2005-06-14
Monday - 13 June 2005
Finally, something worth writing about! I started school today and it was fantastic. The class is small - only six of us, including two Austrian businessmen, a Spanish woman (who may be dropping), a pregnant British woman who is expecting in August, and a German woman from Leipzig who studied here for a year like I did in Pécs in 1997-98. I have to give this school some credit, as they know how to place people. I have a great teacher, named Laci, and the material, though intermediate, is really great. I don’t think it will be too hard to recollect the grammar we are going over and at the same time I am learning words I never learned in my other classes. I guess that’s why it pays to switch schools - as most people tend to do in academia - as you learn more. But whatever… it is just great to be studying Hungarian again!
We met at 7:30 in the f*cking morning for an oral evaluation. Basically, they crammed about 14 of us in a small room and then brought in the five teachers who just bombarded us with questions. I handled that well enough, as my family generally does the same - except about more pertinent stuff like "who’s turn is it to play with the dogs, etc." Anyway, the hard part came when they handed out random pictures glued onto small placards. Some people received pictures of famous Hungarian boxers, or a couple standing in the rain, etc. I received a close-up of a potted plant. A potted plant. There was nothing to say about it. It was very green. It was a standard brown clay pot. And… yeah, uh… I didn’t really struggle, luckily, and I said everything they were looking for, I even attempted to draw attention away from the fact that I had nothing to say about the flowers by starting off by saying in Hungarian "I hope this won’t be ridiculous, as I don’t know how to talk about plants." It got some laughs, but then I was out of material. I ended up concluding we weren’t in the Amazon, and when asked if I had ever eaten such an herb, I told them if I had it wasn’t this alive or bright green. It was kind of fun. Luckily the word for plant, leaf, and flower came to me this morning, otherwise it would have been hell.
The reason the day has been "fantastic" - which is a word I used to use sparingly, but today I’m feeling reckless - was not solely because school started and I have something to schedule my days around. Rather, as of 8 p.m. this evening the day became sublimely surreal. It is amazing what a chance acquaintance in a deserted café overlooking the Danube and Pest can do. Istvan, Detti, their friends and I tried to go there last night, but it was closing at nine o’clock when we arrived. Istvan insisted that I try it some other time, preferably during the day, as it is a great place to sit, read, and have a beer. Istvan hasn’t let me down with his recommendations yet, and the sun was shining all day, so at around 6:30 p.m. I decided to head across the river and up the hill with my homework and enough Forints for a pint. (I have a picture of the view from this small café next to the tomb of a dead Turk - the northernmost dead Ottoman in Europe - and it should be included in this blog. If it isn’t, well… yeah, it will be posted at some point.)
Anyway, I was up there and the place is beautiful. It’s a terrace of tables scaling the side of the hill. Pisti told me it is generally ignored by both Hungarians and the Swedish tourists asking me to take pictures of them in front of a statue of the dead Turk. And he was right! Moreover, the waitress was actually pretty friendly and the place was largely deserted. I say largely because suddenly some bloke, Gabor, sat at the table with the second best view of Pest next to mine, ordered a Heineken, and whipped out a fancy laptop, two cell phones, a cell phone based wi-fi card, and his palm pilot.
For whatever reason we began speaking to one another. He was pumped because he has a free Internet connection at this place through his cell phone or something. I could tell he was a regular, as the waitress charged him only half as much for his beer in the end and was referring to him by his first name. Anyway, the guy was computer nerd, that is for sure, but for whatever reason we just began chatting… I think when he heard me speaking to the waitress in my accented Hungarian. He started speaking German with me, assuming I was German which was nice. Then we went back to Hungarian, because his English isn’t so good and my German is largely nonexistent. In the end, the guy was showing me the Flash/XML Web sites his company designs for local clubs, businesses, and people in Serbia-Montenegro. His family defected to West Germany when he was 10 years old - he’s 29 now - so his Hungarian isn’t really up to date and his German isn’t perfect either, I guess. The Germans put him in a school for middle school foreigners, and he said that basically everyone just spoke whatever language they felt like and no one learnt any very well. So he grew up in Nuernburg but moved to Budapest when he was 22. He lives in his parents house 10 km outside of Budapest, as his parents have since started a produce business and are basically going to stay in Germany and their Spanish winter house indefinitely. (Of course, this is what he told me. But I largely believe the guy, as he was open enough to offer me some hash and he gave me a ride home. But I’m jumping ahead of myself.)
Overall - aside from the standard male chauvinist talk concerning women - he seems like a good guy. He’s well traveled, as he has been to the U.S. and I could tell from what he said that he wasn’t lying to me about it. We discussed the shitty American lifestyle versus the often shitty, all too quickly disappearing European one - lots of money and no free time versus lots of free time and no money. We discussed the greatness of America’s return policies compared to those in Europe - a land where you can return a television and get your money backed amazed him! We talked about Germany’s Autobahns, how over the past seven years since he moved back Budapest hasn’t gotten any nicer, just more expensive and more "Western," which he had reservations about. It was great, he actually said, though it was in Hungarian so this isn’t a direct quote but pretty close - "It’s going to look just like everywhere else here. Everything will be no different than that is in fucking Germany and the US, the malls and all that." The only thing that never changes, he noted, is the price of hash - "Seven years I’ve been here and it still costs 2000 Forints." I nodded, not really knowing where this was heading… well, actually, I did know where it was going, but I wasn’t sure how to play this. We chatted. I studied. We chatted. He told me to look at some website his company designed for a nightclub in Budapest - the Fékszek or something. He discussed how shit the money is in Hungary, but how the lifestyle is better.
He then implied that he had a little hash (marijuana) on him, and maybe later we could smoke it around the corner. I said maybe later. I purposefully said this so as not to come off as someone not in the know, but not necessarily oblige myself to smoking an illegal substance that may have been smuggled into Hungary inside someone’s ass for all I know. We chatted more. Sipped our beers. He talked about women a lot. Said he is the non-committal type, and he just bought a chick magnet car… his life story was interesting, if it was true. He gave me some advice on cell phones and using the Internet. Three Hungarians sat somewhere a few tables away and began playing a board game called "Metro" or something. The waitress came, and since she only made the trip up the 25 stairs or so when absolutely necessary, we both asked for our checks. I was saying goodbye and suggesting that I might become a regular at this place too, as it is like working in paradise, when he told me to wait. The waitress charged him half as much for his beer - though she charged me the price on the menu, so I think he is just that much of a regular.
We walked out together and he showed me his Trans-Am style car. He was saying he likes to drive the company’s Skoda Passat when he goes to Germany, but that this one, even though it isn’t that powerful by today’s standards, attracts women. (I think because he is kind of nerdy he may have a women complex, as women came up a lot in his dialogue. Perhaps he was making sure I wasn’t gay and thinking he was in for something else. I don’t know.) Anyway, he asked me if I wanted to smoke some hash. I said, "I still have work to do tonight and I have to wake up at 6:30 in the morning." Both lies, but whatever. I told him, though, that I didn’t need to run off and would hang out until he finished if he wanted. He said "cool" in Hungarian, which is zsír or "grease." (Krisztian caught me up on that slang my first week here luckily, as it would have been strange if this guy started talking about grease to me and I didn’t know what he meant.) He then asked me where I lived in the city. I am happy with where I live, as all I ever have to say is "next to the Western train station" and everyone knows the region. It is central enough too where in situations like this it resulted in a free ride from someone who had just drunk a beer - it’s absolutely forbidden to drive in Hungary if you’ve drunk even a sip of alcohol within like 18 hours of getting behind the wheel - rolled a joint and was lighting it as we peeled out of the parking lot. I asked him if he is ever scared of getting caught by the cops, and he noted what most Hungarians point out - "They are all corrupt. I’ve never had a problem with them." Okay… I guess. The hills around here make for some very sharp turns, as I found out last night with Istvan, Detti, and her friends in the same area. Detti’s friend would purposefully wait until the last second before making the 320 turn with maximum G-force to watch us bounce around as helpless as fish in a tank strapped onto the back of a snowplow. This guy, Gabor, handled it better, but he still managed to show me the acceleration of his "chick car." It was hilarious, the next thing I know, we’re on Margit Hid, he is getting so excited bitching about the cost of towing one’s car in Budapest - "25,000 fucking forints" because the towing company is only open from 10 ‘til 6 and then the weekend came and they were closed… fucking 10 ‘til 6!!! What kind of system is that?!?!" I noted that it is the system where you have lots of free time and no money. Actually, it was a perfect time for me to chime in, and I have to admit I was egotistically pleased that I managed to say a joke on the fly and crack this guy up. Though, in hindsight, he was pretty high on life - if nothing else. He probably would have laughed if I started flapping my arms like a beached dolphin. Anyway, he almost hit me in the face with the joint about four times, flailing his arms excitedly and telling me stories, while pounding the gas and passing "fucking slow Hungarian drivers" on the bridge. He peeled around the corner near Nyugati, and mid-rant and told me he had to drop me off there as opposed to across the street in front of the station proper, which would have required the maze-weaving abilities of a super-mouse in order to get to. (The front of the train station has both over and under passes of streets, trolleys, and walkways. At times it is a bit terrifying to navigate regardless of whether you are on foot or horseback.) Luckily, while he was rolling the joint in the car before driving, I got his email and phone number. Rogue, stoner Hungarian computer programmers who grew up in Germany and spend much of their winters in Spain are hard to come by these days - especially ones that give you free rides.
And that was my evening. I finished my homework. I came here. I played with recording Hungarian radio on my Creative Zen. It works really, really well. The radio does too, though I am in a city. In Nyekladhaza it didn’t receive but a few stations. Anyway, I continued working on my website - I can’t post shit to the actual site from here, just to the blog, but I’m making the whole Ianville bit far more navigable, appetizing to look at, and getting rid of the broken links so that when I return to the U.S., or get Gabor to hook me up with illegal Internet through Vodafone on my Pannon mobile phone, I can post a site closer to what I originally imagined. I’m not trying to be "creative" with it so much anymore, and I think the difference will be noticeable. At least, I hope it doesn’t come off like a much dreaded new release by Tricky.
School tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. I need to wash up. Yeah, whatever. The school is two tramstops away - ten minutes. I can leave here at 8:50 and still make it. Better yet, it isn’t as humid here as in Minnesota. At least not yet. I don’t sweat like I do there. So if I don’t take a shower, I can generally bluff and make it appear that I did for at least the four hour class! Enough… I think I am going to watch a movie I pirated from the Gavel family’s stash of about 400 movies last week while sitting in Nyekladhaza.
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Stomping around the contested borders of Trianon (yet to come as it were... as this entry is unfinished)
Okay, so I wasn’t actually in Slovakia, and so it was still a handful of kilometers away - or a few handfuls - but the past weekend found me searching my legs for ticks and getting poison ivy oil on my trousers. Only four days after leaving the poor souls in Luxemburg, Detti and Istvan were back in Hungary for a whirlwind tour of family, friends, and Central European cuisine and drink. They arrived on Friday. I was in Nyekladhaza on Friday, but Anya (mom), Adi, and I came into Budapest in the trusty Renault at about eight o’clock. They were crashing at my apartment that night so that they could wake up early and get to work on painting the hallway and rewiring the absolute shit, dangerous electricity put in the apartment by the Communist regime. Istvan sent me a text message from the airport in Frankfurt-Hahn and noted that they had made it and were coming for sure. (Later he told me that they left really late and he beat the record of getting from Luxemburg to the airport, which I think we had set the week before. It now stands at 50 minutes, and I don’t really know how it can be broken without some serious engine damage occurring underneath the hood of the Ford Focus.) He called me while I was in still in Nyekladhaza and he invited to meet up with some of his and Detti’s friends that evening at a location that was yet to be determined. I met him at 10 p.m. at the Kalvin Square. He was there with an old acquaintance of mine, Andras, from Pécs. We went to a great little pub and waited for Detti and other friends to show up. We sat at a table with some Americans in their mid-20s, whom we largely ignored until one heard me mention St. Paul and shouted - "The Twin Cities?! Right on!" I guess she has friends from there or something. In the 30 second conversation we had before we decided to move downstairs where there were fewer people, she told me she was from NY, now lived in Colorado… from the numerous piercings I rightly guessed "Boulder." This in turn brought on a slew of "dude" and "man" grunts and a not so persuasive argument that I should at least learn how to ski… I was somewhat relieved that we were departing immediately, as she was so superfluous it may have induced a mean streak in me within ten minutes. Before we left she was already saying goodbye like we were lost old chums and shaking my hand in a manner that unsettled me somehow. I’m not here to touch people, but I suppose a lonely American from the Rockies getting drunk in Central Europe for the summer has nothing better to do. The basement was a far superb environment, as only here without any place for the pipe smoke to go and years of spilt beer to evaporate can one appreciate the culture that bars contribute to. At some point a a mad pianist began pounding away on a rickety old instrument that may have passed for a second bar had he not dusted it off. He went all night… at least until near close when we left at four in the morning. I had a great time! Reka, another old acquaintance and good friend of Istvan’s, came. Andras gave me his feelings on Hungarian politics. I met one of Detti’s good friends who had just returned from a year at Bart College in upstate New York. (He liked it.) I met Istvan’s really close friend, Atka (I hope someone will check that spelling, as I’ve never seen this name before, but I think that is right.) It was a blast. At four a.m. we all piled into a cab. I assume it zigzagged around Budapest dropping us off, but I was the first one let out so I don’t know.
I hadn’t been hung over in a long time, not in the true sense of the word. I refuse to admit I was on Saturday morning either. However, I must admit that my legs ceased to function. They hurt the whole day. It was like dragging two giant-sized lead bowling pins. Adi and Anya got up only a couple of hours after I got home. I didn’t hear a sound. I woke up at around 9 a.m. for some foolish reason. I checked my email after a long hiatus. I spent some time weeding out the junk mail - much of it coming from the AAG. Knew I should write some people back but didn’t have the patience. I did something else but for the life of me I can’t remember now. I remember being vaguely proud of it, though - perhaps bought food or something. I then just walked around the city. It had been raining and storming cats and dogs for over a week. Just a real mess and damn cold. So it felt nice to have only partly cloudy skies and 60 degrees. (I have to admit, it is nice how people here don’t even pretend that global warming isn’t happening like a lot of Americans still do. When you don’t have the resources for air conditioning or Federal Flood Relief, you are less prone to say that having 100 year floods every three years, 100 degree temperatures in May, and ice storms in June dropping egg sized hail for an hour that kill your peach trees and rip the roofs off houses (as happened to my family in Nyekladhaza) is just a random anomaly.) I eventually made my way to Krisztian’s where I had a good time chatting with Adi, Krisztian, Nori, Anya, and Nori’s parents and learning a lot about electrical wiring in the process (i.e., and the downside of putting wires in concrete when building high rises.) But since I was dressed in nice clothes and the apartment is only two rooms and is not that comfortable with seven people, wet paint everywhere, and people testing wires, I felt helpless and left before too long. Still, it is really coming along nicely. This week some professional refinishers are coming in to sand and stain the wood floors - that are now waxed with wallpaper scraps and about 40 packs worth of cigarette butts - and then the furniture moving can begin! It is the eighth floor. The elevator is tiny and it is a definite fact that other than a kitchen chair or two, everything else is coming up the stairs. But it will be fun... as the place is like a totally different place from when we booted the old residents out on May 22.
I spent the rest of the day walking around the city, avoiding a shower or two by ducking into grocery stores and pretending to be fascinated by bananas. I spoke with Birgit for about an hour on a park bench somewhere near Oktagon Square. I was trying to walk the hang over out of my legs, but it wasn’t working and instead I ended up exhausted and tired. I came home and watched a bit of King Arthur in Hungarian before passing out late at night again.
Woke up and began tweaking my website which has had me thoroughly addicted ever since. The irony is, as already mentioned, that I can’t post anything from here anyway. But finally, for the first time since locking myself in my room in State College and refusing to come out for days as I loathed the town so much, I have ample uninterrupted time to work and I’m really enjoying it. Unfortunately for me, hobbies are something I can only do when I’m not dreading work or seminars. I plan to make the most of this summer in that sense! I hadn’t actually planned on any such thing, but I’m saying it now, damnit!
Sunday morning I set off to buy a Hungarian keyboard. They are definitely better in the sense that they have more keys to play with. I bought it from Blue Fish computers just down the road, as Saturday night I walked through the mega-mall attached to the train station, and it so disgusted me I have decided to not buy in malls and only buy from small Hungarian shops. We’ll see how long it lasts, but… For shit’s sake, they named the mall "West End Plaza!" Lofasz, I say! Bullshit! They don’t even try to do shit in Hungarian! Bastards!!! (Of course, the they could very well be a company that my mutual fund owns stocks in, and that is the whole dilemma of liberal capitalism… it confuses, it transcends, and most powerfully, there is no "they" in control, because it is the combined idiocy of us all that moves this globalization monster.)
Then hopped on a train to meet Detti and Istvan in Vác. And the story will pick up from here tomorrow, as I am now too tired to continue and I have to get up in eight hours if I want to even have a prayer of eating breakfast. Luckily there is a little store/bakery across the street from my flat that sells espressos to go for 50 cents and little white bread roll things with dried crumbs of cheese on them. It is basically like eating oily bread but it fills the tummy and that’s why I pop vitamins! Goodnight. And to test my Hungarian keyboard out:
Jó éjszakát!
Now that, my friends, is zsír!
We met at 7:30 in the f*cking morning for an oral evaluation. Basically, they crammed about 14 of us in a small room and then brought in the five teachers who just bombarded us with questions. I handled that well enough, as my family generally does the same - except about more pertinent stuff like "who’s turn is it to play with the dogs, etc." Anyway, the hard part came when they handed out random pictures glued onto small placards. Some people received pictures of famous Hungarian boxers, or a couple standing in the rain, etc. I received a close-up of a potted plant. A potted plant. There was nothing to say about it. It was very green. It was a standard brown clay pot. And… yeah, uh… I didn’t really struggle, luckily, and I said everything they were looking for, I even attempted to draw attention away from the fact that I had nothing to say about the flowers by starting off by saying in Hungarian "I hope this won’t be ridiculous, as I don’t know how to talk about plants." It got some laughs, but then I was out of material. I ended up concluding we weren’t in the Amazon, and when asked if I had ever eaten such an herb, I told them if I had it wasn’t this alive or bright green. It was kind of fun. Luckily the word for plant, leaf, and flower came to me this morning, otherwise it would have been hell.
The reason the day has been "fantastic" - which is a word I used to use sparingly, but today I’m feeling reckless - was not solely because school started and I have something to schedule my days around. Rather, as of 8 p.m. this evening the day became sublimely surreal. It is amazing what a chance acquaintance in a deserted café overlooking the Danube and Pest can do. Istvan, Detti, their friends and I tried to go there last night, but it was closing at nine o’clock when we arrived. Istvan insisted that I try it some other time, preferably during the day, as it is a great place to sit, read, and have a beer. Istvan hasn’t let me down with his recommendations yet, and the sun was shining all day, so at around 6:30 p.m. I decided to head across the river and up the hill with my homework and enough Forints for a pint. (I have a picture of the view from this small café next to the tomb of a dead Turk - the northernmost dead Ottoman in Europe - and it should be included in this blog. If it isn’t, well… yeah, it will be posted at some point.)
Anyway, I was up there and the place is beautiful. It’s a terrace of tables scaling the side of the hill. Pisti told me it is generally ignored by both Hungarians and the Swedish tourists asking me to take pictures of them in front of a statue of the dead Turk. And he was right! Moreover, the waitress was actually pretty friendly and the place was largely deserted. I say largely because suddenly some bloke, Gabor, sat at the table with the second best view of Pest next to mine, ordered a Heineken, and whipped out a fancy laptop, two cell phones, a cell phone based wi-fi card, and his palm pilot.
For whatever reason we began speaking to one another. He was pumped because he has a free Internet connection at this place through his cell phone or something. I could tell he was a regular, as the waitress charged him only half as much for his beer in the end and was referring to him by his first name. Anyway, the guy was computer nerd, that is for sure, but for whatever reason we just began chatting… I think when he heard me speaking to the waitress in my accented Hungarian. He started speaking German with me, assuming I was German which was nice. Then we went back to Hungarian, because his English isn’t so good and my German is largely nonexistent. In the end, the guy was showing me the Flash/XML Web sites his company designs for local clubs, businesses, and people in Serbia-Montenegro. His family defected to West Germany when he was 10 years old - he’s 29 now - so his Hungarian isn’t really up to date and his German isn’t perfect either, I guess. The Germans put him in a school for middle school foreigners, and he said that basically everyone just spoke whatever language they felt like and no one learnt any very well. So he grew up in Nuernburg but moved to Budapest when he was 22. He lives in his parents house 10 km outside of Budapest, as his parents have since started a produce business and are basically going to stay in Germany and their Spanish winter house indefinitely. (Of course, this is what he told me. But I largely believe the guy, as he was open enough to offer me some hash and he gave me a ride home. But I’m jumping ahead of myself.)
Overall - aside from the standard male chauvinist talk concerning women - he seems like a good guy. He’s well traveled, as he has been to the U.S. and I could tell from what he said that he wasn’t lying to me about it. We discussed the shitty American lifestyle versus the often shitty, all too quickly disappearing European one - lots of money and no free time versus lots of free time and no money. We discussed the greatness of America’s return policies compared to those in Europe - a land where you can return a television and get your money backed amazed him! We talked about Germany’s Autobahns, how over the past seven years since he moved back Budapest hasn’t gotten any nicer, just more expensive and more "Western," which he had reservations about. It was great, he actually said, though it was in Hungarian so this isn’t a direct quote but pretty close - "It’s going to look just like everywhere else here. Everything will be no different than that is in fucking Germany and the US, the malls and all that." The only thing that never changes, he noted, is the price of hash - "Seven years I’ve been here and it still costs 2000 Forints." I nodded, not really knowing where this was heading… well, actually, I did know where it was going, but I wasn’t sure how to play this. We chatted. I studied. We chatted. He told me to look at some website his company designed for a nightclub in Budapest - the Fékszek or something. He discussed how shit the money is in Hungary, but how the lifestyle is better.
He then implied that he had a little hash (marijuana) on him, and maybe later we could smoke it around the corner. I said maybe later. I purposefully said this so as not to come off as someone not in the know, but not necessarily oblige myself to smoking an illegal substance that may have been smuggled into Hungary inside someone’s ass for all I know. We chatted more. Sipped our beers. He talked about women a lot. Said he is the non-committal type, and he just bought a chick magnet car… his life story was interesting, if it was true. He gave me some advice on cell phones and using the Internet. Three Hungarians sat somewhere a few tables away and began playing a board game called "Metro" or something. The waitress came, and since she only made the trip up the 25 stairs or so when absolutely necessary, we both asked for our checks. I was saying goodbye and suggesting that I might become a regular at this place too, as it is like working in paradise, when he told me to wait. The waitress charged him half as much for his beer - though she charged me the price on the menu, so I think he is just that much of a regular.
We walked out together and he showed me his Trans-Am style car. He was saying he likes to drive the company’s Skoda Passat when he goes to Germany, but that this one, even though it isn’t that powerful by today’s standards, attracts women. (I think because he is kind of nerdy he may have a women complex, as women came up a lot in his dialogue. Perhaps he was making sure I wasn’t gay and thinking he was in for something else. I don’t know.) Anyway, he asked me if I wanted to smoke some hash. I said, "I still have work to do tonight and I have to wake up at 6:30 in the morning." Both lies, but whatever. I told him, though, that I didn’t need to run off and would hang out until he finished if he wanted. He said "cool" in Hungarian, which is zsír or "grease." (Krisztian caught me up on that slang my first week here luckily, as it would have been strange if this guy started talking about grease to me and I didn’t know what he meant.) He then asked me where I lived in the city. I am happy with where I live, as all I ever have to say is "next to the Western train station" and everyone knows the region. It is central enough too where in situations like this it resulted in a free ride from someone who had just drunk a beer - it’s absolutely forbidden to drive in Hungary if you’ve drunk even a sip of alcohol within like 18 hours of getting behind the wheel - rolled a joint and was lighting it as we peeled out of the parking lot. I asked him if he is ever scared of getting caught by the cops, and he noted what most Hungarians point out - "They are all corrupt. I’ve never had a problem with them." Okay… I guess. The hills around here make for some very sharp turns, as I found out last night with Istvan, Detti, and her friends in the same area. Detti’s friend would purposefully wait until the last second before making the 320 turn with maximum G-force to watch us bounce around as helpless as fish in a tank strapped onto the back of a snowplow. This guy, Gabor, handled it better, but he still managed to show me the acceleration of his "chick car." It was hilarious, the next thing I know, we’re on Margit Hid, he is getting so excited bitching about the cost of towing one’s car in Budapest - "25,000 fucking forints" because the towing company is only open from 10 ‘til 6 and then the weekend came and they were closed… fucking 10 ‘til 6!!! What kind of system is that?!?!" I noted that it is the system where you have lots of free time and no money. Actually, it was a perfect time for me to chime in, and I have to admit I was egotistically pleased that I managed to say a joke on the fly and crack this guy up. Though, in hindsight, he was pretty high on life - if nothing else. He probably would have laughed if I started flapping my arms like a beached dolphin. Anyway, he almost hit me in the face with the joint about four times, flailing his arms excitedly and telling me stories, while pounding the gas and passing "fucking slow Hungarian drivers" on the bridge. He peeled around the corner near Nyugati, and mid-rant and told me he had to drop me off there as opposed to across the street in front of the station proper, which would have required the maze-weaving abilities of a super-mouse in order to get to. (The front of the train station has both over and under passes of streets, trolleys, and walkways. At times it is a bit terrifying to navigate regardless of whether you are on foot or horseback.) Luckily, while he was rolling the joint in the car before driving, I got his email and phone number. Rogue, stoner Hungarian computer programmers who grew up in Germany and spend much of their winters in Spain are hard to come by these days - especially ones that give you free rides.
And that was my evening. I finished my homework. I came here. I played with recording Hungarian radio on my Creative Zen. It works really, really well. The radio does too, though I am in a city. In Nyekladhaza it didn’t receive but a few stations. Anyway, I continued working on my website - I can’t post shit to the actual site from here, just to the blog, but I’m making the whole Ianville bit far more navigable, appetizing to look at, and getting rid of the broken links so that when I return to the U.S., or get Gabor to hook me up with illegal Internet through Vodafone on my Pannon mobile phone, I can post a site closer to what I originally imagined. I’m not trying to be "creative" with it so much anymore, and I think the difference will be noticeable. At least, I hope it doesn’t come off like a much dreaded new release by Tricky.
School tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. I need to wash up. Yeah, whatever. The school is two tramstops away - ten minutes. I can leave here at 8:50 and still make it. Better yet, it isn’t as humid here as in Minnesota. At least not yet. I don’t sweat like I do there. So if I don’t take a shower, I can generally bluff and make it appear that I did for at least the four hour class! Enough… I think I am going to watch a movie I pirated from the Gavel family’s stash of about 400 movies last week while sitting in Nyekladhaza.
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Stomping around the contested borders of Trianon (yet to come as it were... as this entry is unfinished)
Okay, so I wasn’t actually in Slovakia, and so it was still a handful of kilometers away - or a few handfuls - but the past weekend found me searching my legs for ticks and getting poison ivy oil on my trousers. Only four days after leaving the poor souls in Luxemburg, Detti and Istvan were back in Hungary for a whirlwind tour of family, friends, and Central European cuisine and drink. They arrived on Friday. I was in Nyekladhaza on Friday, but Anya (mom), Adi, and I came into Budapest in the trusty Renault at about eight o’clock. They were crashing at my apartment that night so that they could wake up early and get to work on painting the hallway and rewiring the absolute shit, dangerous electricity put in the apartment by the Communist regime. Istvan sent me a text message from the airport in Frankfurt-Hahn and noted that they had made it and were coming for sure. (Later he told me that they left really late and he beat the record of getting from Luxemburg to the airport, which I think we had set the week before. It now stands at 50 minutes, and I don’t really know how it can be broken without some serious engine damage occurring underneath the hood of the Ford Focus.) He called me while I was in still in Nyekladhaza and he invited to meet up with some of his and Detti’s friends that evening at a location that was yet to be determined. I met him at 10 p.m. at the Kalvin Square. He was there with an old acquaintance of mine, Andras, from Pécs. We went to a great little pub and waited for Detti and other friends to show up. We sat at a table with some Americans in their mid-20s, whom we largely ignored until one heard me mention St. Paul and shouted - "The Twin Cities?! Right on!" I guess she has friends from there or something. In the 30 second conversation we had before we decided to move downstairs where there were fewer people, she told me she was from NY, now lived in Colorado… from the numerous piercings I rightly guessed "Boulder." This in turn brought on a slew of "dude" and "man" grunts and a not so persuasive argument that I should at least learn how to ski… I was somewhat relieved that we were departing immediately, as she was so superfluous it may have induced a mean streak in me within ten minutes. Before we left she was already saying goodbye like we were lost old chums and shaking my hand in a manner that unsettled me somehow. I’m not here to touch people, but I suppose a lonely American from the Rockies getting drunk in Central Europe for the summer has nothing better to do. The basement was a far superb environment, as only here without any place for the pipe smoke to go and years of spilt beer to evaporate can one appreciate the culture that bars contribute to. At some point a a mad pianist began pounding away on a rickety old instrument that may have passed for a second bar had he not dusted it off. He went all night… at least until near close when we left at four in the morning. I had a great time! Reka, another old acquaintance and good friend of Istvan’s, came. Andras gave me his feelings on Hungarian politics. I met one of Detti’s good friends who had just returned from a year at Bart College in upstate New York. (He liked it.) I met Istvan’s really close friend, Atka (I hope someone will check that spelling, as I’ve never seen this name before, but I think that is right.) It was a blast. At four a.m. we all piled into a cab. I assume it zigzagged around Budapest dropping us off, but I was the first one let out so I don’t know.
I hadn’t been hung over in a long time, not in the true sense of the word. I refuse to admit I was on Saturday morning either. However, I must admit that my legs ceased to function. They hurt the whole day. It was like dragging two giant-sized lead bowling pins. Adi and Anya got up only a couple of hours after I got home. I didn’t hear a sound. I woke up at around 9 a.m. for some foolish reason. I checked my email after a long hiatus. I spent some time weeding out the junk mail - much of it coming from the AAG. Knew I should write some people back but didn’t have the patience. I did something else but for the life of me I can’t remember now. I remember being vaguely proud of it, though - perhaps bought food or something. I then just walked around the city. It had been raining and storming cats and dogs for over a week. Just a real mess and damn cold. So it felt nice to have only partly cloudy skies and 60 degrees. (I have to admit, it is nice how people here don’t even pretend that global warming isn’t happening like a lot of Americans still do. When you don’t have the resources for air conditioning or Federal Flood Relief, you are less prone to say that having 100 year floods every three years, 100 degree temperatures in May, and ice storms in June dropping egg sized hail for an hour that kill your peach trees and rip the roofs off houses (as happened to my family in Nyekladhaza) is just a random anomaly.) I eventually made my way to Krisztian’s where I had a good time chatting with Adi, Krisztian, Nori, Anya, and Nori’s parents and learning a lot about electrical wiring in the process (i.e., and the downside of putting wires in concrete when building high rises.) But since I was dressed in nice clothes and the apartment is only two rooms and is not that comfortable with seven people, wet paint everywhere, and people testing wires, I felt helpless and left before too long. Still, it is really coming along nicely. This week some professional refinishers are coming in to sand and stain the wood floors - that are now waxed with wallpaper scraps and about 40 packs worth of cigarette butts - and then the furniture moving can begin! It is the eighth floor. The elevator is tiny and it is a definite fact that other than a kitchen chair or two, everything else is coming up the stairs. But it will be fun... as the place is like a totally different place from when we booted the old residents out on May 22.
I spent the rest of the day walking around the city, avoiding a shower or two by ducking into grocery stores and pretending to be fascinated by bananas. I spoke with Birgit for about an hour on a park bench somewhere near Oktagon Square. I was trying to walk the hang over out of my legs, but it wasn’t working and instead I ended up exhausted and tired. I came home and watched a bit of King Arthur in Hungarian before passing out late at night again.
Woke up and began tweaking my website which has had me thoroughly addicted ever since. The irony is, as already mentioned, that I can’t post anything from here anyway. But finally, for the first time since locking myself in my room in State College and refusing to come out for days as I loathed the town so much, I have ample uninterrupted time to work and I’m really enjoying it. Unfortunately for me, hobbies are something I can only do when I’m not dreading work or seminars. I plan to make the most of this summer in that sense! I hadn’t actually planned on any such thing, but I’m saying it now, damnit!
Sunday morning I set off to buy a Hungarian keyboard. They are definitely better in the sense that they have more keys to play with. I bought it from Blue Fish computers just down the road, as Saturday night I walked through the mega-mall attached to the train station, and it so disgusted me I have decided to not buy in malls and only buy from small Hungarian shops. We’ll see how long it lasts, but… For shit’s sake, they named the mall "West End Plaza!" Lofasz, I say! Bullshit! They don’t even try to do shit in Hungarian! Bastards!!! (Of course, the they could very well be a company that my mutual fund owns stocks in, and that is the whole dilemma of liberal capitalism… it confuses, it transcends, and most powerfully, there is no "they" in control, because it is the combined idiocy of us all that moves this globalization monster.)
Then hopped on a train to meet Detti and Istvan in Vác. And the story will pick up from here tomorrow, as I am now too tired to continue and I have to get up in eight hours if I want to even have a prayer of eating breakfast. Luckily there is a little store/bakery across the street from my flat that sells espressos to go for 50 cents and little white bread roll things with dried crumbs of cheese on them. It is basically like eating oily bread but it fills the tummy and that’s why I pop vitamins! Goodnight. And to test my Hungarian keyboard out:
Jó éjszakát!
Now that, my friends, is zsír!
