nawl

Well, it was a salsa party. I wanted to cook some salsa for the occasion, because really, what is a salsa party without real salsa, but was foiled when I realized the market closes at 2 pm, and I haven't found another reliable source of cilantro.

So it was a salsa party with just the other kind of salsa.

Some notes on cultural things.

I have a cold, so I've been coughing and snuffling for the past couple days. I consider it common courtesy to warn someone that I'm being introduced to that I'm sick, so they won't get my germs by shaking hands or kissing. But at the party I was informed that my failure to offer a tactile mode of saying hello to people was confusing everyone, so I gave up. Nobody seemed to notice or care that they were kissing a walking germ-fest.

It's as bad as France here in that in order to enter or exit a social situation, you have to make the round of the entire room and introduce yourself to and kiss everyone. I'm also told that my failure to greet and say goodbye to people I don't know when leaving a much more anonymous situation (like the big dance parties) is also vaguely impolite. Man. Zsolt is particularly bewildered by my ability to coexist in the same apartment as Jonah without saying goodbye formally when I'm going out for a short while or saying "bon appetit" when he eats something.

So most people I know will remove shoes upon entering an apartment by default, but last night I saw several people who actually brought a second pair of indoor shoes to wear around instead of socks. That's intense.

They were amusing themselves by giving me difficult words to say in Hungarian so they could make fun of my pronunciation. The sound of gy, for example, is between d and soft g, but closer to the d. The standard explanation given to English speakers is "it's like the d in during", but this fails to take into account the fact that I'm American, not British, and the d that I say in during sounds exactly like the d that I say in dog. It's fun to imagine having a British accent and saying gyuring, though. At least I can do an ü.

"Afterwards, they said they never thought an American could be so nice." Ouch. What kind of horrible reputation do we *have* over here? I mean, the usual stereotypes of Americans being stupid, monolingual, and culturally ignorant are somewhat understandable if all you see are badly dubbed movies and tourists, but I never thought that we could be not *nice*. Imagine the super-friendly tourist in garish shorts, waving and saying hello loudly to everyone on the street.

Posted by nadia at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Baked goat cheese salad

Cut some creamy goat cheese (Chavroux is an acceptable brand and can be found at Tesco and Kaiser's) into .5-1 cm-thick slices. Coat with olive oil (oliva olaj) and then cover with a mixture of bread crumbs (zsemle) and thyme (kakkufu). Bake at a middling temperature until brown and slightly melty.

A simple vinaigrette is red wine vinegar (vorosborecet) whisked (with a fork) into about three times as much olive oil (oliva olaj). Add enough salt (so) until it tastes good, and add some black pepper (feketebors). Drizzle this over some lettuce (salata) or, if available, fancy mixed greens and toss until the dressing is evenly distributed. Place one or two of the baked cheese rounds on top and serve.

Avocado maki

Sushi rice without a rice maker: put 1 cup sushi rice (sushi rizs, available in 3-cup bags from the Asian store in the basement of the big market) into a pot and rinse with water until it runs clear. Add 1 cup + 1.5 tbsp water, cover, and let stand for 10 minutes. Cook over high heat, covered, until you can hear that the water has come to a boil, then lower the temperature as low as possible. When you can hear that almost all the water has burned off, turn the heat up high for 30 seconds. Let sit, covered, for 10 minutes. Drizzle a tablespoon or two of rice vinegar (my bottle came from the Asian store and is labeled in Japanese and "Japan Sushi Reisesseg" in German) over the rice and mix gently with a wide flat spoon.

Lay 1 sheet of nori (again available at the Asian store) on a sushi mat or saran wrap and cover all but the top 3 cm with a thin (.5 cm) layer of rice. Place two avocado slices in a line 2 cm from the bottom and start to roll up that direction, keeping the roll as tight as possible. Press closed for a few minutes when you reach the top so the un-riced nori will seal closed. Let sit for a bit, then slice into rounds.

Posted by nadia at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I asked what it takes to get a Hungarian driver's license. There are no fewer than three separate tests to take, which, if I understood correctly, test things like the ability to drive stick and park as well as basic first aid procedures. Practice hours can only be done with a driving instructor, and the minimum amount of practice is not enough to pass the test, so you usually have to shell out for more hours after you fail the first time. The whole procedure probably costs $500.

No wonder Americans are terrible drivers.

--

The stereotype is that Hungarians are intensely proud of the accomplishments of their fellow citizens, and also that once a Hungarian, always a Hungarian. I am amused to actually encounter this. I have a cold. "Did you know that a Hungarian discovered vitamin C?" I study computer science. "Did you know that a Hungarian invented the computer?" (Actually, I had no idea that von Neumann wasn't German. Valid point.) I'm cooking. "Did you know that a Hungarian invented the match?" I'm American. "Did you know that there's a statue of a Hungarian in your white house?"

But when I say that I study math here because Hungarian mathematicians are famous, I encounter a blank stare. Erdos? Who's that? Bollobas? No idea. The stock answer about the most famous Hungarian mathematician is apparently Bolyai, who I'd honestly never heard of. Geometry is so last century.

--

Spring is faltering, but seems to have returned today.

Posted by nadia at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

We took the train to Esztergom, about an hour and a half north of Budapest on the Slovakian border.

There is, um, a basilica and a castle in Esztergom. This is just about the only thing to see in the city, and it's where all the tourists go. It's famous because this is where Christianity was brought to Hungary a thousand years ago, and the castle is where the first Pope-approved kings lived.

There was a museum in the castle, but when asked what was in it, the woman guarding the door responded "Oh, normal museum things. Just buy a ticket." So we passed.

From the hill with the castle and basilica, you can look across the Danube into Slovakia.

Across from the basilica-castle hill is a section of old town on another hill. The area around the path up at the bottom was inexplicably labeled "art square" in Hungarian. At the top we encountered a troop of Hungarian scouts, picked wildflowers, and looked down into the town.

From Esztergom you can take a bus to Visegrad, in the bend of the Danube. Visegrad is famous because the Czech, Polish, and Hungarian kings came together there in the middle ages to do diplomatic things. There are the ruins of yet another castle on the hill overlooking the river.

But really, you don't go there to look at yet another castle with tacky wax figures, another exhibit on the barbaric torture procedures in the middle ages, and long explanations in German and Hungarian about regional politics. You go because the weather was absolutely stunning, and you could climb the path up the hillside and appreciate the green and the wildflowers as the countryside explodes into spring.

At the top you actually have to pay for the touristy stuff to see the view, but it is nice.

--

Back in Budapest, there was a Hungarian house-party with actual Hungarian people, a combination of dancers and physics students at the technical university. I met a French guy who spoke Turkish and Russian in addition to Hungarian and fluent English, and told me about bribing officials in Azerbaijan to gain access to forbidden areas that had been occupied by the army. We danced rueda, a form of salsa danced in a circle with lots of partner passing that I'd never seen before coming here. Imagine moves being called out in Spanish with explanations in Hungarian and the occasional concession in English to me.

Posted by nadia at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

An evening walk across the Danube and up Gellert Hill, to watch the sun set from the lady. Gellert Hill is so named because this Saint Gellert character was rolled down the hill in a barrel for being Christian.

The Buda castle, from the lookout point near the top:

From one of the trails along the front of the hill, looking north towards Erszebet hid:

Looking south. The Gellert Hotel is on the right.

The view of the water from Szabadsag (freedom) hid. The Buda castle is just to the left of center.

Posted by nadia at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So the weather here does this amazing cinematic thing where lightning flashes, thunder crashes, and then the sky immediately starts dumping rain.

I mean, I've seen lightning and thunder and rain before, but usually in a much more random sequence.

--

Homesick Salad: lettuce (salata), tomato (paradicsom), bell pepper (kalifornai paprika), avocado, scallions (zold hagyma), cilantro (coriander), olives, black beans (feketebab), cheese (sajt), with a dressing of fresh lime juice (zold citrom le), sour cream (tejfol), salt (so), and chopped garlic (fokhagyma).

Posted by nadia at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hungarians eat weird things. Like sugary foods for dinner.

Example 1: Pasta, plain, mixed with powdered walnuts and sugar.

Example 2: Pasta, plain, mixed with tejfol (sour cream), tehenturo (tastes like cottage cheese, consistency about halfway between cream cheese and feta), and powdered sugar.

There is also this fruit soup thing going on that I haven't experienced yet.

I eat weird things. Particularly corn soup. Mm, corn soup. The meal most easily constructed around what's available in crappy Hungarian corner stores.

Saute 1 onion and 2 stalks celery in butter. Add 4 potatoes, cubed, a chopped green pepper, and 1 liter of milk, and cook until potatoes are soft. Add 1 small can of corn, about a tablespoon of salt, and a lot of fresh ground pepper. Stir in an extra pat of butter if you're feeling indulgent.

--

I had something almost resembling a conversation in Hungarian yesterday, where in various interrupted parts it was established how long I had been here, when I was leaving, and (this part threw me off) what my name was. I also managed to contribute "Nincs cipo." and "Nincs noi cipo." to a real conversation, and figure out when I was being talked about. That's helpful. Up to now my conversations have been centered solely around buying things: "Tessek?" "Trappista." "Mennyi?" [hold up hands] "Jo?" "Jo." "Mas valamit?" "Nem, koszonom.", or the other variant, "Harom paradicsom" [confusion] [hold up 3 fingers, point] "Harom?" [nod] "Mas?" "Nem." "Nyolcvenegy forint." Of course by that point most store people will hold up a calculator and receipt and point to the number, as if numbers weren't just about the only thing I can reliably understand.

I can follow a good deal of what goes on in the folk dancing class, with a vocabulary slightly expanded from last week to include "lep", "fordul", "setal", "lany", and "fiu". I was dancing with the instructor when he came out with a long sentence in Hungarian correcting something, and when he saw my blank expression he asked "something something magyar?", to which I answered "Nem." This prompted a great expression of shock and an announcement to the entire class about me not being Hungarian. (I was told later that he was saying how polite I was about it, or something, but it was a bit alarming to have him making an announcement to everyone about me in Hungarian that I couldn't understand.) Later I told him "Nagyon jo tanar." and he kissed me on the cheek.

I tried on a traditional Hungarian costume, a bright blue wraparound skirt with matching beaded apron and vest. The same old ladies come every week to the club to sell these elaborate costumes that I have yet to see anyone buy.

--

It was absolutely gorgeous last night walking along the Danube, the long and scenic way home. We went from Gellert hill to Erszebet hid and back home down Vaci utca. Touristy places I haven't been to since the official outings in January. I'm not quite sure what I do most of the time, but it doesn't involve exploring Buda.

There is a church built into the cliff face of the hill as it plunges towards the road edging the Danube. Actually, there are two roads, one of which floods when the water level rises too much. The higher one has a tram line. For some reason I find the view of the tram between rocky cliff with old church and greenery and Danube draped with bridges quintessentially European. For a ways along the water, you can see the statue of the woman on top of the hill lit up against the night. The river water glitters. There is a waterfall in the cliff, but it wasn't running.

People are confused to learn that I chose to study in Hungary, first, because why would an American want to go to Hungary, and second, because students here don't travel. In my innocence I realize that there is a flip side to Eastern Europe being an awesome and cheap place for Americans to visit, which is that America and Western Europe are prohibitively expensive to someone here. An average salary here is $500 a month. A student can be expected to live on $150 a month. People think that American-style dormitories must be called something other than "dormitories" because the "dormitories" here have 12 people to a room.

And yet, and yet. Half the city doesn't need a car because you can get everywhere you need to go using public transportation, and indeed the buses and trams and metro cars are packed at nearly every hour of night and day. There are always people walking and talking (and chugging bottles of alcohol, urinating, or vomiting) on the street. I have never seen more public displays of affection in my life. Couples make out on the bridges, on the romantic walks along the river, on the metro escalators, in the tram cars, in doorways. Traditional crafts are only good for selling to tourists, anymore, but the crowd of Hungarians learning folk dances at Fono is young. My room has a view of the yellow courtyard of this huge old apartment building where the only green in sight is the algae growing in the puddles on the concrete on the ground, but I can walk a block and look out over the water, or take the metro to the park and the baths. There are men playing chess in the stone yard at Keleti, in the baths, and on tables in the station at Nyugati.

A realization: "Our grandfathers were fighting against each other in WWII." Apparently last month the prime minister here thanked the Soviets for coming to liberate the Hungarians in 1945.

I don't want to leave.

Posted by nadia at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Papers signed and mailed, housing contract submitted.

I'm going to Princeton.

I won fellowships from both AT&T and the NSF.

I have an internship this summer at AT&T in New Jersey.

The BSM semester ends May 25. Move-in day at Princeton is September 8. 15 weeks minus 10 weeks of work equals 5 weeks of vacation. I'm thinking 3 before, 2 after. I don't even have tickets home yet.

Maybe I can go to Burning Man this year. That's what being a grad student is for, right?

Posted by nadia at 07:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Wednesday, Hungarian folk dancing. Lesson and then dance. The teacher was hilarious, a big older Hungarian man with a thick mustache and more rhythm than twenty average teenagers put together. The lesson was in Hungarian, of course, but fortunately the vocabulary required for a dance class is fairly small. We all held hands in a circle and traveled around, following the patterns of hopping and kicking that he demonstrated, accompanied by his shouts of "egy, ket, ha! bal! jobb! bal! jobb! el, vissza, egy ket!" When someone appeared particularly lost and was not responding to shouds of "bal! bal! bal!" in their direction he'd start yelling "left! left!"

I'm told the Hungarian dances actually come from Transylvania, the Hungarian-speaking part of Romania. There appeared to be two kinds. The partner dances were much like any partner dance and required lots of spinning and arm-tangling and only occasional kicks. There were also dances where the men get to show off, which involves all sorts of complicated jumps and stomps and slaps and kicks and squats in complicated rhythms.

During the actual dancing, it appeared that particular dances weren't so much associated to a particular type of song as to a particular song itself, and that (in at least one case) the songs themselves were organized into groups that constituted an entire half-hour dance by themselves. At the end of every partner dance, the man picks the woman up. One dance consisted of groups of four with arms locked around each other, spinning. The men stomp when they want to change direction or pattern, and in my circle they tormented us girls by yanking us around and picking us up together at the end of the dance.

By the end of the evening the entire room was singing along with the music, long verses in Hungarian that I couldn't even start to parse.

I was promised that there would be hordes of Americans there, but the only foreigners I met were a troupe of Norwegian folk music students. They gave a performance of Norwegian folk songs and dance. The themes were much more solitary and sad than the Hungarian music. The leader spoke to the crowd in English about the music. Thoughts about a lingua franca. It seems to be a source of some angst among the well-educated liberal classes in the US (me) that every non-American who comes to the US seems to speak perfect English on top of one or two other foreign languages, while Americans can barely speak English. But from the perspective of a country like Hungary, if they weren't communicating with Norwegians in English, they'd be speaking German, or French, or Russian, or they wouldn't have a way to communicate at all. We were just fortunate enough to be born speaking the chosen language. Not that this is an excuse, mind you.

I caught the last tram of the evening back across the Danube. Looking out from the bridge, I could see the lights from Buda reflecting on the water, other bridges further up the river. I thought about how fortunate I was to be there, then. A Duna szep, indeed.

Friday was another beautiful day, and after class I went to varosliget to juggle. Ben gave me a lesson in club passing. Unfortunately we only had three clubs, mine. By the end of the afternoon we had balls and clubs going back and forth in every which way. Highly amusing. Everything I threw out of my left hand while I was expecting a pass on that side ended up going halfway between a self-throw and a pass.

The evening was a non-stealth date of conversation and tejberizs, which was originally rather charmingly translated as "rice-in-milk", but which I discovered was actually the famous meat-free Hungarian specialty of rice pudding. One can eat it sprinkled with powdered cocoa, with jam, or with canned fruit.

And the conversation. We traded stories of holiday traditions. Christmas here is celebrated on the 24th, all in one big bang. You set up the tree and trade presents in the evening, then spend the 25th relaxing with your family. On Easter, the girls decorate eggs, and boys come around and spray perfume on them (it used to be dump water on them!) and receive an egg in return.

I found myself again in the position of unlikely defender of American foreign policy. In 1956, Hungary decided to declare itself independent from the Soviets. The Soviets were not pleased, and rolled in shortly thereafter to smash the rebellion to pieces. The US didn't step in to help. When a similar thing happened in Prague, it was the Hungarian troops who were sent in against the Czech. The standard American response is that if the US had intervened, it would have started World War III. The Hungarian response is that there were no Soviet troops in Hungary at the time, and the US intervened in places like South Korea and Vietnam. (US response: intervening in those places was not going to cause a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and we know how well Vietnam went.)

And another question, one which I have heard before, and about which I am both woefully uneducated and afraid to read and believe anything I read: what the heck is going on with the Middle East? Why does the US like Israel so much? Asking this question is enough to get you called anti-Semitic, so I'm afraid to put it down, but I realized that I have no idea how or why it was decided that Israel wins, Palestine loses, goodbye, end of story. Or why I only get asked this when I'm in Europe. And who even knows about the Iraq thing.

Am I proud to be American? A difficult question to answer, especially when the answer pauses every few sentences to explain a word or idea. It was pointed out that when asked where I'm from, I always answer "California". Maybe this is because I feel more pride to be from California than I do to be from the US, or maybe because it's the most specific geographic region that I feel I can reasonably assume people have heard of. How do I explain feeling disconnected from the federal government when my state is bigger than this entire country? From afar (and heck, from up close, too), the US looks like a gigantic monoculture, so how do I explain that the parts I like are not usually the parts that get exported to other countries? When I think about the things that being here has made me grateful for at home, some of them are symbolic of my privileged life as a spoiled American (clothes dryers, ovens with temperature settings, wireless networks), and some of them aren't (chopsticks, cilantro, Indian food, eucalyptus trees, fog, Santa Cruz).

Money things. It seems that we are indeed being overcharged for our apartments, in the range of 1.5 to 2 times more what a normal rent would probably be. Obviously we're paying for the furnishings, linens, dishes, the fact that they're unoccupied for three months out of the year, and that nobody stays longer than four months. It's also cheaper, I think, than what anyone was paying for housing in the US. And, well, Hungary probably needs the money more than we do. A good salary for a programmer here is less by current (ie, bad for the US) exchange rates than any of the stipends I was offered by grad schools. (Also, there are scales to being overcharged for things. Several of the private school kids here are being charged $20,000 tuition for the semester, a quarter of which goes to pay for the tuition here, just to get the coursework to appear on their transcripts at home.)

Sunday was the first day of a clothing market at Stadionok. It's apparently the place to buy cheap Hungarian clothes, but I didn't see much that I liked. At one point, I stopped and sat down outside a booth while Zsolt tried on some pants. When he was done, the proprietor came up and delivered a long speech to me in Hungarian. I sort of stared wide-eyed until we left with a "koszonom szepen". Translation and summary of what the booth owner told me? "I told your husband that if you come back tomorrow we will have some smaller sizes for him." I don't even know where to start with the assumptions contained in that sentence.

Last night I missed the last metro back from Buda, so I took the 4/6 tram in a wide circle through Pest to get home. A drunken Swiss couple asked in half-English half-German something about an address and tram stop they had scribbled on a piece of paper. They said they'd been enjoying Hungarian absinthe. When they got off at Blaha Lujza, I saw them ask new people about their paper again, and the passers-by shook their heads no, and the couple wandered off somewhere.

Posted by nadia at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A date of sorts. We walked down Raday and found a teahouse. The menu was only in Hungarian, but I surprised myself by understanding the important bits: zoldtea, feketetea, oolong, jasmine, eperkrem, karamell tejszinmentes.

Raday, and really all of Budapest, really seems to have come alive. In the winter, the restaurants were closed up smoky tourist traps interesting mainly because they're probably warmer than the outside. But with spring, they have unfolded, unfurled themselves out onto the street in large swaths of tables filled with chatting Hungarians and tourists. Dusk sets softly.

I learned that the standard Hungarian accent is actually from a very random part of Hungary, not from Budapest as you would expect. Apparently some poet decided to reform the language to get rid of all the Latin, and came up with a system of inventing words by combining syllables from older Hungarian words. Huge amounts of vocabulary were invented this way, including entire suffixes, the words for things like "insect" and "painting". And the accent that this poet had became the standard.

It was the fashion around the turn of the 19th century to take on a Hungarian name, which is why there doesn't seem to be as much diversity in last names as you might expect.

The effects of communism on religion. I'm not sure I realized what happened. The communist states were officially atheist, so if people were religious they kept it to themselves. Nobody was baptized. When everything collapsed, suddenly families went back to Christianity (or whatever they were), baptized their kids at whatever age, and started sending them off to church.

Things change so quickly.

Tomorrow: Hungarian folk dancing.

Posted by nadia at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I remember why I wanted to live in a city now.

On Sunday morning, Aly woke me up with a phone call inviting me to come see the Dali exhibit in the museum. In the end, we were a large troupe.

To get to the Dali, we walked through several rooms in the museum housing a bizarre collection of media-themed "modern" art from the 70s in German by a guy named Peter Weibel. It felt somewhat analogous to the atonal modern pieces that they play at the symphony before they get around to playing the classical work that everyone in the audience is actually there to hear. We amused ourselves in mirrored rooms with wordplay poetry on the walls (columns of "was bin ich; bin ich was; ich bin was; saw nib hci") and video installations superimposing input from multiple cameras. The museum people didn't like us waving our hands in front of the cameras to figure out what was happening.

The Dali itself was a large collection of drawings organized in series along particular themes. There were large decorative books. Everything was in Hungarian, so I could only figure what was going on when a title was printed in French or German. We eventually deduced that "aranykor" is "l'age d'or", the golden age. The only Dali that I'd ever seen before was elaborate paintings, so it was interesting to see less... formal... pieces that seemed to be studies for some of the themes everyone knows. Long-limbed bony animals, women. Strange universe.

I spent an hour relaxing in the baths in the late afternoon. It's actually so warm that the hottest pool feels too hot in the sun.

The evening was Ot Orai Tea, which was blessedly free of performances and full of dancing. Happy, joy. I danced with someone who told me I absolutely had to try Hungarian folk dancing, and that there are tons of Americans there every week. That's tomorrow. I took the tram home with a small crew of master's students who recently got into ballroom. Only one of them was confident enough in his English to actually talk to me. Everyone here has such charming Hungarian names: Gabor, Csaba, Zsolt, Laci, Zoltan.

Monday was combinatorics and Hungarian class as usual. Our Hungarian teacher was 40 minutes late for class, so the five of us who were there spent the time working through our translations and discussing vocabulary and pronunciation. It's nice to be in classes entirely populated by people who are there because they want to be.

After class, I was convinced to go slacklining in the city park with a small crew. (Slacklining: like tightrope, only not as tight, tied between two trees with some complicated knots and belay hooks.) I didn't have much luck getting up on my own, but I could balance for a few seconds after a fashion. Ben had some juggling balls that we played with, and after a while he started teaching us to do circus acrobatic tricks, a way of climbing onto a person to stand on their shoulders, and positions for holding people up at strange angles. This started attracting small children. We made a three-story pyramid and shouted "photo! photo!" (or maybe it was "foto!") and a random person actually came and took pictures of us and exchanged emails so he could send them. Small children convinced their parents to let them walk along the slackline. One particular family stayed for at least an hour, entranced by Ben's juggling and our various antics on the slackline. The mother told me she had been a mathematician before staying home with her children. I haven't been barefoot in the dirt in ages. The subway train periodically rumbled directly underneath us. The weather was warm, the afternoon blissful.

We had pizza for dinner in a tiny two-story place near Astoria. The waitress actually brought us a pitcher of free tap water, and promptly refilled it after it was immediately emptied. A whole pizza for 500 ft.

Then I went home, packed all my things, and moved in two tram trips to the apartment on Lonyai. People riding the tram helped me get my bags up when I struggled, and when I was about to get off, a couple asked "something something leszallni something", to which I nodded, and they helped me off. Almost competent. Almost.

My room is very small, taken up almost entirely by the rather large bed. Instead of a wall of windows, I have a wall of mirrors. The stove is gas (good) and must be lit with a sparker (bad). There are long matches to light the oven with. I put my flower sarong on the wall. I think that means this is actually my room now. I am a block from the Danube, and a block from Raday, the place to be if you want to spend the evening cafe-hopping.

Today I am a ball of sore. But happy.

Posted by nadia at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I took Jonah to explore the asian market today. It was in full swing in the middle of the day, and packed with shopping Hungarians. I really wish I could take pictures, because it's such a trip. People winding their way through narrow aisles lined with the makeshift storefronts spilling out of, um, metal cargo lockers, tables piled high with bundles of socks and plastic-wrapped shirts.

I did take pictures of some of the awesome Engrish on the toys for sale in a nearby store:

INTERESTING Wild Surfing. With different function, more funny to play it! With funny music sounds. Battery operated

The "Barbara (Cool Hair Accessories. Have Fun!) fashion doll". As in, we're not even going for plausible deniability of not copying Barbie. This was among the highest quality in an entire row of Barbie knockoffs.

And my personal favorite...

... the Benign Girl toy cell phone. Vision. Super. Telephone. For age 3 and up. Beautiful girl press any button.

Among other items that I didn't feel comfortable photographing:

"Lecends of Spidernen" action figure set containing something looking like Spiderman and something looking like Batman.

A "Flower lower" t-shirt.

The t-shirt with text in roman characters that was not in any language at all. I could type "zcxlkjzcv oiednv zxdcoliz wernmwen oicoinw" and it would be a pretty good representation. It's the next step after Engrish: if we don't understand what our clothing says, why should anyone?

A t-shirt printed with "cultural and religious studies, cultural and religious cultural, religious studies, cultural and, cultural and religious studies..." all the way down.

A thong with some sentence about 18 cm in Hungarian.

Disturbing things that I didn't take pictures of:

The man with the chicken/pigeon/rabbit stand. He sold a box of chickens and a big carton of eggs to someone for 3200 forints while we were there.

The nearby dog in a cage that had a bowl full of disembodied chicken feet.

--

Tonight we went to Szombat Esti Laz only to discover, to my great dismay, that it was another Szuletesnapi Bal! (Anniversary ball.) Augh. So what little dancing there was was frequently interrupted by various performances from the dancing school. (The last weekend that I was in Hungary my attempt to go to Ot Orai Tea was similarly interrupted. I've decided that I have a performing curse.)

On the plus side, I got to dance with a guy named Zoltan.

I also won a certificate good for six sessions at a szolarium (tanning salon) in the raffle. It was somewhat embarrassing: I could understand the numbers as they were being called out, and when I went up to the front of the room the announcer said something in Hungarian and put the microphone in front of my face. Ack. He wanted my name. Afterward a woman came up to me asking where I was from, and told me they had a bet going as to whether I was British or American.

A small moment of shock passes across the face of everyone I dance with when they realize that not only am I not Hungarian, I don't speak enough Hungarian to have even a simple conversation, and that I'm going to bring back all those years of English they suffered through. And then I become this sort of linguistic curiosity. They think it's cute that I can parrot things like "Jo napot kivanok." and "Nem beszelek magyarul" or "szaznyolcvanegy". When I express that I wish I spoke more Hungarian, the answer is "Don't bother." The conversation switches to German so I won't have such an advantage. Fortunately, the international ballroom syllabus is truly international.

While waiting for the bus last night with someone going the same direction, a random person came up and struggled to get out a question in English that I didn't even understand. He was cut off swiftly by the answer in Hungarian from my companion. I was amused. Memories of similar encounters in Paris with American tourists struggling in French for me.

I wonder if I know anyone who wants to visit a szolarium.

Posted by nadia at 02:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I gave up and succumbed to the forces of jet lag.

Two days ago, I stayed up until 8 am, just because, and went to class on three hours of sleep. The next night, I went to bed at 1 am and inexplicably woke up at 5 am, which is not an acceptable time to be waking up in any of the time zones my body could plausibly believe it's in.

The almost-warm weather encourages an afternoon nap with the window open. Actual sun, actual breeze, actual birds twittering away. I hadn't realized there were no birds around before. City noises of cars, scooters, loud music, loud conversations that I don't understand.

Lack of motivation to do anything.

--

I decided to start taking myself out more often. I figured I'd start by being conventional: Aaron Archer has an online Budapest restaurant guide that is only slightly out of date, and I bought a guidebook with the intention of working through the restaurants they mention. This week I've eaten out every single day since I got back, an unprecedented record since my arrival.

It's a nice date, really: some quality time with a problem set or a recreational book (currently Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography) over a tasty Hungarian feast. Actually, I've been sticking pretty much to "modern" international food, because traditional Hungarian food scares my tender little vegetarian soul.

... and I've been disappointed. Either food here really is terrible, or I'm an incorrigible food snob. The second option is certainly a distinct possibility, considering that first, living in the bay area is likely to make someone a snob about nearly everything, and second, I can cook. I'm not inclined to think kindly on restaurant food that I can make better myself. But I've never had the experience of being disappointed by every restaurant I try.

Tonight: Buddha, a cafe/bar/Thai-themed restaurant between Oktogon and Nyugati. Baguetteszendvics with sauteed vegetables. The vegetables, while relatively tasty with the mayonnaise, were absolutely smothered with really salty sauce. I got the sneaking suspicion that the meat versions were probably more edible. My mango juice was good, though. 1000 ft with drinks.

Last night: Menza, an almost overly hip retro-Communist restaurant/cafe on Liszt Ferenc Ter by Oktogon. I had been intending to go to nearby Falafel, which the guidebook described as "the best salad bar in Budapest", but when I walked in and saw the saddest collection of over-sauced salads and dead lettuce mixes I've ever seen, I walked right out. Anyways, Menza. The weather was almost, almost nice enough to sit outside, so I did. I ordered a broccoli cream soup with mozzarella and a salad with grilled vegetables. The soup was good, but so overwhelmingly salty that the little melty mozzarella balls floating around the bottom were a relief by comparison. The grilled vegetables on the salad were also completely destroyed by the salty sauce that they'd been cooked in. I appreciated the shredded lettuce and tomato wedges, though. Mm, tomato. Raspberry milkshake. They actually make milkshakes (turmix) with milk here, not ice cream, so that what you get is a milky fruit drink with some chunks of ice in it. 2000 ft.

Tuesday: Momotaru, a ramen/Chinese place near Parliament. All the free tea you want. Vegetable ramen, which turned out to be vegetables (a respectable Chinese mix with actual tofu and bamboo) sauteed in massive quantities of msg and grease on top of a bowl of noodles in broth. I found a piece of chicken in my soup. It was actually not bad, but the msg and grease were overwhelming after a while. In an absolutely unprecedented move for a restaurant in Budapest, I was actually given a free glass of tap water when I asked for water. I felt really, really sick later that night, though. 800 ft.

Before break: Vista Travel Cafe, near Deak ter. This place had such rave reviews and a charming exterior that I was honestly expecting a lot. I ordered the vegetarian prix fixe menu, onion cream soup, a salad with "roast ewe's cheese", and (I think) peach cake. The onion cream soup was really, really salty. It was kind of edible with the toast/crouton thing that came floating in it, but once that was finished it was hard to eat on its own. By this point I'm suspecting that this is the way soups are done here. The salad was an absolutely massive pile of totally respectable salad vegetables (generous with the bell pepper, cucumber, tomato, and cabbage) drenched with the yogurt-dill dressing that you can buy bottled in the supermarket and topped with two enormous slabs of extremely salty warmed cheese the consistency of, say, normal jack, each one about 3/4" thick and 4" in diameter. Not quite the delicate baked creamy goat cheese over greens in a light dressing that I was expecting. The best part of the cake was the canned peaches that were baked into it. Something tastes seriously different about the sugar used in most baked goods here, and I do know what real sugar tastes like in the US, so it's not just the lack of corn syrup. Diane had a pasta dish she liked that she described as a glorified tuna casserole. 2400 ft.

Bonjour Cafe, French-themed cafe somewhere between Deak and Vorosmarty. Brie-zoldseg baguette, where the zoldseg turned out to be lettuce, tomato, cucumber with some sort of drizzled oily-pesto-y sauce. Not bad, if dry. How hard is it to screw up bread and cheese, though? Some sort of tasty, if dry, baked good. Over 2000 ft for two drinks, a small sandwich, and a small cake slice.

Govinda, Indian-themed place that appears to be run by Hare Krishnas, near the Chain Bridge. Everything's vegetarian, which is nice, but the soup tasted like it came from a can, the vegetables in the rice were burned, and the sauce on the main vegetable dish wasn't particularly flavorful. The yogurt drink is interesting, and they also gave me free tap water. 1200 ft.

Vegetarian place attached to the bio-ABC by Astoria. Unexceptional but not over-salted vegetarian food. I had some sort of bean dish that contained a strong herb that I couldn't identify. Unfortunately, it's exactly the kind of food that I make for myself. The fresh-squeezed orange juice was good, as fresh-squeezed juice is wont to be.

Lancelot, medieval touristy place not far from Nyugati. You don't really go here for the food, you go here to eat with your hands while watching sword fighters and bellydancers do their thing up and down the aisles. The waiter offered to bring us a vegetarian platter consisting of all the side dishes. Potato-heavy, but considering the above experiences with vegetarian fare, I'm starting to respect their restraint with the grilled vegetables, and the potato-onion pancake was positively tasty, if greasy. I have no idea how much it cost, but it was really expensive.

Pink Cadillac, touristy pizza place on Raday. Best pizza I've had in Budapest. The four cheese one has gorgonzola and little round balls of goat cheese. So good. Most positive dining experience I've had in this city.

Posted by nadia at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)