peter who is hoping to come for a couple of days in early-mid July. We talked for ten minutes, and feeling refreshed from my nap, I immediately got to work. I’ve been at the computer since. I wrote a letter asking for an interview with a political party I want to work with, I tweaked about 50 photos for posting to the Web, etc. And then I wrote this. Yeah, life is pretty banal again. I’ll stop here. Thanks for waiting to any of you who are still checking this blog.

P.S. Oh yeah, one day last week my brother Krisztian jokingly noted he was going to go online at work and submit a code from underneath a Coca-Cola cap for a chance to win an iPod. We laughed and I left his apartment after helping him move his furniture in. He won one! Unbelievable luck! Or was it destiny… too many Star Wars comics for me here. They are rotting me brain!

Below are about 50 pictures taken over the past two weeks or so. I'm going to stop uploading them all to the blog and in the future just send one with a link to a photo album. It just looks bloody atrocious! But some of the pictures are decent. If you want to just cruise through them, click on one and the link will bring you to a page where you can just flip through them. More on a jukebox soon...

# posted by IanM : 14:59