Paying Tribute to Pecs

Noemi had a bad week. Among other things, she accidentially spilt a glass of wine on her laptop. A shocked gasp later, it was fried. Her mom took it to tech staff at the National Museum of Fine Arts, but they’ve been oscillating all week on whether or not it would be possible to save any information at all. The computer itself, though, goners.

I figured that just treating her to a nice Jeremy-cooked meal (all the ingredients used to be enclosed in one bag) wasn’t enough, so I suggest we whisk ourselves off to Pecs (Pay-Ch) for a weekend overnight. Three hours by IC train, it’s a perfect weekend destination, long built up by guidebooks and stories. We took off early Saturday morning with smiles.

Pecs is the biggest city in southeastern Hungary, perched on rolling hills just before Hungary slopes into Serbia. The hills are flush with wine, the southern side of the mountains has a Meditteranean feel to it. The climate goes as far as to offer fig trees along the streets in Pecs.

Two architectural highlights crown the city. In the main square, a green-domed church stands as proud tribute to the 150 years of Turkish dominance. (Shown in the picture, alongside one of the delightful nationalist rallies that you run into every once in a while in provincial Hungary...) After conquering Pecs in the 16th century, the Ottomans razed the largest church and made a grand mosque out of the rubble. When the Hungarians (fine, Austrians…) retook the city late in the 17th century, they were strangely more sentimental and, in rather unprecedented act of foresight, converted the main mosque into a unique Christian church rather than razing it in retribution. Inside, you can still read verses of the Koran painted onto a few of the walls. At the other end of the downtown area, formerly encased inside a city wall, is the four-spired cathedral. On this particular Saturday, at least ten brides stood white against the picturesque towers.

We ate food, we drank wine, we touristed. Come Sunday, we hiked in flipflops up the hills that grows from the north end of the town. First we wove through residential streets before settling on a footpath to the TV tower atop the bluff. While we weren’t properly afooted, the trail was nice hiking and the view from the top even better. After the long stroll and a good meal, we dashed back to the train for the last Sunday afternoon train, refreshed from a quick night out of the city.

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...

Up-to-date

I’ve come to realize the reason for the ungodly plug-in air freshener. My bed smells like urine. It’s not good. I tried scrubbing. Hard. But it still smells like old-lady urine. I speculate that bed-wetting may be why the old lady was shipped off to the nursing home. The can’t-wait-to-move countdown is at less than ten days!

Feeling a little underutilized at work. And the work that I’m doing seems more chart-perfecting than a valuable learning experience. Hmm.

Said goodbye to Harpswell on Wednesday at a little good bye party of the old standards (Janos, Kat, Aran, Matt, Noemi) and the law ladies I invited a long (Julia, Melanie, Kalli). Harpswell is headed back to Maine for the summer, than staking out a new life in Chicago. She hopes to go to nursing school there after a year. We toasted the last of her two-years worth of nights with Drehers, watching hot Hungarian salsa dancers and gyros. They’re so good.

Thursday was a wild evening storm. Noemi and I were shoved in from an outside table at the restaurant down the street. We loved the swing in temperature at the crack of the storm. Luckily there's a night bus between my house and Noemi's.

Friday was Zold Pardon, Buda's hot night spot for rockin' music. The teenagers dig it. Melanie and Kalli were skeptical, but Janos and I managed to convince them of the merits of the joint with the 100-forint entrance turnstill, pulsating tunes like "what is love" and "eye of the tiger," and a fantastic blend of merry young hungarians and sketchy Chinese businessmen.

And Saturday morning before heading to Eger? I woke up early to catch the train, but Janos was already up and about, slamming doors at 7:00 am in the morning. I didn't know what he was up to, I didn't open my door until i hear him stomp down the courtyard walkway. I shook my head at his antics, and opened the door to head into the shower.

But then what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a girl. Standing in Janika's room, looking out the window. Her hair, like a dream, was most likely flowing in the breeze. I gaspes a "Szia" before dashing into my room to better clad myself and find my glasses. When i popped back out, capable of seeing this time, she was still there. Redish hair flowing. 20 or so.

She spun and smiled. She stuck out her hand. She introduced herself as Monika. As if to explain her magic apperance, she said she was Janos' niece. She spoke a beautiful English lacking in communiation between Janos and I.

Her t-shirt, I kid you not, I swear to god: "Porn-Star-In-Training." Branded across her chest.

She's headed to Debrecen next yeat to become a translator. She was in town with her mom - Janos's sister - to see the Night of the Museum festivities. (All the city's museums stay open until 2 am with special programming, the Saturday night closest to the Summer solstice.) And she came, apparently, to stuff my freezer full of meat. More meat than I've ever seen in my life. Certainly more meat than our little kitchen can handle...

Just Like a Prayer

After a meandering Friday night with the teachers and Noemi, I started to weave my way through the 6th district, homeward bound, about 2. A block from Szinyei Street, I was surprised to hear Madonna pulsating through the empty streets. The closer I got, the more I started to wonder what kocsma was played the song. How had I missed a neighborhood bar, at first glance, that would have been willing to blast Like a Prayer late on a Friday night?

I debated investigating the sound, but decided against it, resigned to tiredness after a long day of work/play. Instead, I slipped the blue key into the keyhole of the big double door that guards the 3 Szinyei courtyard. A funny thing happened, though, when I opened that door: the music got louder.

At first I was worried, disconcerted that a neighborhood bar could be so loud that the sound would permeate the walls and invade my tranquil little courtyard. Two sides ivy, two sides balconies. But as I walked up the steps, the music only got louder. That’s when I saw the young man passed out on the stairs, that’s when I knew for sure: I have young neighbors and they were having a party in my little building!

Momentum was pushing me toward bed, but I figured I had to take advantage of the opportunity to meet my neighbors. I started in Hungarian to the first person I met when I walked into the open door. But I quickly switched to an English “Who lives here?”

The man pointed to a couch in the corner with an accusatory “Andras.” I introduced myself. Under the threat of German, he admitted to knowing English, and quickly apologized for being too loud. I laughed and promised I hadn’t come to complain. He brought another neighbor into the conversation, and a bottle of homemade wine. They both were artists of sorts in their spare time. I never learned what their jobs are, but they were both out of school.

We talked a while, then the police knocked on the door, telling Andras to be quieter. People across the street had complained. He obliged and I went home not long after, still amazed at having young neighbors in what had seemed to be such an inactive, almost elderly, building.

I also am proud to report that my room is beginning to smell less like old woman, a fragrance that had begun to suffocate me in a sort of asaematic clenching of the lungs. A Glade Plug-In, or however they brand it in these parts, was the culprit, injecting its rotting stench into my precious 14 square meters (an approximation) of living quarters. Now that it’s been removed, I’m starting to breath a little better, and apologizing less to myself and visitors.

Balaton Bash

After two weeks, I’m back to fluid in moving about Hungary, but it’s always the wacky things that remind me of how adventurous it really is. On the train to Balatonfured it was a fish head – and the spine of that same fish – laying underneath my seat, picked clean by whoever had been in that compartment on the stop previous. I tried to convince the distraught middle-age woman across from me that it was “nem baj, nem baj,” but she insisted on calling MAV employees to discard of the skeleton.

I was proud of myself, just as Balaton came into view and the tracks started to skirt Central Europe’s largest lake, for talking to the cute girl who had been sitting in my compartment as we gazed out the window, mesmerized by blue water and floating sails. Timi spoke English, of course, so we talked about swimming and sailing and studying as we got closer to Batalonfured. From there, she’d catch a kics-piros train to Zanka for a weekend with friends.

This weekend, just like last year, I was off to Lake Balaton for a welcome-to-summer bash with American teachers. This time we crashed the north shore, Balatonfured, rather than overstay our welcome on the south shore near Siofok. I only knew a handful (Janos, Emily, Harpswell) of the 23 from last year, but I’ve gotten to know Matt and our token Hungarian Noemi well in the first weeks of being here. The rest of the crew were new teachers I’d only heard about in so many stories.

Friday night was the drama and uber-americanism that the stories had promised. Apparently the group isn’t as tight knit as last year, not a smallish band of brothers and sisters battling through a foreign land with the comforting drunkenness of quick-tongued conversation with fellow Americans. So it goes, that sometimes you’re a part of something magical, and trying to recapture that is more difficult than in should seem. So instead of take part in naplos and merriment, I convinced Noemi that we should climb into the bar’s tree-house and talk an hour of the evening away.

Saturday was summer, and it felt good. Sunshine warmed our walk to the beach, and after a minute or two of trepidation, the water felt good. A brief afternoon thunderstorm was the perfect preventative cure for sunburn and allowed a nice lunch break. By evening we were ready for the pitcher after pitcher of free white wine samples that our guest house arranged for. They really treated us well for $10 a night. And while eating supper before drinking wine might perhaps have been advisable, it’s hardly a necessity if you’ve got a pole to lean against.

But, of course, there’s no getting around the absolute highlight of the weekend: Not once, but an amazing twice, I found myself locked inside a bathroom…

The first, definitely, was the charming Noemi’s fault! We let ourselves into what might have been a locked bathroom at the beach. Thinking that I must have finished before her, she locked the hallway door on the way out. A minute later, I found myself trapped on the inside of a locked door, inside a darkened hallway. I stood befuddled for a few minutes, pondering exactly how I found myself locked inside a bathroom. I was just about to start knocking on the door, from the inside, when an employee unlocked the door. I think he was surprised to see me in the locked, darkened hallway, but I koszonom szepan-ed him and walked past before he could ask the obvious question.

The second incident, though, was no one’s fault but my own. Back at the guesthouse, about to take off for the train station, I thought I’d be smart and use the flushable facilities rather than wait and use the more primitive accommodations available on-board the train. On my way out, I struggled with the key. It’d been giving me problems all weekend. For the life of me, I couldn’t get the lock mechanism to budge.

Not about to be caught trapped in a bathroom twice in one weekend, I decided to get smart. Rather than bust my fingers trying to click the lock open, I’d use mechanical advantage. I picked up the doorstop and the can of aerosol fragrance – I’d squeeze them together like a pliers, using mechanical advantage to force the lock to give way. With fierce determination, I put my plan into action. I squeeze the key between the doorjam and aerosol can, and turned. I smiled when I felt it easily give way. But then I heard a terrifying clink – one-half of the key falling onto the hard bathroom floor, snapped completely off of the operative end of the key.

I let my head crash into the door in disgust. And again I found myself pondering being locked inside a bathroom. With imagines of missed trains and eventual starvation creeping into my psyche, I began to knock on the door, from the inside. Five minutes later, help arrived. We concocted a plan. They’d get the other bathroom key, and try to open the door from the outside. I was ready to plant kisses on my saviors when the plan worked, a hostage freed of misfortune, but that would have only increased the intra-group drama and intrigue, so I simply offered thanks.

Needless to say, I avoided bathrooms on the train-ride home. Luckily, the most excitement at Deli Pu was recognizing Timi and waving a hello. Hungary made a little smaller by a familiar face, a voyage come full-circle.