Wine in Caves & Olympic Hockey

Things have been a mile a minute in the past two weeks. My parents visited for my birthday (details below) and I started two new projects at work, won two hockey games by a combined score of 56-1 (seriously) and finally put curtains up in my apartment.

It was great to have my parents in town - when you're in a new place, it's nice to meet with people who know you well (in this case, better than anyone). We did a lot of sightseeing, and I've mastered my "tour guide" mode so I will be ready when people start visiting!

The first full day they were here, we went to the most well-designed museum I have ever been to. It's called "The House of Terror," and it focuses on the repression, secret police and "gulag" work camps used during Hungary's time behind the Iron Curtain. It's housed in the former HQ of the secret police. Each room was completely different, and designed to specially fit its subject matter. I'm not doing it justice.

After accompanying me to ice hockey practice Sunday morning, my parents went with the hash and I to run up a MASSIVE hill to the highest point in Budapest. After climbing the 100-year-old watch tower at the top of the hill, the guy who had set that day's trail offered everyone shots from a bottle of Unicum he'd been secretly carrying in his backpack. Unicum tastes like Jagermeister, and has been made by the Zwack family for countless years with a secret recipe containing more than 40 herbs (! this is apparently a selling point). I was proud that both parents participated in the unicum portion of the event.

That night, we went to the final game of the 2010 Olympic Ice Hockey semi-qualifying tournament. Hungary was 2-0 going in to the last game, and we saw them beat Lithuania to move to the final qualifying tourney in Latvia in February. (Road trip??!!) The game was great - my hockey teammates had prepped me for the Hungarian cheers ("Hun-gar-ians!" clapclapclap & "Let's go Hun-gar-y!" in Hungarian), Hungary won the tourney and it was AWESOME to watch live hockey again.

The next day, we headed to Eger, a town about 2 hours from Budapest. Eger has been brought up on this blog before - back in the 1500s, 2000 townspeople held off 80,000 Ottoman Turks who were sieging the castle [view from castle at left]. The defenders drank local wine, which apparently fortified them for their task, and which is now known as "Bull's Blood." Eger is a pretty town with enough to see in a day, but the highlight was...

...our time in Eger's "Valley of the Beautiful Woman" aka Eger's Napa Valley. A short walk from town, the Valley hosts >30 wine caves right next to each other. They sell wine for 25 cents - one dollar. You can buy the wine in liter quantities (and many people just bring their own used 2L Coke bottles from home). There are cobwebs on the ceilings of the caves. The shopowners we talked to only spoke Hungarian. In short, it was awesome. Anyone who visits me will receive a strong urging to go wine tasting here.

The parents headed back, but they left me amazing things: peanut butter, peanut butter M&Ms, chocolate chips, pumpkin cake fixings, English books and Quaker Oats instant oatmeal.

Living/Working abroad

I've been collecting examples for this post for awhile. Living and working abroad, silly things happen all the time:

• I help my ~17-year-old neighbor with his English from time to time. He had a big assignment coming up, and asked for my help translating an American sports documentary about steroids. The past few days, I have helped him translate such lines as: "And then the Hulkster ripped off that shirt." "He put him in the dreaded camel clutch." "We used to practice wrestling moves all the time - body slams, elbow drops, DDTs, double noggin knockers." "I drove myself to the river with a bottle of liquid lead, some sleeping pills and some Nyquil." I got some free cookies for my help!
• I was working on a proposal with a co-worker in a Word document. We had divided up the workload, and had just combined our two pieces. As my teammate was looking mine over, he casually mentioned the typo/extra space I had put between two sentences. I looked at him, confused as to what he was talking about. As any American school children would, I had put two spaces in between my sentences. My co-worker was shocked. He had been taught to put one space by the Hungarian school system. We laughed for a few straight minutes - talk about cultural differences.
• I bought curtains a few days ago, and muddled through semi-successfully with the first few steps. I was able to tell the shop keeper "My room is red and white. What color do you think?" and we picked out some good fabric. Now, despite my precisely drawn diagram of my windows, there was a little (a lot) of back and forth with the sizing woman. Thankfully, I was saved by an English-speaking shopkeeper who magically appeared and confirmed my suspicions that the sizing woman wanted to put curtains in the wrong place, in the wrong size and in the wrong number. Phew!
• I had a training session yesterday on formal (standing) presentations. I told my co-workers that one of my goals was to understand how I could adapt my style to working in Hungary - that is, if there were things I had been trained to do back home that would be distracting to a Central European audience. I gave my prepared presentation, and the facilitator asked people what they thought. Like a shot, the first thing out of everyone's mouths was, "Well, you're very American!" I learned that I used more gestures and was more colloquial than my colleagues. Watching them was really helpful! While it's clear that Americans may differ from Hungarians in presentation style, I learned that it can be just as important to know exactly where a person is from inside a country. Apparently, even Italians from Rome vs. Milan differ substantially on how much they like to ask questions, whether they want the introduction to be about the person/the topic, etc. Milanese folks take more after Germans.
• There are a lot of countries in Europe, and I still have a lot to learn about them. Last week, my principal pulled me and my teammate aside and asked for our help writing some materials concerning a Slovakian electricity company. Going in, I definitely knew more about Slovakia than the average American ... but I still needed to wikipedia some basic facts immediately upon my return to my desk. (FYI, the Slovakian currency is the crown - SKK.)

The parents arrive today for the weekend, and I'm looking forward to showing them around!

Downturn and election

So, a few major things have happened recently. First, after the Head of Hungary's Central Bank had claimed that the economy was fine a few weeks ago, Hungary became the recipient of $25B in aid from the IMF, EU and World Bank. Since I've been here, the Hungarian Forint (HUF) has lost 1/5 of its value. Hungarians who took out loans in foreign currencies (Euros, Swiss Francs) are now having a hard time paying them back. Thankfully, my co-workers and I are fine as our salary is denominated in Euros and converted to HUF each month. It's easy to note the dollar's resurgence (and the cheaper cost of living) when it costs less than $10 at the grocery store for fabric softener, laundry detergent, cheese, tomato sauce and strawberry jam. All of this has led to numerous Hungary vs. Iceland vs. the US comparisons being sent around the office, my favorite of which is here.

Also, I'm not even sure where to start about the election, except that I'm thrilled. On election night, the US Embassy and American Chamber of Commerce hosted a massive event (1300+ people) complete with a speech by the American ambassador, national anthems by the Hungarian Air Force band, live news feeds from the US, free food, etc. I went with a co-worker, but quickly ran into other people from the Hash club, Hungary for Obama and other co-workers. There were more Obama supporters than McCain supporters, but the split was more even than you might think due to the high number of business/embassy people present. I stayed until ~2am Budapest time and then went to sleep until a 5am phone call from Chicago woke me up just in time to see the speeches. I can't tell Meri, Anna and Louis how much I appreciated that. I teared up when Obama said: And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in theforgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. Just got an email that Hungary for Obama is going to keep going strong, and we've got a meeting on Sunday to figure out our next steps.

Most people at work found a time to ask me what I thought about the election results. I've used the opportunity to ask them what they think as well, and everyone has been glad about Obama. People have been amazed that in the course of Obama's lifetime, the US had gone from being a place with segregated water fountains to one in which he could be elected by a majority of its people. Going in, we took an office poll, and 100% of respondents thought Obama would win. Additionally, people have been surprised that there was such hoopla over watching the election results. In Hungary, people (a) don't feel the need for minute-by-minute updates on their national elections and (b) aren't as open about their political opinions - in the past an open declaration of your political leanings could cause big problems.

Romania

I traveled to Romania Oct. 23-26 for Hungary's four-day weekend and had a great time.

Romania: 22M people, Romanian language (Romance), Leu currency, 7% Hungarian nationality (due to frequently overlapping historical boundaries)
Bucharest: Romania's capital, 2M people
Brasov: City of 300,000 people in Transylvania, Romania
Bran: City of 5,000 people in Transylvania and home to "Dracula's Castle"

My first stop was in Bucharest to visit an old friend from the NU ice hockey team. The city was unlike any I'd seen before. Due to the former dictator's megalomania (wording given by a Romanian I met), it had massive squares, including one that housed a replica of Paris's Arc de Triomphe. The Parliament Building [pictured] is the second largest office building in the world, after the Pentagon. There was active construction everywhere: Romania is growing rapidly (5-9% versus Hungary's -1-2%, range due to reestimates from global downturn) and buildings are going up all over the place, including within old buildings [below right, shell is the former secret police headquarters].

Now, this was an interesting and memorable experience from the get-go. I walked through a filmshoot at the airport. I saw Chinese Army generals with Beijing 2008 shopping bags touring the massive Parliament building. And then I met up with my friend, and we walked immediately to one of her friend's book launches, where a speech was given by the ex-wife of Romania's 1989-91 Prime Minister (the divorce had made national headlines last year due to some kind of scandal). My friend was Romanian, which paid huge dividends when we grabbed a traditional (and delicious) Romanian meal - sliced meat wrapped in grape leaves with rice and fried doughnuts for dessert. I felt like I saw most of Bucharest's sites that first day (and really enjoyed it), and then headed to Transylvania on Friday.

Brasov is a beautiful, small town in Transylvania. It was located at the intersection of trade routes between the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe and was very strategically important. As such, it was heavily fortified; many of the walls and watchtowers still exist today. It rained most of the time I was in Transylvania, which just made the town's tiny winding streets seem even more picturesque. Brasov boasts one of Eastern Europe's largest Gothic cathedrals and (excitingly) Europe's largest collection of Anatolian carpets.

In Brasov, I made friends with a great Australian girl at my hostel and we palled around for the next two days (and she even visited me in Budapest a few days ago). Part of this adventure involved heading to Bran to visit Dracula's Castle. Now, Dracula is a fictional character. Vlad the Impaler, who Dracula might have been based off of, did not live in Bran Castle. But this does not matter, as the masses continue to call it Dracula's Castle. Our visit was rainy and mysterious, and the castle was small, pretty and on a hill. It boasted two crucial castle elements: a secret staircase and a full bear rug. [Much better pictures here than the ones I took in the rain.]

My favorite part of Transylvania was that several of the towns put the names of their towns on nearby hills in big Hollywood-like letters. This led to situations suchas:
-Jenny in minivan bus: Do you know where we are?
-New Australian friend: Point to hill and laugh

After the Transylvanian experience, I took a 10-legged journey to make it back from Brasov to Budapest, via Bucharest's Village Museum and my ice hockey game. The Village Museum is Europe's largest open air museum and contains 50 traditional Romanian buildings. The circumstances of my visit were intriguing, but this blog post is too long by far already. As mentioned, I went straight to a hockey game from the Budapest airport, backpack and all. We won 10-1 and I scored! You can see some pictures of me in the game write-up. A successful adventure all around.

October 23

Before I post about what I did on my four day weekend, I wanted to write more about the reason for the national holiday.

On October 23, 1956, Hungarian students and eventually thousands more citizens revolted against the nation's pro-Soviet government. As a result, the old government fell, and a new government was installed that pledged to hold free elections and withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union seemed open to withdrawing, but they quickly changed their mind. On November 4, Soviet tanks and troops invaded Hungary. Over 2,500 Hungarians died, and by January 1957, a new Soviet government was firmly in place. Time's 1956 Man of the Year was the "Hungarian Freedom Fighter."

October 23 is a national day of remembrance, but has also been marked by a lot of anti-government rioting in the last two years. In May 2006, the Prime Minister gave a closed speech to the National Assembly, a recording of which was released later that year. In the recording, the PM confessed that his government had completely lied to the Hungarian nation about the economy:

"I almost died when I had to pretend for one and a half years as if we were governing. Instead, we lied in the morning, at night and in the evening. I don’t want to do it anymore. Either we do it [the reform] and you have your man to do it, or you choose someone else. (…) You are wrong if you think that you have a choice. You do not and nor do I (…) There will be conflicts, yes. There will be rallies, yes. They can go and rally in front of the Parliament. (…)"
-Prime Minister Gyurcsany

Well, rally in front of Parliament people did. And they've continued to do so. The US Embassy sends all Americans in Hungary notifications about planned demonstrations - over 20 occurred this Oct. 23. The police force spent $1.5M to secure the demonstrations this year, and they went on without incident (despite the few Molotov cocktails that were confiscated).