Season's First Snowflakes: Gaines & Jeremy in Eger

Gaines' bus was a little late arriving Friday night. No one else but her decided to make the trip to Heves. Some excused themselves for lack-of-forint reasons, others found English-teacher conventions to attend. But Gaines and I had spent the week building a text-message-based excitement, both raring for friendship and exploration after a weekend at home.

Standing alone at the bus station waiting for the Mezobereny-Heves express, I got a little cold. The moon was bright, almost full, the night sky was crisp. Crisp like a good late-November, suddenly-winter night should be. But that's not where the story begins.

It starts back when the weather was warm, in August, in Budapest. I like Gaines. She's a wonderful person, I think you would agree. I like to use really good adjectives when I describe her. In my little boy heart, there was a tinge of romance, the hope for something more, in uber-photography, pillow fights and messages in a bottle. She makes me smile.

Her friendship was a wonderful escape from the early struggles and unhappinesses of living alone in a little village with no one to understand you. But I realized I was too dependent on it, almost headed toward an addiction, when I realized I had became dishearteningly sad because she wouldn't dance with me and wouldn't talk to me after I whapped her with a sweatshirt. (Oops.)

I became better through thinking and writing, as I always do. I shared it with you and I shared it with Gaines. I wanted to build a happiness off Hungary, not just off of a crush on a beautiful young woman. We didn't really talk about it, but reached a bit of an understanding.

We went to Romania, with a lot of people, and didn't talk much. We went to Poland with only two other people. So in Krakow, we were back to talking and walking and smiling. There is a rather soul-sustaining friendship that can be found in falling asleep while talking to a person, a friend, almost laying next to you.

When Gaines' bus did pull in, it was just us, a first. We talked all the way back to my apartment, as I showed Gaines (it took approximately five minutes) the city of Heves. I cooked spaghetti, it was a relative success -- I only swore aloud three times and started one kitchen item on fire during the process. We ate it over wine and traded the stories of who we were. When we got tired, we fell asleep talking.

The early bus took us to Eger, I think she was more excited to see the baroque headquarters of wine and tourism in Heves county than the namesake city of the county. I'd made reservations at a guest house, but things weren't looking good when no one answered the doorbell. A friendly man, keyword for Hungarian-speaker-who-is-amused-by-non-Hungarian-speakers, offered to help us, then disappeared in his car. Five minutes later, as we were desperately thinking of options, our host arrived. The plan was back on track.

It was at about that point, perhaps an hour into our trip, when I blew my nose. Gaines was shocked. I had to teach her the concept of a handkerchief. She was rather unimpressed by the saturation, quite disgusted that one might blow his nose into a piece of cloth, only to store it in a pocket and repeatedly touch the snotrag with his hand and wipe it against his nose. But I consider myself quite well-schooled in the art of battling through winter -- an arrival marked by light snowflakes drifting peacefully down from grey clouds while we were touring the castle. I marched on, blowing my nose again, while Gaines -- foreign to freezing -- posed for pictures with the flakes.

At a take-out pizza place, quickly becoming one of my favorite places in Hungary, we proved we are still vulnerable foreigners. We placed an order for two pizzas and two Coca-Cola Lites, and were set to walk out the door with a smile on our face. But they grabbed us just as we pushed the door open, treating us like shoplifters. It took a while to figure out why. We laughed when we realized that they thought we had ordered two pizzas, plus two additional pizzas, and were walking away without paying for the sodas. We straightened it out with hand gestures, and the pizzas (only two!) turned out to be wonderful as always. (Gaines also stamped tourist on our foreheads by diving across a guardrail for a picture with a wax Turkish khan, only to set off a motion sensor!)

After the day's adventures, we decided to battle the cold with a trip to the thermal bath. Hungary is a country ripe with two of my favorite luxuries, wine and hot water. Most of Hungary's thermal baths were formed when oil drillers found underground lakes of geothermal merit, not a bad consolation prize for not finding black gold.

Eger's thermal bath, building off of a tradition left behind by the 16th-century Turkish invaders, is a beautiful facility. We weren't impressed at first, the water was only lukewarm, we were hoping for better. But after we braved the cold air outside of the glass dome, we found our reward, a pool of mineral water, bubbling up thousands of feet just to warm us. Smelling just a dash like sulphur, the water felt good. Real good.

There can be a candor to a two-person conversation in 37 degree water, surrounded by a continuous cloud of steam and ears that can't understand but a word of what you say. With only our heads left above the water in the cold night air, we talked for three hours, about life and love and living and loving. And we talked about theories. I have many theories. I enjoy feeling like I understand a part of the world, and am romantic enough to think that I can apply any kernel of wisdom I learn to any other part of the world. For a long time, one of my central theories has been that the nature of life should be a delicate balance between thinking and feeling. Oftentimes mutually exclusive, happiness and healthiness can be found only in a zero-sum balance of the two pursuits.

So we talked and talked and thought and thought. The conversation was intense and thoroughly wonderful. We both thought so much that I, for one, wore out my mind, my powers of thought, by the end of the night. I could hardly formulate a correct English sentence. I switched, 180 degrees, and traded thinking for feeling. We had already agreed to take late buses out of Eger on Sunday, and turned off our alarms to sleep late. By the time we fell asleep, we were talking again, almost next to each other.

Sunday morning was lazy, a perfect way to spend a weekend morning. We woke up and talked and smiled. There was a happiness, a contentedness in the air. I liked it and wondered. I didn't think that I should, but I felt like I should - so I asked Gaines if she wanted to be my girlfriend. She paused. And so did my breathing. Then she spoke. "Do you have any idea how difficult it is for me to answer that question?" I didn't, of course, but I did know how difficult it was to ask the question. I listened through a long story of factors I hadn't heard of before and a desire not to lose her best friend in this lonely country. The story seemed to have the fairy-tale ending of "probably not."

I thanked her for her story. I was glad that she shared it, and I was glad that I understood. And I thanked her for being a person who inspired me to be a better man and brought happiness to me. She smiled. We packed and walked through beautiful vineyards, just a short hike from the hotel, feeling like friends. I smiled and announced a new theory. Gaines helped me realized that I liked both thinking (and the twin processes of conversing and writing) and feeling far too much to do both only half way, to find a balance that required only half of each. Instead, why not try living both full tilt. Think and feel to a maximum, and find healthiness in the simultaneous excellence of both.

What a gal, gifting me with theories and friendship. I hugged her a goodbye and blew her a kiss as her bus pulled out of the Eger station and began its slow ramble out of Heves County.

(As a thoughtful individual, I reserve the right the modify all theories at all times. That's what makes it fun. Thanks!)