Scrolling and Circles

If you do some scrolling, a serious amount of scrolling, if you scroll so much that lives and times and people and places and the world have changed as you scroll back in time - you'll come across this:

"made it to Budapest safe and sound! yesterday we watched a boat sink (seriouslz! apparentlz it's important, when on a fast-moving river, to anchor off the bow of your boat, as opposed to the low-profile stern...) on the Danube River, then both an air show and fireworks above the Danube. hungarians know how to celebrate the signing of a constitution! today Eva is driving me to Eotvos Collegium so we don't have to do it before she works tomorrow morning. hungarian is marginallz improving. z and y are switched on hungarian computers, please be forewarned for the upcoming ten months!"

August 20, 2005.

Two years ago to the day.

August 20, 2007.

So, so long ago. To get there, you'd have to scroll back in time, through me and my stories. And yet I can remember it. In some ways I miss it desperately. The planes flying above the Danube seemed so fresh and new and scary and invigorating. The twisted keyboard so full of mystery and potential and wonder and intrigue. Hungary was still magyarorszag, sometime delightfully unfamiliar. A challenge. An adventure.

I leave, tomorrow morning, a bona fida tour guide.

Emily and her friendly Hungarian boyfriend are sleeping on the makeshift guest-room on my porch. an amazing hungarian girl is sitting on a train right now, making a bee-line from the second-to-last day of Salsa camp to the sweaty capital, just to be with me. eva's waiting for me in her apartment, half an hour from now. this time, two years later, she doesn't have to pick me up, i can navigate there myself.

the tall black shelf in my room is the last thing I have left to pack, sandwiching three bottles of wedding-gift wine. i'm standing in front of it, typing on my laptop set on the fourth of five shelves. the tears have a long way to fall.

it's harder, much, for me to say goodbye to hungary this time. so, so much harder. maybe it's heves vs. budapest. maybe it's three months vs. ten months. probably its because of noemi. maybe it's because of friends. maybe it's because of school. probably because i know it's for good. probably because it's the same pang of autumn - just after the first back-to-school ad, just before the excitement of the first day of school - that pang that has made me cry since i was a little boy.

yesterday emily and i stumbled upon a wine festival. if we had arrived 6 minutes earlier, admission would have been free. another random turn took us to concerts up and down imperial Andrassy. We smiled, in silence, in delight of simply watching Hungarians for block after block. that same amazement i've always felt.

At the last block, a fitting tribute to two years in the books. Hevesi Tamas. Not simply is he "Thomas from Heves," but he's the singer who has haunted me since i arrived. his wailful ballad has followed me with every turn. The song, simply, is titled "Jeremy." students in heves who had never even sat through one of my classes and couldn't even speak a single language i could, would serenade me with the cry. Don't leave me, Jeremy, Hevesi Tamas and all the subsequent crooners would beg. The world will have no meaning without you. Don't go.

As much as I shouted as he stood on stage, entertaining a few hundred holidaying Hungarians, the song didn't come. Jeremy vagyok, I pleaded, certainly one of only a handful of folks in this whole country who can say that with a straight face. I am Jeremy, I am leaving, I begged silently. Please play my song.

It never came. The tribtue, though, was a good reminder in silence. Hungary isn't about me. Hungary will keep going on being Hungary long after i've snapped my seatbuckle on the plane at Ferihegy tomorrow. I leave having touched hundreds of friends, making their lives sparkle in many different ways. they'll just have to know that they have all done nothing less for me.

Just as there are flavors that go unnoticed in gulyas, there are stories that will go untold in this goulash. wonderful stories of twenty-year old american girls learning to enjoy celebrating an evening, and birthday, in Little Heves. and 4:50 am bus rides home. stories of friendships and goodbyes. tears and waves. stories of coworkers discovering themselves in the fineprint of a largely anonymous blog. stories of hungary.

my story, one of just a million billion stories in hungary, is ending. mixed into the gulyas, one delcious spice of a savory whole. i pass my story off to others, those with hungarian stories yet to come. michal the traveller. jenny the visitor. alison the student. dave the dentist. trever the scholar.

little pieces of the Hungarian gulyas. My goulash. Egeszsegedre!

ejszekatek

typikus magyar ejszekat van.

hetveget

Julia and I skipped an afternoon of work, in protest, when her goodbye lunch was pushed back from Friday to Monday. Our rebellious ways took us to the Ethnography Museum, which was quite nice. Right across from the majestic Parliament, it was originally the home of the Hungarian supreme court. The traditional Hungarian displays were free, they charged only to see two temporary displays that may or may not have been worth the 400 HUF.

Noemi and I discovered the joys of 499 HUF frozen pizzas, three to a box. Austerity measures and tastebuds both agree that the pizzas are a good find. I don’t have an oven, though, so we can only make them at her house on Raday utca.

Kalli’s cousin inspired our first trip to Rio. It’s wonderful people watching, our personal favorite was the cow-pantsed young man seducing the mini-skirted young lady. After the music and 700 HUF beers got to us, though, we crossed the street to Zold Pardon, back to where we belong.

I made Noemi take her first trip ever to Csepel, an island just south of the city center on Sunday. It was a planned suburb from the 1960s or 1970s, and to this day retains much of the feel. It’s connected to the city proper by a quick and easy section of the suburban HEV rail line. The reason for our visit was the nearly deserted northern half of the island. It’s rumored to be a tentative site for a potential Olympic village down the road, so I wanted to check it out with my own eyes. It looked, truthfully, quiet promising for the purpose. Close the city center, nice views, and absolutely nothing of value to knock down. Potentially really good.

On the way back, we stopped at the National Theatre. It’s an eclectic building, surrounded not only by a beautiful spot on the Danube at the southern reaches of the city, but also by quite a controversy, but I loved it. The boat part of the design is glorious, and the odd-tidbits surrounding it are engagingly fun. In my SimCity world, the Olympic Stadium is right across the road from the theatre. ☺

And the weekend finished with a screech. The almost rusty-screech of a foot-powered air pump at 11:00 Sunday night. Janos brought over a queen-size inflatable mattress that his brother and sister-and-law had bought to sleep on when they were visiting. Slipped underneath my futon mattress, it’s a wonderful addition to my home! I have a bed finally!!!

Glorious...

Hot. A lot.

(The dateline is right. Monday morning. 1:42 am. The city and I have become nocturnal in the brutal summer heat.)

Office Manager Reka asked last Monday how it felt to be 27. I gave the obvious answer, old. But I was wrong. I feels hot at age 27. Ridiculously hot. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday was the hottest seven-day experience of my life, bar none. Unbe-freaking-lievable. It's hard to know the actual damage, as i don't speak the language of the weather reports, but I've heard accounts that the mercury topped out at 43 celsius.

CNN says it's causing havoc.

Even the rhinocerouses need cold showers.

According to Pestiside.hu:

• A train carrying a load of yellow phosphorous crashed near Lviv, Ukraine, releasing a toxic cloud that some predict will travel west through Hungary. This would be a big deal, except that by the time it gets here, we'll already be dead from the fucking heat. [mno.hu]

The government is taking action.

Budapest Mayor Gabor Demszky told a news conference on Thursday the city would never again try to save money by buying buses or trams that were not air-conditioned.

The city of Szolnok has bought 1.2 tons of melons from local farmers, which it has been distributing to elderly residents and families with children.

It's a level-three heat warning.

In short, it was the hottest temperature ever in Hungary, since records have been kepy.

Cities were not designed for 43 celsius. I never really knew this, the incompatability of cities and summer. The past eight years I've had the privilege of summering in forests, mountains, islands, lakes, rivers and meadows. Occasional trips to Denver, Charlotte and Seattle were only rare adventures, where an afternoon of heat could be blown off as part of the adventure.

But living in a city of 2 million during the summer? Ugh. Sixth-floor apartments, with southern-exposure windows. Ugh. Each step up is a notch up the thermometer. The city smells like dog urine. Parks aside, there are 18 trees in the entire city. Suffocating trams. Smelly people. Stagnant air.

Of course, though, there are occasional respites. It's wonderful to take joy in simple pleasures. WestEnd is pleasantly cool. It's less of a pain to spend time in the office when the air-conditioning switch is enchantingly easy to manipulate. The Buda Castle cave tour is refreshingly 60-degreesed, even if the content is maddeningly unimpressive. And dusk and dawn are colorfully pleasant.

So the city, and I, have taken to modifying ourselves. We nap through the day. Accomplishing even one thing during daylight would be a highlight. The streets are deserted during the day. This weekend, an absolute ghost town. The only souls braving the sidewalkes were the same old cycle of revolving tourists, clutching their maps in the hopes of figuring Hungary out in 48 hours. Here for only a day or two, they marched through the sun and heat in the hopes of seeing all that they could. The regulars, though, either escaped the city or escaped the daytime.

At dusk, at dawn, at night, we move. Noemi and I went to see The Snows of Kilimanjaro at the square fronting the Parliament tonight just after the sun set. The website said it would be in English, with Hungarian subtitles, so I got bored after a while. Not before, though, Noemi earned a set of precious goosebumps as the evening breeze picked up. Afterwards, I went for a 10 pm jog. People were walking their dogs. Sitting on sidewalk steps, emerging from summer sun bomb shelters. Plus it's prettier this time of day, watching a parchment-colored half-moon set, just beyond the Buda hills, capped with stately stone buildings of the same tone.

But there's only so much playing with ice cubes I can do before I start to wonder if I would ever be able to acclimate myself to the idea, the terrible notion, of spending an entire summer cooped up in a city, when there are so many wonderful places to be and explore and see and do. and even if I were able to trick myself into that domestication, the urbanization of summering in cities, would that be any way at all to live? ahh cities. they push and pull...

A Sweet Saint

I did it. I cracked. I caved in. I succumb/succumbed/succame/succambed.

Driven mad by heat in my 6th floor, southern exposure apartment, I bought a fan. 5,000 HUF well spent, if initial reviews are anything to go off of.


I named her Melissa, when Noemi began to worry that I had too strong a romantic attachment to my new fan. Within an hour, she was Saint Melissa, as I began to pray to her. It works. She listens, and keeps me (relatively) cool and comfortable all night long...

Olympic Rings

A wonderful evening with Noemi and Janos last night, as well as his friend who was leaving town come the following morning and was flush with forints to get rid of. The results, absinthe, which you can’t get back home. A not unpleasant drink, much akin to the Ouzo we had for the first time in Greece. A fun little experiment in one of our favorite atmospheres, Potkulcs.

And on the occasion of birthdays, it’s hard not to feel old. Especially yesterday, when I stopped to think how far away the year 2020 is. It's not really all that far away. And it's, courtesy of simply math, the year I will turn 40.

The reason I was focused on the year 2020? A good one. Budapest is beginning to start the process of bidding to host the Summer Olympics in 2020. While the 40-year-old realization carries with it a tinge of concern, I'm jazzed about the prospect of a Budapesti Olimpia.

I first took a curiosity to the pamphlet handed to me at the Bryan Adams concert weeks ago, something along the lines of “Do you want Budapest to host the Olympics in 2020?” Immediately I was inspired and developed a fascination.

I took to researching. Budapest was originally scheduled to host the 1920 Olympics. This was, of course, in the hey-day of Budapest’s imperial grandeur. But along came that darn first world war. And just like how the Treaty of Trianon ripped 66% of the territory and 50% of her population away from Budapest, the IOC ripped the right to host the games away. (And the Hungarian athletes were uninvited to the entire 1920 Olympics.) Around these parts, they’re still irate about the former, if they’ve long-since forgotten about the latter.

More Olympic trivia? Hungary’s been successful in the games. Hungary ranks in the top ten countries in summer Olympic medals. Water polo, weightlifting and fencing glory have paid off. And guess which country among the top ten is the only one to have never hosted an Olympic games. Yup. Magyarorszag.

When calculated per capita, Hungary ranks third all-time in the most medals won! Rick Steves’s figures show Hungary behind on Australia and Cuba, when medals are tallied per person.

The committee of companies and leaders who have banded together to bid to bring the Olympics to Budapest reads like a who's-who of modern Hungarian economics. Malev. OTP. Danubius Radio. All their CEOs and executives make up the high-powered board of directors.

And so, excited beyond believe, I sent an e-mail, asking if I could help. The next day, a response, straight from headquarters:

Dear Jeremy,

Thank you very much for your letter. We were glad to read your lines about your intention that you would be a volunteer of our movement. As you have a special skill you can really help us occasionally. You could review any translations and fine-tune them to ensure the highest quality professional tone, as you had suggested. The only problem is that you will be in Hungary only until the end of August. Do you think you can still help us after returning to the US ?

Best regards,

Akos Baranyai
General Secretary
BOM

So there you have it, I'm an Olympic volunteer. Jo lesz!

Heat Wave!

North African heat wave!! How much is 42 degrees Celsius, you wonder? It's probably more dramatic if you do the calculations yourself...

Fathers and Daughters

Two months, two daughters in Europe.

A year ago, I was her father. Robyn and I were tutoring her in the ways of being a productive camp counselor, a self-sufficient community member suddenly dedicating her happiness to others on an island just off of Washington State. We lived out of teepees.

Yesterday, though, Michal and I were friends. I was the tour guide, she and her boyfriend Clark were the tourists, stopping in Budapest just long enough to catch their breath on a whirlwind seven-week post-graduation tour if Europe. Things are different now. We can toast her mother, of sorts, and Four Winds with palinka and stories.

They had they fair share of stories and adventures getting here. Midnight ticket collectors in Croatia, demanding 60 euros each, on the spot, because Eurail passes aren’t good in Slovenia or Croatia. They battled my Romanian “…and I almost died!” stories tit-for-tat.

Thursday, a late arrival to Keleti from Venice. A schnazzy new hostel, just down the street, catering to the artsy type. Laundry, lunch, the usual logistics. Then Szechenyi bath and the exquisite uncertainty of Hungary’s favored relaxative. I gave the usual, less-than-definitive history of Hungary in the shadow of the heroes that ring Hosoktere. Dinner, Fisherman’s bastion, then a nightcap above the blustery Corvinteto.

Friday, they met me at my office. After lunch and a long spiral up to the views at the crest of St. Istvan’s Bazilika, I sent them off the Terror Museum and Synagogue. Come quitting time, we raced back to Keleti, as all trips to train stations in Hungary must necessarily be rushed. We hurled their bags onto the rain, just seconds before it slowly rolled to Vienna. Hugs and handshakes were rushed, but firm.

I rather liked the company, as fleeting as it was. Michal’s off to Stanford come fall. Clark to Indiana. If he liked his taste of Hungary enough, and they said they certainly did, he could be plodding through Hungarian languages classes in just 6 weeks…

That Summer Seemed to Last Forever

My old German student Jenny has been in Hungary, her homeland until age 9, for the past couple of weeks. Our plans of meeting up finally happened Saturday, one of the greatest days in the history of Budapest: T-Mobile’s annual free concert at Heroes Square. Starring Megasztar Ruzsa Magdi and…

Yup, Bryan Freaking Adams.

Now ordinarily you might look at the Canadian crooners reproitre and feel unsatisfied beyond the classic jolting chords of Summer of ’69, but for me, BA’s always meant a little more. You see, everything I do, I do for Bryan Adams. Back at the end of 6th grade, way back before the summer of ’92, we chose his Robin Hood serenade to close out our elementary school career with a tribute to our parents who suffered through so much in the Lakeshore gym-turned-theatre.

I was stoked, as you should be for a free concert in a European capital. Others weren’t so excited, and opted for the utterly commonplace occurrence of an evening of gypsy music at local hotspot, West Balkan. It’s akin, I suppose, to a New Orleans resident skipping out on a Tom Petty show for another night at the jazz club. Regardless, I was joined by Noemi, legal intern Alla and student Jenny.

Magdi opened. She’s the most famous of the Megasztar’s, Hungary’s very own version of American Idol. She switched back and forth between English and Hungarian seamlessly and rocked pretty well. She covered Janis Joplin and Queen to rave reviews. My favorite, though, was a wild take on Bon Jovi’s It’s My Life.

But the 200,000 who showed up in the shadow of Hungary’s heroes didn’t come for Magdi. They came for Mr. Adams. Hungary and Canada have many links. Many Hungarians live in Canada, especially Toronto. Recently, Canada was so moved by some marker in Hungary’s history that they donated a waterfall – a Niagra falls – to the WestEnd shopping mall just four blocks from my flat. And apparently history and political cooperation extends into music. Hungarians dig Bryan Adams.

He popped up, in the midst of the crowd, on an elevated platform to start his set. After a rockin’ intro. His band disappeared, replaced by only an acoustic guitar. He asked us to forgive him, he knew not what he was doing. I wasn’t the only one ready to forgive him. The ladies were squealing at each song they recognized, even if they didn’t know before that it was him who sang it. I was probably squealing, too.

We’d been anticipating, for several hours, and even the several days leading up to the concert, that the singular moment when we realized the chords he has banging out were Summer of ’69 would be one of the greatest moments in the history of our lives.

I am here to testify - today, tonight, forever – that it was. It was good. So very good. Egeszegedre-good. I bought my first real six string. So so good. Bought it at the five and dime. Wow. Waves of goodness. Played it till my fingers bled. Yes. Yes. Yes. Was the summer of ’69.

The moment was so good that I could do nothing but call Kat and Janos and put them on speakerphone so they could taste the moment. I don’t think it worked.

By the time dusk set, he’d rocked through 2 hours of songs, laced with hits if not stuffed full of them. He strained his way through All for One, All for Love as the grandest of finales, he’d given his voice to Let’s Make it a Night to Remember, 18 Until I Die and Cuts like a Knife.

I guess I didn’t have a good answer, swaying with Noemi, Jenny and Alla as he asked, rather repeatedly, if I’d ever really, really really ever loved a woman. No good answer except a wistful smile.

But I do know now that I’ve ever really, really really ever had a man crush on a Canadian rocker. Well, sort of ever really, really really ever…

Home

After a week as Kat’s house-guest, I finally have a room of my own! It’s in the heart of imperial Budapest, a block off of ornate Andrassy Ut and the Yellow Line buried below it. The stately 6th district. Two metro stops to the northeast? Heroes’ Square and the gateway to City Park. Two metro stops to the southwest? The eight-sided heart of pedestrian Budapest: Oktogon.

3 Szinyei Ut I.6

I’ll have my own little neighborhood stores and restaurants to patronize for the first time. The OSI offices are just four stops, a five minute commute on the first underground metro on continental Europe. A dark and soothing inner courtyard, ivy creeping up the far building under the shade of a sprawling tree that must have been planted as the building was built seventy or eighty years ago.

Eva was the connection. Dezso, a PhD-holding retired Colonel of the Hungarian army, had a room to let. His aunt, a nicely old lady, judging from the pictures of three generations of moustachioed Hungarians hanging on the wall, left last month, off to the nursing home. So I sleep now in a bed, crunchy with springs, that smells a little like old lady.

And down the hall? My new best friend Janos. He’s 40. A salt-and-peppered marketing manager of a local Metra store. Metro’s a magyarized Sam’s Club. It turns out that Janos and I are going to be talking mostly in German, as his English is more limited than his limited German. Luckily, conversational language is all we’ll likely be needing for the next month.

After June, I’m moving toward Nyugati Station. One of Noemi’s friends is renting an apartment to teacher Matt. It’ll help everyone out that I can stay there in July and August, and Matt doesn’t come back from his summer in America until three days after I leave. Moving won’t be hard, as I own three garbage bags full of things in this country, and it’ll be nicer to live by myself, not to belittle Janos’ company, of course.

First meal at the restaurant at the corner of Kodaly Korond? I was feeling daring in my first taste of my Magyar independence, I went with a milanoi dish I’d never heard of. I wasn’t impressed at all, but it was easier to choke down knowing that it was a part of the adventure of finding myself smack dab in the middle of a Hungarian neighborhood.

A scrawled message to Janos in the morning, auf Deutsch, of course, and it was off to the office then Lake Balaton!

Song and Dance

Once upon a time. Not so long ago.

Favorite moment of the first week back in Budapest:
A Saturday evening of make-shift fun.

Tommy used to work on the docks.

Janos was kind enough to host us at his favorite neighborhood bar, The Squirrel, if we translate away. An outdoor café spilled out of the wood-panelled interior, complete with a native group of young Hungarians who were kind enough to bring a guitar and sentimental enough to play Wonderwall. Liz would have made fun of me for faux British accents if she had been there. But as our conversation turned rowdier – as it has known to do – Janos ordered us on, lest we ruin his reputation with the help and regulars.

Union’s been on strike, he’s down on his luck.

A missed metro, the last of the night, left us wandering down a street we’d never wandered before, and likely will never wander again. Block after block of search for elusive night bus stops created inspiration or desperation, or some combination of the two. I was adamant that we take advantage of the first oasis of sorts that we stumbled upon. A sketchy karaoke bar.

It’s tough, so tough.

We ordered beers as two Hungarians battled their ways, surprisingly well, through Barbie Girl. When they reverted back to Hungarian favorites, I was nominated to kickstart the English.

Gina works the diner all day.

Harpswell handed the balding man behind the kareoke stand a request, a minute later he called Jeremos up to the front of the bar. that's when Bon Jovi's rhythm started to pulsate.

Working for her man, she brings home her pay for love.

I burst into song as Laura burst into dance. We were rockstars.

She says w'eve got to hold on to what we've got
cause it doesnt make a difference
If we make it or not
Weve got each other and thats a lot
For love - we'll give it a shot

Most impressed? The Hungarian lady who had sang Barbie Girl. She clapped wildly. She was digging me. By the end of the song, but voice was cracking and hoarse, but I managed a koszonom szepan as I handed the mic back. Walking back through smiles and high fives, the Barbie-singer jumped me. She thrust a new request sheet in my hand. A translator explained that she wanted to sing a duet with me. I didn't know the song written on the top, but i scribbled Jeremos down anyway.

Whooah, were half way there
Livin' on a prayer

But as I finished writing, scrawling myself into a contract of collaboration, she smiled. A bit of a smirk. Then the translator-du-jour told me why.

"She wants you to put your telephone nymber next to your name."

Take my hand and well make it - I swear
Livin' on a prayer...