Sziastok! A Hungarian journal

 This is being written in flight from Charlotte to Mexico, where I am spending non-christmas with Jill's family. In the last four days, I have flown from Budapest to London, London to New York, Albany to Charlotte and now Charlotte to Cancun. In between the flights, I spent some time sprinting through airports with a thirty-pound carry-on full of bomb-like electronic equipment.

  What a pity it is that the final result of mankind.s longing for flight, a desire driven by dreams of freedom, should end up like this. Modern air travel isn't freedom, it is hours of anxiousness in a metal can, screaming across the sky, book-ended by incompetence and yelling.

  It is jarring to be back in America. Americans frighten me. Jill says that.s just because I can understand what they.re saying, but I disagree. While it's true that every nation has its ignorant hillbillies, tattooed and toothless, our ignorant hillbillies run the world. I think the sense of entitlement that comes with that assumed power might be the key to my unease.

  I think some of my feelings about America were neatly encapsulated in the airport bathroom in Albany: Everything was new and high-tech. The toilet saw me enter the stall and flushed automatically like a cybernetic guard dog. The faucet turned on automatically ever time I got near it and the paper towel dispenser did the same, pumping yards of paper directly into the trash can beneath it. In the stall next to mine, someone had put down one of those paper toilet sanitizer rings. They had then shredded it completely and sprayed shit all over it, as if a great ape had been using the john. Muzak played nonetheless.

  Our last few days in Budapest went by too quickly. We discovered a few more strange bars with unpredictable patrons and we acted unpredictably in order to fit in. We ate at several of our favorite restaurants and I rediscovered my love of good food, something that the lawyers in New York had dulled a bit.

  Our last day, we tried to shoot a short film, but my camera malfunctioned so we went to the Electro-Technical museum instead. This turned out to be our best experience yet in a quirky, central European museum and one that most closely resembled the fictional museum I invented in a short story of mine that Pilvax published. I wrote the story before I had ever lived in Budapest.

  Like all good Hungarian museums, the Electro-Technical museum seemed closed when we got there, but a woman eventually appeared and led us up a flight of stairs to a room full of fantastic B-movie electric devices. There were two old men in the room, one short, balding and mustachioed, the other very tall with a lab coat and wild eyebrows.

  We were the only people in the museum. The taller man spent an hour showing us all of the devices. He turned cranks and made sparks and explained the physics of each device in English with only a few accidental German or Hungarian words. After the demonstration, he took us around the empty museum and showed us all of the electrical artifacts, adding a bit of Hungarian relevance to each. He also tried half-heartedly to reclaim Tesla for the Hungarians. Everyone wants a piece of Tesla these days.

  Our guide was so earnest, so affable and his eyebrows were so bushy that we couldn.t help but find the whole experience adorable.

  If the contents of this diary have seemed to often dwell on the negative, that shouldn.t lead you to think that we have had a bad experience in Hungary. It is only that the most newsworthy events are often the scary, awkward ones.

  We met many wonderful people while in Budapest. The list that follows is by no means comprehensive:

  Michael, who we met in Hungarian class and is always impeccably dressed. He works for CEU as a fundraiser.

  Attila, our landlord, who was charging too much but was super-helpful, even driving us to and from the airport. He and his wife Eszter have just had triplets and she drove us to the airport in a Renault van whose size clearly anticipates each daughter weighing 300 and owning a pet cow.

  Maria, our Hungarian teacher, who made fun of the rich people in Buda and Jill's hairdresser and who was a real pro at language instruction.

  Rick and Sarah. Sarah grew up in the Bay Area and was involved in the same punk scene that I was, albeit eight years later. They introduced us to weird instruments played by weird people. Without them, we would never have seen an Armenian Accordion player get in a knife fight.

  Nathan, the Canadian, who is now involved in a struggle to the death with Jill in online scrabble.

  Dylan and Michelle, who write the blog CuriousExpeditions.org, which you should definitely check out. Michelle is from Maine like Jill and Dylan was a bit player in a few sport-themed movies in his youth, things like "Mighty Ducks 4" or something.

  Matt, who runs Pilvax Magazine and who gave me some much-needed direction in my writing as well as standing up for Jill when she got rowdy and started calling everyone "senkihazi".

  Jovana, the hopeless romantic, in the sense that she should be Byron to our Shelleys when we take up residence together by the sea.

  I'll also miss Budapest, which is a beautiful, haunted, melancholy city. Elegant and chaotic, it is a city that, like the language its inhabitants speak, will probably always defy complete outside understanding.

  Every time I think I've really experienced all Budapest has to offer...

  Jill and I went out to Kiado last night to hang out with Jovana and some friends of hers who are living in Romania. We weren't there long when we ran into Matt and Nathan, and we spent several enjoyable hours playing hearts and accumulating odd glassware in a back area of the bar.

  We got a text from Dylan and Michelle saying that they were over at Siraly, so we went there to meet up. Sarah and Rick were also there. I may have mentioned Siraly before, but if not, it's a squatted building that's been turned into a three-storey bar with a performance space in the basement. Jill hates it, since it's too bright and too granola, but I don't mind it. It's where we ran into the Brazilian hurdy-gurdy player who had moved to Budapest to play hurdy-gurdy in the Hungarian style. It's also popular with the Jewish crowd, so one is less likely to be told to "go back to Israel" there.

  There seem to be a lot of those sorts of people here: the free-jazz violinist, the hurdy-gurdy player in the Hungarian style or the twelve key pandemonium operator, and there might well be a market for it, but I would have no idea. For me, it's all pretty comical. I suspect that there might only be one person in each of those specialized fields. It's like being a Joyce scholar. There are only four of you in the world, so your options for advancement in the field are slim.

  At Siraly, there were some superstars of klezmer performing in the basement. I guess they were superstars, since I'm no klezmer expert, but Sarah told me that they were fragments of two groups that had performed at the Budapest sport arena earlier in the day, and they were just fooling around for free late at night at Siraly. This raises some interesting questions. Klezmer can book a show profitably at a stadium? The guy who won a grammy, he won it in the U.S.? I'm guessing it wasn't on the broadcast portion of the show? Did you know that Santa Claus' evil twin brothers played the bongos? Neither did I, but I do know that they should get some dental work done.

  We hung around for a while, but these hippy girls kept getting on stage and singing and it was all sort of incomprehensible, so we moved upstairs to be able to talk more easily. Just in time, it turned out, for the famous Armenian accordion player to get in a fight with the bearded bartender who looked exactly like one of the fabulous furry freak bros.

  I don't know what it was about, and for a while it was hard to tell if it was a fight or just fooling around, but then they were outside, swinging wildly at one another. The bartender came back in smiling, and the accordion player came to the door, bloodied and yelling. Another round of fighting ensued, and we started to leave, only to find the accordion player brandishing a quaint-looking switchblade at the bartender while his friend half-heartedly intervened.

  Somehow, things got settled, but the bartender seemed to have gotten a little bloody too. We passed the accordion player up the block, smoking and talking on the phone, still looking like a cast member of west side story. So, now I've seen an Armenian accordion player in a knife fight in Hungary. Can anyone raise me a better sentence than that?

  Oh, yeah. When we left our house that evening, the fuzz were there doing something with the ax-murderer and his drunk friends again. It's never confrontational, but they've been stopping by every other week recently.

 Serbia had, till now, been a country with a foreboding air for me. For no good reason, I thought of it as a haven for war criminals, gangsters and soviet-style shortages. The fact that the U.S. had bombed the country only 13 years ago added to its exotic image in my mind. This all made me excited to discover that Belgrade was only 4 hours away on the motorway. I have a poor grasp of central European geography, and I know that motorways are fickle things over here, often not going anywhere near where I want to go. For example, the 300-kilometer drive to Krakow takes seven hours.

 We were stopped at the border to Serbia because our rental car didn't have the right papers, but in an amazing display of efficiency, the rental agency faxed papers to the border and we were only delayed by 10 minutes. At least we weren't trying to enter the country with an American car with homemade cardboard license plates as we were at the Croatian border a few years ago.

  As we approached Belgrade, the air became heavily polluted and hazy. It smelled strongly of wood smoke. The houses in the countryside were often made of brick and looked recently built, but they also seemed half-finished, with rough edges and missing windows. (see picture above) I imagined impoverished Serbs heating themselves by open fires on the concrete floors of unfurnished, unfinished but oddly modern buildings.

  Our only map of Belgrade was one I had downloaded from the Internet. It was made in 1994, and closer inspection made it seem as if it might have been designed as a list of bombing targets rather than as a useful tourist map. It had all the street names, but the points of interest on it were mostly things like "power station", "cargo port" or "Chinese embassy." No, I kid about the last one. We did drive by a government building that looked as if it had been bombed, but it seems like 13 years is a long time to leave a bombed out shell of that size standing. It hardly mattered that we had a map, since all street signs in Belgrade are in Cyrillic, and by the time we'd translated enough to match a sign to a Latin street name, we were way past it. Still, we found parking and wandered off in search of a hotel.

  We found one in the grand "Moscow Hotel" (seen above at night). We were debating whether to splurge on an expensive room when the receptionist suggested a cheaper room on the top floor. We went for it, and it was clearly the old servant's quarters, under the eaves and a floor above the elevator (which had no door). It was cute and romantic to be in the servants' quarters of an old grand hotel from the communist era.

  The streets of Belgrade were teaming! It's a city of 2 million, just like Budapest, but I never see that many people out on the streets of Budapest. I don't know if it is because of the approach of Christmas, but people of all ages - families, teenagers, young couples - were all out and walking around the pedestrian areas. Belgrade seemed to be full of a perky enthusiasm that is often missing in Budapest, especially this time of year.

  We got some directions to an area with traditional restaurants that Jovana had recommended from the hotel desk clerk, which included a funny "turn right at monument horse" step. He clearly meant the big statue with a man on a horse in the main square of the pedestrian district, but we referred to it as "monument horse" from then on. Someone tried to kill us with heavy, meaty Serbian food, so we had to walk it off by going up to the fortress / park overlooking the confluence of the Sava and the Danube. I would love to take a boat from Bratislava to the sea via the Danube some day.

  The next day, we walked all over town, looking at churches and old buildings, including a massive unfinished orthodox cathedral. I was a little nervous about trying to get Jill to go to the Tesla museum, since it seemed so nerdy, but it turned out to be really fun.

  Serbia is really excited about Tesla, to the point that he's even on their 200 dinar bills. The museum was small, but it had a whole room full of the best kind of science-museum gadgets (no-one makes them better than Tesla anyway) and a very informed guide to turn on the coils and generators and make sparks fly around. I've been sort of immersed in Tesla-lore since I got back. His story is fascinating and tragic and of immediate relevance to anyone who lives in the 21st century.

  We wandered around the castle again in daylight, bought some candy and pins, acted like tourists, and then decided at about 3 to drive to Novi Sad, a smaller city an hour closer to Budapest.

  Novi Sad was, like Belgrade, completely hopping. People were out in droves, walking up and down the public square. We had a very confusing time trying to work out the parking system, but an extremely helpful parking officer showed us what to do and went so far as to walk us to the store where we could buy a parking pass. In general, we found people to be fantastically good-natured and helpful, in a way that we rarely see in Budapest. People are friendly to us here, but in Serbia, people would hear us speaking English and come over and help us out. It was really great.

  Novi Sad had more of the same: a pedestrian plaza, lots of high end shopping and a bunch of churches. The most interesting pastime was just watching the people. We did a lot of window shopping too, but the prices in Serbia are surprisingly high. They're high even by US standards. I have a hard time understanding how the population that lives in those run down houses can afford to buy clothes. Maybe that's why the houses are run down?

  Anyway, to get an idea, see the pictures above.

  As a final note, I'd like to mention that I went to Vittula last night and DIDN'T get in a fight. Yay me!

  Sometimes I think there are people who live in the world and people who live beside it. By beside it, I mean that they somehow manage to believe that reality ends at the improbably well-dressed limits of American television. For them, laws do not get broken, simply because they are laws. The idea that people sometimes act like their ape brains live on in a short-circuit in their hypothalamus confuses people who live beside the world. They're usually upper-middle-class and can afford to ignore the weird stuff that really happens in the world when it's not being filmed or running for national office. They may get drunk in Vegas and wake up peeing all over the hallway carpet with no idea of their room number, but they can pass that off as an anomaly.

  Personally, I believe in the irrational actor. Lord knows I am one. I think life is a constant struggle to use the beautiful, complex machinery of our brains and keep the simian side from hooting at shiny lights or eating live pigeons on the street. The normal man lives a life of practical anarchy. Society, police and government are restorative elements, not preventative, and we sometimes don't get to count on anything but our awkward selves.

   I bring this up, because my experience in Budapest recently has had elements of the darker side of man recently, although my experience has remained generally good. It began with my newest, most improved, attempt to get in an actual fight. I was crossing Aradi Utca, a small, one way street near our house, while carrying an armload of groceries. Some middle-aged guy in a small car ran the light and seemed intent on running me down while I was in the crosswalk. I turned towards him and gave him a normal, NYC-style "waddya thinking?" shrug. No rude hand signals, just a shrug and a glare. Even so, he screeched to a stop and came flying out of the car, swearing in Hungarian. He took a swing at me, but I sort of dodged and elbowed him out of the way, still carrying the groceries. I was sort of out of it, and the event seemed too odd for me to have had the time to get ready to fight back before he was back in the car, swearing more and driving off. Finally, the reality of the episode seeped in to my dull brain and I managed to hit his driver's side window with a carton of yogurt from a good 30 ft away. Pink goo sprayed all over the car, which screeched to a stop again, but I still felt lethargic, so I chose flight over confrontation, jogging back up the one-way street and around the corner, where my attacker would have had to abandon his car to follow me.

  This particular Hungarian was clearly not firing on all cylinders. He was probably 45, and no bigger than me, not a thuggish teenage skinhead nor backed up with a carload of friends. Had we actually fought, I suspect our chances were about equal. He could have beat me up, but he could just as well have been seriously hurt, which should be enough to dissuade a rational actor from undertaking a stupid fight about nothing. Besides, even without a fight, I could have stolen his car. Cost greatly outweighs benefit, yet he chose the course with the highest cost and lowest benefit. Take that, Mr. Friedman!

  A week or so later, I continued my attempts to make my visit to Budapest take on a Vin-Diesel-in-triple-X feel. We were out with Matt - who has started doing a very cool job of editing my weird novel, Jovana, Michelle and Dylan. Things were sort of winding down at Kuplung, the warehouse bar on Kiraly, so Matt suggested another place. Turned out to be a place called Fészek that I'd been to with Jill's work last summer. When we'd gone there, I felt a little like I was in a communist-era version of the Overlook hotel, with a stone-faced waiter in the dining courtyard and a stone-faced coat check man in the Spartan lobby.

  This time, we went into a small basement bar. They were charging a ridiculously low 100 forint as a cover, which we learned after some confusion as to whether it was a private party or not. When we got in, it was all meatheads and porn ladies. I see them on the street in single servings or coupled off, the men with their muscles, small eyes and huge watches, the women cartoon characters with unnecessary fake boobs and craggy faces you would never want to see in bright light, but I'd never been in a room full of them in Hungary. There was a band setting up on stage, and Matt said that one of the musicians was some sort of big time pop star. There was one girl there with these gigantic fake breasts, gigantic to the point of being freakish, not just big enough to show up well on video.

  Jill and I went to find the bathroom, and there was quite a bit of confusion. I guess it was the women's room, but there was a guy in it, so I went in. Oh! He was there to do coke with his stripper girlfriend! Of course! The communist-era coat check lady came and shooed us out, and I explained that I didn't speak Hungarian, didn't understand, didn't realize it was the women's room and was sorry - as well as not being a coked-out lunkhead, and she seemed to relent. I thought I was done with the awkwardness, but the meathead and his girlfriend followed me into the proper bathroom, made fun of me in Hungarian and then did more coke while I tried to Pee. Back in the bar, nothing was happening with the music, even an hour into it. Some people had been tuning on stage and possibly writing a bad song, then leaving again to talk to strippers or do more drugs. No performance, though. The meatheads and the porn ladies ran shifts to the bathroom to do coke. If they were in such agreement, I don't know why there wasn't just a giant pile of cocaine on stage. Anyway, I left, feeling uncomfortable. Matt says that it got weirder, and that when they performed, they performed prince covers, but I don't have further details.

  Above ground, and in the daylight where the beside-the-world people mingle with the rest of us, it's Christmas season. All the streets are lit up in a lovely way, and there are huge Christmas markets. These markets are nice, because they actually seem to be selling other things besides the same tourist stuff you can get everywhere in Europe. They seem to be actually run by Hungarian artisans. They serve hot spiced wine (foralt bor) and sausages, and one vendor spent about 20 minutes helping to recommend a necklace that would go well with Jill's skin.

  In another only-in-Hungary move, we picked up a pair of Tisza's. Tisza's are sneakers, cleverly marketed with commie-chic in mind, but still unavailable in the US. They're pricey, but slick enough that I needed to have a pair.

  Otherwise, things remain normal - Nicolette at the coffee shop is unnaturally perky 12 hours a day, the old man on the second floor comes home drunk every night and can't work the door buzzer, the old-style trams are badly in need of lubrication and the forint holds steady at a depressing 173 to the dollar. I can't believe I'll be home so soon, I've really grown to like Budapest. I've had people jump out of cars and try to punch me in Poughkeepsie, San Francisco, Chico, Texas and a smattering of other cities, so that's no big deal. This remains one of my favorite of all of the cities that I've been threatened in.

  It's been a long time since I've written. If anyone cares, sorry. I have had guests, and I've also been struck sometimes by the urge to hibernate during the times that I should be working. It's dark all the time, and some ancient instinct seems to make me want to sleep all the time, even though the city is alive with energy and even though it doesn't feel depressing here, just appropriately dark.

  We took a train to Prague. I love trains. We could fly to Prague, I'm sure, and the time in the air would have only been one hour, but there would have been an hour of transit to and from the airport on both sides, plus two hours of waiting around, clearing security and waiting around some more. All of the hassle of flying is even more unbearable in the states, where all the TSA people are rude and incompetent.

   The train, though? What a great set-up. We took the streetcar down to Keleti, and found a cabin to ourselves in one of the second-class cars. We had an entire cabin to ourselves for nearly the whole trip, but even if we hadn't, there is so much legroom on a train, and you can get up and stand in the hallway for hours watching the countryside pass without anyone thinking you're going to blow up the train and without being tossed around by turbulence. The actual functioning of the train is quite quiet, considering what a large machine it is. No screaming jet engines, just the click of rails.

   Some of the tranquility of traveling by train might be offset by the drunk men who walk by your cabin and make kissy faces at your girlfriend, if you have that problem, but there are drunk dipshits on planes too. On a train, you can always pull the curtain if you feel like it.

   Prague was nice, swarmed with tourists the way a normal city would be in high season, but not nearly as overtaken by "Czech drinking team" buffoons as it could have been. Prague is nice, it has castles and churches and everything, but I've never understood why Prague is favored over all other eastern cities by the tourists. Whatever, there's more of Budapest for me.

   We had a really good time though, doing all the touristy things and going out to dinner with Jill's parents. On the platform in Prague, waiting for our train out, we met a great big woman right out of an Agatha Christie novel. She was in her late 60's, of considerable girth and wearing a fur coat that seemed as if it were made from all of the woodland creatures of an entire forest. She had gaudy rings on nearly every finger and wore completely blinged-out Versace sunglasses.

   She immediately introduced herself as the cultural attaché from Italy to Canada, in town for a conference on religion. She said she had houses across the world, in Italy, Russia, Canada, Buenos Aires, etc. Sure. I mean, did it matter if she was telling the truth or not? Her presence was overwrought enough that any story she told would certainly be entertaining, and I have no doubt that she would have eventually gotten around to telling us about the time she was a communist and dated a lesser duke if the train hadn't arrived and she hadn't hurried off to first class.

   On the way home, somewhere near the Slovak / Hungarian border, I saw a giant castle, looking like the Taj Mahal and lit up with floodlights, that I have never heard of before. I still don't know what it is. Perhaps it was a mirage. It was enormous and looked Turkish. I want to find out what it is.

   Possibly part of the reason that I've started to feel like hibernating in the afternoons is that the nights blur together into an endless string of smoky bars. Too often, I seem to wind up at Vittula some time after 3 am, which seems like the hopping place for good new wave music, ex-pats and me almost getting in fights.

   The first incident came from an anti-Semitic Texan who told Jill she was a "good looking Jew." I know Hungary has a reputation for anti-Semitism, but our first blatant run-in with it was from an American. Go team America! Anyway, at some point, I had to stand up and tell the very drunk, short Texan that it was time for him to leave, and I guess I managed to toss a chair across the room in my haste. Everyone looked at me, but he left and we went on way too late.

   The next time I was there, someone stole my cool messenger bag. In it were my hat, three paperbacks, and my three-dollar umbrella. Slim pickings, but I loved that bag.

   Then, the last time we were there, some idiot from the Netherlands who was wearing a little-drummer-boy costume decided to come sit down and tell us how we were all arrogant Americans. He did this without having interacted with us in any way beforehand. Baffling. I think, being Dutch, it took him a while to realize I was going to physically remove him if he didn't leave, but eventually he left. Eventually we left too, but not in time to avoid seeing the sun come back up from our flat with Jovana and Sarah, friends from CEU. I'll put a link to pictures of the four of us (me, Jill, Jovana Babovic and Sarah) taken that morning from Jovana's flickr account. Ugh. I don't want to think about the next day..

   Jill's parents came in on Thursday, and we've been out all day doing tourist things again, which is a nice break from working and staying out all night anyway.

   Last night, after dinner, Jill and I dropped by a birthday party for some friends. They're jazz musicians, at least she is (Sarah, but not the Sarah above) and so she invited her friends to bring instruments to the bar for a jam session. That sort of music isn't my thing, but one Argentine guy had a hurdy-gurdy, which seems like a wind-up viola with keys. We met some people, Dylan and Michelle, who are spending the year writing up the curiosities of Europe on curiosexpeditions.org.

   Also, on Friday, Jill's birthday, we went to see Gogol Bordello play on A-38, a boat that is permanently anchored on the Danube. It was the ideal place to see a band like that, but I'm a little surprised they're so popular in Hungary. I mean, they're popular in the US, but who has done the publicity that would allow them to sell out a show in Budapest? The opening band was French and called something like "le fuzz." I kid you not. They were exactly what you would expect if American punk rockers decided to make a spoof French punk band. "We are le rude boys! 1.2.3.4!" But they were adorable and full of energy. It was a fun show.

The video above is of the self-cleaning toilet in the modern art museum in Budapest.

  Last weekend, we went to London, where everything costs two times what it does in the U.S. A breakfast that would cost six dollars in the U.S. costs six pounds in London. No big surprise, but it was pricey. Luckily, we were staying with Shen and Suin, and we didn't have to stay in a hotel.

   What did surprise me was that NO-ONE in London spoke English. I don't mean to sound like Pat Buchanan, but it was actually somewhat harder to understand what people were communicating to me in London than it is in Budapest. Maybe the expectations are lower here. The bus driver, all the waiters and even the guy who stamped our passports at the airport all spoke some other language besides English first. That, coupled with British English, made understanding them difficult.

   We went to the Tate modern, which had more boring paintings and fewer dynamic installations than I remembered, but it did have an installation by Louise Bourgouise that was truly inspiring, if often creepy. We went to Camden Market, where there are still punk rockers with giant liberty spikes who sell their picture to tourists. That tradition is now at least 30 years old, and it seems quaintly hilarious, like the "native Americans" who play Andean music for tourists in the city park here.

   Shen and Suin's apartment had a beautiful view of the city, from the London eye to the pickle building. Since it was approaching Guy Fawkes' day, we could see occasional fireworks displays across the city.

   We went to a grand old department store called Liberty, all heavy wooden beams with intricate carvings, good looking salespeople and 500 pound handbags (monetary unit, not weight). The store was strangely inspiring, making me want to learn how to make new things, work leather, sew more, etc. They had a fabric department that had some of the most amazing fabrics I've seen, at 100 pounds a yard.

   The next morning, we waited in the dark and cold for the train to Luton. We were accompanied by two types of people: those traveling to the airport, and those returning to their suburban homes after a night out in the city. One of the latter, on the opposite platform, was a coked-out girl who twitched and danced her way around the platform in bare feet (eww and brr) while talking on her cell phone.

   Back in Budapest, where the language is at least predictable, we picked up Gretchen from the airport. Gretchen seemed to have memorized her guidebook, and her first order of business was to go to the Semmelweis medical museum in Buda. Budapest museums are often pretty weird, and the idea of a medical museum seemed great. Hopefully there would be creepy things in jars. It was not an easy task to get to the museum. The first time, we went over and walked along the Danube, along some broke-down castle's I had not seen before, but the medical museum was closed. The next time, the museum was supposed to be open, but was closed for "technical reasons" that seemed to involve a film crew shooting someone walking around the courtyard. Finally, on Friday, we managed to get in.

   Semmelweis invented the idea that it might be a good idea to wash your hands before delivering a baby. He did this some time around 1847. He had giant head, which I know because the museum had a replica of his skull. It also had thousands of really terrifying surgical instruments which seemed to point to the conclusion that it was a really bad idea to ever get sick any time before around 1950. Why does an ophthalmologist need a box of thirty or so needle-like torture tools? Isn't one tool all that is needed to poke you in the eye? The museum also had a stuffed puffer fish, a stuffed crocodile, a life-sized plastic model of a woman's lymphatic system and a commemorative glassware collection. Good times.

   Gretchen and I went to Széchenyi baths on a pretty cold day. There was steam rising from the outdoor pools, and it gets dark pretty early, so it was quite romantic. I'd never been there in the night or cold before, though walking from one pool to the other in my sexy swimming suit was really fucking cold.

   When Shen arrived, we also went to Rudás baths, which were a little more crowded than usual, possibly because we went when the baths opened at 10pm. There was the usual crowd of people there, but one woman showed up with fake breasts and high-heeled sandals. It's funny when porn-star-ish (this could be a real word in Hungarian, pornsztaros) women show up at a place like that. There are tons of really hot women at the baths, and the contrast really makes the fake breasts tragic. Also, why do the porn-stars always date men who look like Georgian wrestlers? There must be some symbiotic relationship between short, hirsute, barrel-shaped men and strange plastic ladies. Maybe if Jill had accepted the offer of the guy at the falafel place to be his wife for the evening in exchange for the price of a falafel, we'd have more insight into the phenomenon.

   After the baths, but still at the early hour of 11:30, we took the drunk bus home. To see what makes the drunk bus so special, see the movie above. The season of drunkenness has arrived, apparently. I got in a minor altercation with some guy in our building when I challenged his entry to the building. He'd been skulking outside, and I thought he might be one of the people who sneak in behind residents and fill our mailboxes with trash. He convinced me he lived here, and then proceeded to go up the stairs (and sometimes down) on a combination of legs and all fours. There was also an impeccably dressed businessman with a valise over near the castle who was so drunk at four in the afternoon that he was holding on to the railings at Moszkva ter as if the world might fall away.

   Among the other touristy things we did while Gretchen was here was a tour of the labyrinth under the castle. As we entered, they were setting up some of it for a medieval-themed banquet that I could only imagine would be attended by pony-tailed Hungarians who enjoy running around the woods pretending to be orcs. The labyrinth itself was wonderfully bizarre. Along the way, there were occasional roped off areas with plaques. The first one explained that excavation in that area had been stopped because of the discovery of a footprint of an early human. There, in the concrete before us, was clearly the print of a converse hi-top. As we went on, there were more joke displays, including a "burial site" with the impression of a microwave oven. It was sort of like "science made stupid" in Hungarian, underground. There was also a fountain of wine that looked like blood. It was swarming with fruit flies, and some joker down there took a sip of it. That seemed like a horrible idea.

   Now it's gotten even colder, down to nearly freezing, and it's snowing pretty heavily. Not sticking, but it's nice to be indoors with a giant tile oven in the corner of the room. It's Armistice Day again, and I've been watching Ken Burn's "The War." It's funny to see how easy the Americans had it in world war two. If the film were shot from a European perspective, it would simply be "everyone dies, all the time." I hope the next Armistice Day sees more peace than this one.

Over the long weekend, Jill and I and two classmates, Alana and Jeanine, drove to krakow. We left late on saturday, and drove to a town at the foot of the small mountains in Slovakia. We had dinner in an old fortress, then roamed the strangely deserted central square looking for nightlife. It's the end of the outdoor dining season in all of these cities, and umbrellas and wicker chairs are piled in front of every restaurant. Despite it being saturday night, there seemed to be no-one out.

Finally, we found a basement bar that was having 'tequila' night. There was some confusion about a small cover charge, since no-one involved spoke any common language, but we paid and found ourselves in a series of three underground chambers. The middle one had green lasers frantically cross-sectioning the bar and the dancers, most of whom were fond of some dances almost hilarious enough for me to try to learn them. A short bald man was spun around like a top while his friend kept a finger on the top of his head.

The drive to krakow is long. The distance isn't great, but there is really only one road, a two lane mountain highway that is in a rural hamlet as often as not. It's also clogged with long haul trucks. Nonetheless, the scenery was gorgeous, low mountains and pine forests and snow up in the higher elevations.

Our first stop in Poland was the Wieliczka salt mine outside of Krakow. When I first went there in 1999 or 2000, the mines were still in use but no less of a tourist attraction. Images of the moria-like underground halls and chambers and lages are all over on the internet, but I've included a few of my own above.

The first time I was there, the tour guide grudgingly told us that the Nazis had used the mines as a bomb-proof airplane factory during the war, using slave labor culled from the local concentration camps (auschwitz, birkenau). This time around, the room used by the nazis was a gift shop and no mention was made at all of any nazis. For something the current crop of poles bears no responsibility for, the holocaust seems strangely taboo in poland. The tourist brochures in our hotel advertised "auschwitz and the salt mines in one day!" as if one would go to auschwitz and not want to spend the rest of the day weeping quietly in a corner. I know I did when I was there.

Krakow was COLD. We wandered around, got some great food at a georgian (the former socialist republic, not the morbidly obese american state) chain restaurant. Alana and Jill went home to study, and jeanine and I found a basement bar that had a piece of styrofoam above it with "we need customers!" scrawled on it in marker. They did need customers, but the bartender was super friendly and spent the next hour explaining polish politics to us, since it was election night. The putin-like twins lost to a more moderate center-right party, and the rest of europe breathed a sigh of relief.

We spent the next day doing the normal krakow things: going to the castle, the jewish quarter, shopping for jewelry. At night, we heard the trumpeter again, playing his abbreviated song from the central church tower. I find the melody of that song to be particularly haunting.

One of the more excitable administrators at CEU had been urging students to leave budapest during the oct. 23rd holiday, which I consider to just be silly. Even if there were going to be riots, they would likely be contained in a small area and not particularly dangerous to out-of-towners. I was surprised that there was any clash at all, but I guess the night of the 22nd had some fights between far-right thugs and police. The whole riot thing is so stupid. 200 skinhead-like thugs show up looking for a fight. Any group with real grievances against the government here is not helped by their thuggish behaviour. Maybe if the right wing got its shit together, it could win elections instead of having to resort to calling in the deranged country folk for a yearly brawl. Regardless, the riot was relatively small this time around, and things seem normal out in the streets, sort of as if they'd never happened.

Just some quick funny pictures. I found the penis cop on a fire hydrant in the fifth, proving that there are some things that cut across all cultures, just like burritos. I also saw this billboard. What's the name of the play? I'll give you a hint. 'Minden' means everything and 'jo' means good. I also saw a cereal for sale in Rothschilds called 'miss fit', apparently aimed at young women. No picture of that yet.

Damn the information super-highway! I have so much work to do, I never really get to go out and experience Budapest. It's a pain.

My parents were in town from Saturday till Wednesday (szombat to szerda, if you're interested). I took them to a bunch of the normal touristy things, including the szÃchenyi baths. I've said it before and I'll say it again: every culture should spent an hour once a week / month soaking in hot, mildly radioactive water. The baths have been updated, so one set of completely confusing procedures had been replaced with another. Even so, my mother managed to make it through the dressing room gauntlet. It's interesting that one of the places where one is least likely to find English speakers is one of the most touristy.

Also, spent some time in the steam room with a bunch of old guys who were built like cubes and wore heavy gold necklaces. That + my parents and one porn star in a zebra-print thong. Aah, the old country!

I sent my parents off to do some things on their own, and they managed to get called "stuffed american monkeys" by a wanna-be tour guide in the castle district. I wish I'd been there to try out the hungarian cursing I've been practicing. It probably wouldn't have worked.

It's the weekend before the holiday commemorating the 1956 revolution against the soviets. Last year there were a few wildly over-hyped disturbances around this time. The administration at CEU has been in a paranoid frenzy about it, telling Americans to leave the country, saying oct 23rd is really dangerous. The sheltered American students seem to buy it as well, which is pretty funny. The way I understand it, attendance at last year's riot wasn't mandatory, and even if anything happens this year, it's not as if you have to go test yourself against the cops or the magyar garda. We're going to poland, purely coincidentally, but we'll return on the 23rd in time to catch the madness. Stay tuned for my report on the city erupting in an orgy of looting and arson. Or, more likely, a little public drunkenness and a bank holiday.

Punk rock night

After dinner at one of the snooty restaurants on Liszt Ferenc, Jill and I decided to try to go to a show we'd seen listed on punk-portal.hu. It was a new bar for us too, kultiplex, over by Kalvin Ter.

As we approached the club, the street was littered with teenagers drinking from bottles. Weird that they went to the trouble to drink outside, because once inside, a bunch of teenagers were serving some sort of booze out of a giant plastic buffalo head. It was clearly a promotion for the booze, since the teenagers giving the booze away were all wearing the same green shirt. There was a separate room for the bands, and a utterly bland pop-punk band were on stage standing there and playing whatever it was they were supposed to be playing. After them, the room became super-crowded, since the popular hardcore band was playing. They were also color-by numbers, but the crowd really liked it.

I'm not saying that they don't look cute, but all the kids dress as if they learned how to do it after carefully studying every myspace photo they could get their hands on, and then made sure to not ever break ANY of the rules. Heavy eyeliner and checkered belts for the girls, check. Hoodies with the name of some tough sounding band in English printed on them for the boys, check. Maybe if I spoke the language, I would find out that they were all really interested in far-reaching social change and the underground network of rebellion, so I shouldn't judge. The bar was cool though.

What do you rebel against when you're a hungarian teenager? Your parents? I mean, you don't want to get your troops out of Iraq, you can't say much about ronald reagan or george bush or freedom of speech. The prime minister here is named Gyurcsány. Does anything rhyme with that? Racism against the Roma minority is so ingrained that no-one even knows it's racism, so you won't see people singing about that.. It's a mystery.

On the way home, we say two guys spill out of the metro and start brawling on the street. They connected a few punches, and then went back to posturing and we rolled away. That was sort of entertaining. Also, we saw some joker in a eagle talon trying to drag race down the Korut, but the street car beat him the whole way. I can understand being excited about a mercedes or a bmw, or especially one of the cool Lada or Trabi piles of rubbish that still thrive here, but an eagle talon? Hilarious.

That day, a photographer approached us and asked to take one of our pictures for a tabloid newspaper. "we need you to pretend to be using the parking meter, and we will give you a fake hungarian name and you will be saying that you have no problem using these parking meters." Holy crap, the paper actually came out, and I'm in it. I now can prove I'm a Hungarian! Sadly though, the words under my picture don't actually seem to include a name, but I can't really read any of it, so I can't be certain. Now we know how much journalistic integrety is involved in those "man on the street" interviews. "We asked this typical Hungarian.." ha ha. I'm taking it into Hungarian class tomorrow.

It's confirmed! The crane operator on the corner IS naked. Wow. This picture doesn't show it all, but he leaned out over his window earlier and I saw his wang. For real.

We rented a car - a convertible! - for only 100 Euro for the weekend and went to Austria, somewhere called Obertraun. It's next to some big-ass mountains, like a lot of Austria. Everything was unbelievably beautiful, even though it was cloudy. Austria is truly amazing. They've clearly spent 10's of billions of dollars on tunnels for their roads. Every few miles, rather than go around the mountain, the highway just goes straight through it. Everything about Austria was great, except for the fact that it's on the Euro and is full of Austrians.

It's strange how palpable the change from east to west is. As soon as you enter Austria from Hungary, great big propellers for generating electricty loom over you. Everything is clean and neatly maintained. There is no trash in the streets and no sense of seething madness among the people. It's not the sort of place where you'll look up at the crane operator at the construction site on the corner only to realize that he's wearing no pants and he's waving at the coffee shop lady. (This really happened the other day). It made me want to go home, where the crazy people set up shop on giant mounds of trash.

Also, the Austrians seem LOUD, something I can't accuse the Hungarians of being. It might be that we were staying with a bunch of Austrian bike-gang members, but even the people in the cave we took a tour of were loud and pushy, like a bunch of german-speaking frat boys.

Back in BP, we've had two Hungarian classes, and the woman I buy my coffee from has started chiding me to speak to her in hungarian. I can say "i live in hungary" and other thrilling stuff like that. I tried to actually talk casually (rather than simply order food or buy groceries) to someone, but he turned out to mostly speak italian. We'll see. If I can converse for more than one sentence at the end of class, I'll be happy. There are all sorts of nationalities in our class, and they all seem to pick up the language much more quickly than I can. Makes me feel dumb.

I'm back in Hungary. Living again in the apartment I spent last summer in while Jill goes to Central European University for a semester. It's been two weeks since we got here, and the jet-lag has worn off and the crazy moon language that they speak here.. is really still a crazy moon language. I can say a few words in Hungarian, but that seems to mean that the Hungarian will respond in Hungarian, and then I'm out of luck. The language is confusing, and only related linguistically to Finnish. If you've been there, you can see that the language breeds weirdness.

Our building is like most others in Pest, the part of the city across the Danube river from Buda. It has a large courtyard, and the interior stairs look as if the residents should be impecunious but stylish vampires. Our apartment has high ceilings, as most of them do, and looks out on the courtyard. Across the way lives the ax murderer. He's an older man with a Hungarian mustache and a limp who often comes over to chat with us in Hungarian. He is always quite animated, but completely unable to understand that we don't speak Hungarian, no matter how we tell him. Our landlord, Attila, says that he can't understand a word our neighbor says either. Attila also says that he spent 10 years in prison for cutting his wife's throat, which seems impossible for such a genial seeming man.

Last time we were in Hungary, the metro was free. Technically, it wasn't free, but the controllers who stop you to check your ticket were few and far between. Now they're in every station, though you can still usually blow by them if you look like you know what you're doing and act Hungarian. I get a month pass, so it doesn't matter, but it's a striking difference to see actual Hungarians paying for the subway.

From my point of view, Hungary isn't terribly different than other European countries, though it feels incredibly different than the US, mostly in ways I appreciate. There are a bunch of people who drive old Russian or East German cars that are so crappy they're comical, but there are also plenty of nice cars. None of them are big though. People, women especially, still wear garish outfits that would put any New Jersey mall rat to shame, but they're Eastern European, so they've earned it. Most people speak softly, and most of my encounters are pleasant.

At this stage, most of the comedy in our life comes from not understanding ANYTHING that people are saying. It's easy enough to order a coffee, but when things go wrong, it gets bewildering quickly. For example, I had to go to the post office the other day. I had my letter in hand, and I waited in line at one of 10 or so identical windows. I got to the front and proffered my envelope hopefully, but the man behind the window rejected it and pointed at the gift shop behind me. Magyar Posta has a gift shop? Anyway, I ignored his advice and waited in another short line, this time for a window that clearly had an envelope printed on it. Right away, an old man came and took the three of us who were standing in different lines out of line and kindly led us to some sort of robot box. We were told (I guess) to press a button on the robot box, and it spit out a piece of paper with a number on it. We then went back to wait in our respective lines, and I could see nothing that had anything to the number I held in my hand. Nonetheless, when I got to the window, the man ignored my number and took my envelope, 200 forint and sent me on my way.

All sorts of things like that happen in a way that makes me feel like I'm a 2-year-old trapped in an adult's body. I bought train tickets to Frankfurt for my parents, and while the woman spoke some English, the ticket itself doesn't. I just have to take on faith that all those 2's on the piece of paper I got from her had to mean that it was a ticket for two people.

People are generally very understanding about the language, and if you make an honest effort to use your vocabulary, they seem pleased. However, they also seem to think that all languages that aren't Hungarian are the same. When I go to one of my favorite coffee shops, the owner always tries to speak to me in Italian. The nice couple who ran the carpet cleaner rental place (the word is Szõnyegtisztítógép, if you were wondering, which is a perfectly logical combination of the words 'carpet', 'clean' and 'machine' with some extra letters thrown in.) wanted to speak to me in French, which is one of many languages that I am unable to speak or understand. That trip was essential, because our landlord must have hired a particularly cut-rate cleaning lady, since the carpets were filthy. See the picture of the brown scum milkshake I got in the carpet cleaner!

Speaking of cleaning people, it was big trash night in our neighborhood this weekend. It's a working class neighborhood, and the stuff that people heap into the street is garbage. It's rubble, really, completely worthless. Nonetheless, some street person / Roma / crazy person camps out next to each pile of trash. If you try to take something home, like a crushed cell phone, they will yell at you and try to sell it to you. I haven't tried, but I've seen it happen, with hilarious consequences.

Our landlord's wife has just had triplets. We can't imagine. Anyway, he invited us to their christening, which took place in the basement of the amazing cathedral in the castle district over in Buda. It was funny to press through the crowds of tourists in the wake of a three-baby stroller. The priest was an older gentleman, and he looked quite priestly, but since it all was done in Hungarian, he might as well have been talking about the mongol hordes.

One last note. Here's a picture of George Bush playing the bagpipes.