The End of 2008: A Hungarian Synopsis

As has been pointed out to me on recent occasions, I have potentially been shirking my blogging responsibilities as of late. For that, I apologize - I vow to right these wrongs in the new year. But before that, let's revisit the last Hungarian weeks of 2008. This may be long, but I'd prefer to call it "comprehensive."

First stop: Paris
In early December, I headed to France for a long weekend to meet up with a friend from Chicago and do a business school interview. It was a blast. The last time I was in Paris was with my 8th-grade French I class, so there was a slightly different atmosphere this time around. We had a chance to eat good food, drink good wine (I nearly broke a chandelier opening a champagne bottle) and see good sites. A few noteworthy items:

• I headed for the "Flower Market," which I understood turned into a "Bird Market" on Sundays. Now, birds were certainly not the only item sold at this market. By the rodent area, I saw two men with furry creatures on leashes. Upon inquiring (in French! Mme Smith, my French I teacher, would be proud), I learned that they were their pet minks. I really don't think I've ever seen one alive (e.g. not on a coat).
• I wandered into Notre Dame, accidentally and conveniently timed with a free concert on its pipe organ. And of course, the concert included pieces by Franz Liszt, the Hungarian-born composer whose musical academy is two blocks from my apartment.
• Now, let me preface this. I have done a lot of touristy things recently. The past 5 months have been a touristy blur. And after two full and fun days in Paris with my friend, I was art'd and museum'd out. So, what better way to kill time after my interview on Monday than by heading to Paris's "Museum of the Sewers"? The museum was literally underground, in an old (and still connected) part of the sewer system under the center city, complete with running water. I actually learned a lot - in his memoir, Napoleon claimed that extending Paris's sewer system was his greatest accomplishment. Les Miserables has an extended sewer scene because Victor Hugo was buddies with the guy who did all the survey work for Napoleon. And if you want to know how they keep sewers clean, just let me know. I can tell you.

Second stop: Office Christmas Party
Back in November, I had agreed to play my sax with a band of a few other co-workers at the beginning of our company holiday party. At first, I was surprised that we were allowed to play Christmas carols in such a public setting. When I asked a co-worker if that might offend someone attending, he looked at me, puzzled, and exclaimed, "We don't just play them, everyone sings along!" Even the fact that it was called the company "Christmas Party" surprised me. I sometimes forget how engrained political correctness is in daily life back home. I also enjoyed a comment later in dinner - I was seated next to a German couple, and they found it hilarious that a group of Hungarians was singing "Stille Nacht" and "O Tanenbaum" in English, rather than in the original language, German. Later in the evening, everyone stood up in front of the group to read a poem about their Secret Santa - when that person realized that they were the ones being talked about, they came forward and got their gift. It was a cute tradition made possible by our smaller office size. (I moved from a 300-person office in Chicago to a 50-person one in Hungary.) It was a really fun night.

Third stop: Competitive Beer Run in the Woods
When I heard about this event, I had to do it. And so, on a cold December Saturday, I found myself in the middle of the Hungarian woods on a team with 4 Hungarian guys and 1 American guy, battling a field of 200+ others. (One of the Hungarian guys was a co-worker, which was my connection.) Teams were composed of 4-6 members; teams scored points based on the distances they traveled and how many beers they drank when they arrived at each station. Some of the pit stops were pubs: the go-to food was bread with smeared grease/fat, onions and salt. We survived, had a lot of fun and managed to only be lost in the woods at night for about an hour. This also wasn't something I would have been able to do if I only stuck around expat circles - the advertisements were all in Hungarian, and my American teammate and I were definitely some of the only non-Hungarians there.

Fourth stop: Hungarian Language Challenge
After stop #3, my co-worker and I intended to go check out an Edward Norton movie, which was showing in English at one of the local theaters. Well, when we sat down, it turned out we were in "Mongol," which had Mongolian speech and Hungarian subtitles. I powered through and actually got most of the movie. I will admit that it is a lot easier to match speech to visible actions in a war flick. ("You killed my daughter, you must die." "No, you must die." stab stab)

Conclusion: So, 2008 ended well in Hungary. And I didn't even throw in the part where I got authentic "bangers and mash." I headed back to the States on 12/19, where I proceeded to see as many people as possible, lose my voice for 4 days following the Alamo Bowl, buy many necessary American items and have a tremendous time. It was great to see you all!

Brussels + Cross-Town Hockey

This past week, I traveled to Belgium Tuesday-Friday for a work conference and a business school interview. It was my first time in the country, and it was interesting to get back in the swing of speaking French! (I managed to get a haircut via French+pantomime, so it seemed to work out well.)

Belgium: 11M people, Dutch/French/German language, Euro currency

Brussels: Belgium's capital, capital of the European Union, home of NATO

Belgium is known for a few culinary items: waffles, "French" fries, chocolate, beer and mussels. I tried all of these and will vouch for them heartily. The waffles are sold by the same franchise at small stands every 20m in the downtown area. This gives Starbucks' sales cannibalization strategy a run for its money!

I learned that Brussels is home to a particularly notable monument: Mannekin Pis. This is essentially a statue/fountain of a 30cm little boy peeing. Mannekin Pis literally translates to "Little Man Pee" in Dutch. It is a very tiny statue, but crowds gather to see it. Rumor has it that years ago, two parents lost their little boy and pledged to construct a statue of him however they found him. Well, that was how they found him. In 1987, Brussels became equal opportunity and erected a similar statue of a young girl. It is not very flattering.

More dignified landmarks, such as the European Union's Council (the main institution) and European Commission (executive branch), are also located in Brussels. I got to go inside the EC for my interview, which was quite cool.

So, I spent Thanksgiving in Belgium, complete with a phone call home and room service pizza! Luckily, the next night I was back in Budapest - I palled around with Laura, a good friend from NUMB, who was visiting Hungary with her family. Together, we conquered Budapest's main Christmas market in search of mulled wine and had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner courtesy of some friends in the Hungary for Obama group. It was great to see her, and nice to have a real Thanksgiving meal.

That brings us to last Saturday, which was a very, very important sports day. I play hockey for one of Budapest's two main sports franchises - Ujpest - and that day we were playing our cross-town rivals, Ferencvaros. [Picture at left: I'm in blue.] This rivalry goes back decades. Ujpest was designated the official policemen's team during the Communist era; Ferencvaros was the "team of the people." All over town, you'll see stickers or emblems supporting one team or the other. My team has been beating the competition by somewhat unhealthy margins (17-0, 39-0, etc.) and we were looking forward to a close game against our rivals. I was also excited because some of my co-workers and friends from the Hash were coming to the game as well.

Though the game started a little slow, it turned into a blowout by the second period. I got our team's second goal off a rebound (I play forward now), and a later one off a tipped shot from the point. We won 10-2, and I spent the rest of the night celebrating with the Hash and my co-workers. Woo hoo!

So, life is good! I'm wrapping up a healthcare project for work. I head to Paris this weekend to meet up with a friend and interview for a business school. And the Wildcats finished up the season 9-3, which means I will be meeting up with as many of you as possible somewhere warm later this month!

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).