Spring Fling 3: Hidden Treasures

The Hotel de Russo — also known as my 32 sq. m. studio — has been very busy lately, hence a long interruption in updates. But before spring totally fades, I want to add in my last bits of reminiscence about a spring break now far gone.

After tackling the joys of Sofia, my dear friend and guide to all things Bulgarian — the incomparable Carolyn – agreed to one of my main requests for the journey, which was to see some “real” Bulgaria. And by “real” Bulgaria, I mean all those things the average American, Lonley-Planet-clutching/Rick-Steve’s-Reading folk can’t find.

And Carolyn didn’t disappoint: we headed for an overnight in Kazanlak, (in Bulgarian- Казанлък, thank YOU Wikipedia!), a small town in the central region of Bulgaria.  The town lies in the famous “Valley of the Roses” — that’s where all those pieces of tourist kitsch, the wooden dolls filled with Rose Perfume, hail from this region.

Carolyn LOVES history!

But the big draw here is the Thracian Tomb, which was built in the 4th century BC, near the ancient Thracian capital of Seuthopolis. The tomb — which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 — is best summed up by Carolyn’s comment: I can’t believe we are standing somewhere so ancient, and just looking at it. Indeed. I can’t post pictures because you cannot take them inside, obviously, as it would destroy the fine paintings, but it is amazing. The tomb itself is small — Carolyn and I filled the space pretty well together — but the paintings preserved inside are amazing, depicting an ancient wedding feast. To stand there, my international cell phone in my pocket, in my mass-produced jeans and T-shirt did certainly invoke that feeling of insignificance — but in a good way. We are but blips on the radar; our time here is small compared to the great spector of history.

And, it is just freakin’ cool, period. Even without the philosophical blather.

And, crazier still: the tomb was found accidentally, by soldiers during the second World War. Could you imagine? Whoops, what is that hard surface? Egads, it happens to be a FREAKING FOURTH CENTURY TOMB! No, I have to say, of all the interesting things I have dug up helping my dad with his garden, 4th century tombs, unfortunately, do not make the list.

Overlooking Shipka

We followed the trip into the ancient world with a stopover in nearby Shipka, a tiny town about a 20 minute bus ride aways you can see from the picture, Shipka, as viewed from the hills around it, is postcard-perfect: small, red-roofed houses, teeny-tiny twisting lanes, even donkey carts roaming the streets.

We then scaled the hill to what was my favorite sight in Bulgaria: the Shipka Monastery. This Monastery sits high above the town, so that as you approach it, the huge, gold onion-shaped domes leap out at you from the moutainside. It is impressive from a distance, but even more so close up, where you can see the gorgeous colors and rich, warm gold accents.

 

We Interrupt This Broadcast…

… of Spring Break Reminiscence to bring you breaking news of a rare sighting in Budapest:

Today, at approximately 5:49 p.m., while on my way to catch the train home from a day at Pázmány, I spotted the POPPED COLLAR POLO SHIRT on a Hungarian.

The popped collar, or the collar of one’s polo worn flipped up, was a sad scourge upon my Georgetown education. Yes, despite an excellent education, a kickingly cool faculty (Madeline Albright, anyone?), great alumni network (our best native son, Yes-He-Was-Slutty-But-Still-a-Damn-Good-President-Hey-Remember-That-STRONG-Economy Bill Clinton?), Georgetown, as a wildly expensive school in a wildly expensive city still attracted its fair share of students known, for lack of a more diplomatic term, Over-privileged Tools.  Now, on one level, I appreciate the O.T.’s existence at such schools — hey, you pay full fare so I don’t have to — but somewhere around my sophomore year, the collars started to turn up.

I don't actually know these guys. But I very well might have "accidentally" poured a beer on them during college.

I thought it was a joke, an bit of irony in a throwback to Zach Morris-style preppiness. But no. These kids were serious as a Pittsburgh Steelers fan is about his Terrible Towel: they meant it.

The collar-popping began to creep around, sucking more and more people into its vicious cycle. You’d be talking to a guy in class one day, he’d seem intelligent and interesting — then, come Saturday night, under the influence of Miller Lite and the glisten of the Potomac River viewed from a rooftop party, poof, you’d seem him: collar popped, and your hopes dashed, for he was one of Them. Despite heckling from some pretty harsh critics, the popped collar endemic seems lasting at my beloved alma mater. I once, as a graduate student, even saw one on a student working at my old student-run coffee shop, a place where we once had your respectable, crunch-alt-anti-establishment employees who would have seen a popped collar O.T. and refused him a caffeine fix. (I shed a single tear)

But I though Pázmány was better. European students are so much more sophisticated, on the whole, that us coddled Americans — and, even in a globalized world, I expected them to still have the market cornered on fashion.

So I say this to you, young Hungarians: one popped collar might not seem like a big deal. But it takes just one bad seed to start a cascade of tool-ish dressing. Soon, your hip bars, your grungy-proud Szimplas and unassuming Potkulcs could be filled, not with people dressed in the requisite crumpled black of Euro cool, but in the over-J.Crew-ified world of well-pressed polo shirts.

And need I even warn you about the evil which is soon to follow the popped collar? Yes, even to you, the Critter Pants could emerge.

Let’s not take any chances, shall we? Should you find my rogue collar popper, kindly turn it down for him. Then slap him upside the head.  I — and your country — shall thank you for it.

 

Spring Fling II: Remains of the Red

One thing which caught my attention as an immediate difference between Hungary and Bulgaria was how each approached their Communist past. Of course, I know I am speaking about this as an outsider, and as someone who is not trained, schooled or otherwise an expert in any way about this history. But, when Carolyn took me to the main city park in Sofia, we were greeted with this:

Socialist Realist Statue

close-up

It was strange, for me, to see these Socialist-Realist pieces right in the “regular” city.  In Hungary, the statues were all pulled down, and now most of them reside at Memento Park, an outdoor museum located outside the city center. We also have the Terrorhaza, or House of Terror, museum in Budapest. Located at the former headquarters of the secret police, this museum is an excellent walk through the two oppressive regimes in Hungary, the Arrow Cross (Hungarian Nazis) and the Communist party. With extensive descriptions of each time, the museum is as informative as it is moving (I particularly like the room dedicated to propaganda, where one is literally surrounded by the ideology, as the whole room is papered in advertisements. A clever curatorial decision, to make literal the feeling many must have had).

For American visitors to post-Soviet countries, there is a whole market of “Commie Kitsch” — tours in Traubis, the ability to buy giant Lenin-shaped candles, and oodles and oodles of stands at the flea markets offering vintage pins from the Socialist era. (Berlin, for instance, really capitalizes on this in certain places). And I suppose I can understand why, from a certain angle, people might “sell” this idea: it does indeed sell, because for a certain age group (of which yours truly belongs) in American/Western society, the Communist countries are that recent past for which we have such big blinders – that time too “new” to make the canon of compulsory history lessons like the Revolution or the Civil War, but still having occurred so young in our youth that we remember only blurred news photos, if we remember it at all. Yet, that kind of thumbing-your-nose at the idea still leaves me feeling a bit creepy, a bit put-off, as if we who didn’t suffer are getting our giggles of those who did. It is kind of like how I felt about that certain set of Serious Graduate Student who would self-proclaim themselves “Marxist” because it was seen as a super-hip, anti-establishment stance. 

 

Spring Fling I: Surprisingly Sweet Sofia. (No, Really.)

Coming back from 10 days of Spring Break-ing, which came on the heels of a short jaunt to London, means the old blog has been pretty thin on the ground, particularly as I have tried to catch up in terms of my “homework” and other responsibilities. But I have returned, with some lovely stories from Bulgaria, and from Istanbul.

To start with, Sofia, Bulgaria — where I met up with, Carolyn, another Fulbright ETA (and the main reason I have my Fulbright, as she was our fellowships advisor at Georgetown. Before I came to visit, Carolyn had blogged about wanting to “sell” Sofia to me, worried that the city — and indeed the whole country — were viewed negatively in the imagination of Westerns (and particularly us hard-to-please Americans).  Well, after looking at some of the material published on Bulgaria, I have to say Carolyn’s worry is valid: it doesn’t seem those who are supposed to be promoting Bulgaria do all that good a job of it. Her Lonely Planet guidebook is full of negative comments and asides about the country, claiming you can see Sofia in a day. The only English-language magazine, Vagabond, which I perused while sitting in Carolyn’s apartment, was liberally sprinkled with cutting jokes and Debbie-Downer-style language about the country.Now, I know I have been prone to pointing out my beloved Magyar people’s seeming inability to say anything nice about their own country, but the things written about Bulgaria make the Hungarians look cheerful in comparison.

And, what is more, the claim isn’t true: Sofia definitely deserves more than a day!

Carolyn and I started, after she picked me up at the strangely-bare airport (it was actually nice not to have so many stores calling for your attention, but it was kind of eerie to walk through such open halls — not like at Ferihegy in Budapest, where you HAVE to walk through the giant Duty-Free store to even get to your gate!), by heading back out for some shopping around Carolyn’s  neighborhood. Sofia, it turns out, has an abundance of great stores — in the picture above, yours truly is wearing a scarf (bought for us 4 Bulgarian lev…or something like $2.50).

Alexander Nevskiy Cathedral

The scarf, however, is not the true story — that is the Scarf Lady, who sells them. A thin, willowly older woman, topped with a beret, and, of course, a jaunty scarf, this woman greeted Carolyn and I as if we were visiting dignitaries, clasping both of my hands in her wrinkled ones while Carolyn introduced me. We bantered a bit in French — she speaks only Bulgarian and French — and then she began to display her wares. Carolyn, through her previous talks with scarf lady, had discovered she was once a ballerina, and she moved with all the grace of one. While her scarves are in expensive polyester (Dolce and Gabbana this is not), she treated each as if it was a precious piece, walking outside to fling the scarves we chose over her shoulder and show flashy ways of tying them. I’d defy anyone to not be charmed by her!

Following scarf lady, we enjoyed some more shopping, particularly Paradise Garage, a store which displays the work of young Bulgarian designers, where we each picked up some hip, urban-chic gear and had a lovely chat with the fashionable owner (check out Carolyn’s review here)

Relieved of some lev, we began doing the more “touristy” things, including checking out the town’s main cathedral. Since Bulgarians tend to be Orthodox, I found peeking in churches here particularly interesting — the Orthodox style, all covered in gold. In the plazas nearby, vendors sold scores of gold-painted icons, and the last of the martenitsas, a Bulgarian tradition for spring. These are little pins and bracelets made of red and white string, which one picks up on the first day of March and wears until one sees the first blossoming tree. Then, you hang your martenitsa up on the flowering tree, bringing in good luck for the new season.

 

News From Abroad, II

Maybe the New York Times is reading my posts about being too down on Hungary, because the front page, around 11 a.m. Hungarian time, today, had this upbeat story “Hungary’s Spirits Are Back Up, on a Horse,”

The writer here tries to draw a parallel between America’s Seabiscuit and a Hungarian winner called Overdose.  It is too simple a comparison, to be sure, but it is an interesting story.

And it even brings up Trianon and the loss of Greater Hungary. Of course. Because I haven’t heard about that enough in my 7+ months here …

 

3 Happy Thoughts For Friday

1)  Budapest has burst into spring — the cafe tables are out, it has been in the low 70s (whatever that is in Celsius … I never did get very good at metric conversions), it’s been lovely enough out that I can go running on Margit Island again, I can finally hang up my winter coat (which smells, permanently I fear, of the millions of secondhand cigarettes faced in a winter’s worth of Hungarian bars),

2) I enjoyed one of said cafe tables with one of my students from my fall class on Women Writers. She is not enrolled at Pazmany this term — she has a job in Switzerland. But she asked for the reading list for the spring class. For fun.

Yes. She asked for a syllabus for fun. My teacher heart exploded a bit.  Or a lot.

3) I ran into a Hungarian I know on the street. OK, that doesn’t sound that happy — but I remember how, before I left D.C., I thought that one of the things I will miss the most is all the spontaneous friend-spotting and chatting which occurs when a city has been “yours” for 8 years. Today, when I ran into a sweet Hungarian boy I met back in November and we had a little talk, I felt how strongly Budapest has become “my” city.

Which could quickly turn into a sad thought, if I think of that return ticket I just booked, and how quickly that date approaches. So I won’t.

More happiness to follow soon, when I get a chance to chronicle the awesome spring break I had, which included, among other things, a near detainment at a border crossing, tromping through the valley of the roses, and a restaurant that mixed Bulgarian nationalism with Bulgarian kitsch to delightful effect. (For now, I have to get back to my “wild” Friday night: singing Mamma Mia! tunes with my favorite 14-year-old, Lily the daughter-of-a-fellow-Fulbrighter).

 

No News is Good News?

As I’ve probably mentioned before, this semester I am teaching a class on Journalism History — it is an attempt to teach American history through journalism, as well as try to explain what about American journalism is unique/ how journalism makes America unique. While I was, once upon a time, a journalist, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a historian. Truth be told, the last U.S. History class I took was in high school — AP with Mr. Andrews, a lovable mullet-ed tattooed type (this was Pittsburgh, after all) prone to snapping a plastic model of a toilet in the face of a students who offered (his words) “crappy answers.”  Hence, in my search for creative pedagogical techniques, I hit upon using what I know: specifically, journalists. I’ve been interviewing some journalist friends of mine and using Skype to record the calls, making for guest lectures that don’t require the physical presence of said guest. I started with my former roommate, Amanda, who works for the washingtonpost.com as a Senior Producer.  Although she is now in Arts & Living, and more likely to follow, say, movie stars than international issues, she started on the night news desk and was able to give a lot

Anyway, one of the questions my students had was “How does the paper decide which foreign countries to cover”. And, specifically, why does Hungary get in the news (or, as is more likely, not get in the US news?)

We looked at the homepages of several US papers in class, trying to figure out what their layout had to say about American concerns yesterday. No Hungary to be found, I asked why the students through this was. After all, the country is currently in a weird flux limbo state: their Prime Minister resigned, then said he didn’t really mean it, then resigned and appointed another guy, to the screams of the other party. I mean, in my opinion, a Prime-Minister-less country is headline worthy. So why no news love? One student had an answer It isn’t sensationalist enough yet, he said. Someone needs to do something crazier, or things need to get worse.

And today, it looks like he might be right.  When I logged on for my daily morning scan of the New York Times, I was greeted with the front-and-center story being on Hungary: “Politics Add to Turmoil in Hungary.” Complete, as you will see by clicking on the link, with the saddest-looking shot of an old Magyar lady you could imagine.  (she’s even got the babushka on, just in case you weren’t sure if she was “other” enough).

Now, Hungary is in bad straits, yes. The country has problems. Big ones. Another student, hearing my protests that I do really like Budapest and I am not just saying it to be polite, reminded me that Foreign people always love Hungary. That’s because they aren’t from here.  It was a statement that jarred me, but that I also know is true. I am living in Hungary, but not as a Hungarian. I have one “job” with the Fulbright, and it pays me enough to live quite comfortably on. I have another job to count on back in the U.S. I know who my president is.  I am a lucky little being, to be sure.

But, at the same time, I have to cringe a bit when I see Sad Magyar Lady gloaming out from the Times front page. Because if this is all your average American sees, then they do get this negative impression of the country. That is not to say this isn’t a fair or good article, or that it isn’t needed: Americans, mired in our own economic crisis, need to understand how much worse it can get elsewhere, as well as how our actions reverberate (because, indeed, the troubles of Europe our intimately tied to the grandiose screwups of our own greedy moguls and bad policies). But (and there is always a but), part of me still itches to add a paragraph reminding the US reader that Hungary isn’t a gray, backwater place, and that today, even with the resigned PM and low forint exchange rate, the sun is shining, people are out, enjoying the warmth in the cafés (some even … gasp …smiling!) and I just finished talking with a very happy student who succeed in getting into a medical school in New York. So good things happen here, too.

And, just to prove that point, the # 5 most e-mailed story on the New York Times at 1:35 p.m. Hungarian time is a happier Hungarian tale: the resurgence of the Mangalitsa pig (written by our Fulbright exchange teacher, Amy’s, husband!). 

So, Hungarian life can be hard. But delicious too.

 

Jaj Nekem!

In the battle of Me vs. Magyarul, it seems magyarul (Hungarian language) is once again winning. As much as I loved meeting a bunch of American Fulbrighters to Italy at the Berlin Conference, the fact that I spent a few nights showing off my (still bad, but far superior to Hungarian) Italian has only increased my Itali-garian problem, where I try to start a sentence in Hungarian and it comes out partially in Italian. This is only compounded by all the words that sound the same in the two languages but mean completely different things — like io (Italian for “I”) and jó (Hungarian for “good”), both of which sound like the English “yo!”.

Over the past two weeks of Hungarian class, I have continued my role as comic relief by doing the following:

- I attempted to be amusing during a skit and have a line where I asked for a “handsome Hungarian man’s telephone number. Instead, I asked for his telephone bill.

- While describing my trip to Berlin, I said I saw the city’s cathedral. Instead of calling it “very big,” I somehow said it was “very church-y”. When Gabi, the teacher, tried to correct my, I, frustrated, insisted that it was actually quite church-y, saying There was a whole lot of Jesus! Many Jesuses everywhere! until poor Gabi was laughing so hard she relented and agreed that a church could be church-y.

and, my personal favorite…

- we learned the word emlék which means “remembrance”. I was very excited because the word sounded familiar, so I said, in my bad broken Hungarian that I say many signs that had a similar word on historic buildings. When I tried to pronounce the word, I said something like “moo-mel-ake”. Which made Gabi start laughing like crazy. I got flustered and insisted, “No, no — they’re all over Castle Hill! Yes there are lots of them by the castle!”

Apparently, I was trying to say műemlék, which does indeed indicate that a building is of historic importance. But instead I said, műmellek.

Which means “fake breasts.”

Jaj!

 

Western Travels, Eastern “Home”

I’ve just returned from my first ever trip to Germany that wasn’t solely based in an airport (I always seem to come through Frankfurt…): a five-day jaunt to Berlin for an conference organized for all the Fulbrighters in Europe. In short, I’m very glad I finally was able to leave the terminal. Berlin is a very cool city — and an extremely large one, after being used to the rather small, centralized city Budapest is. I got to see the gorgeous Rococo gildedness of the Charlottenburg Castle, climb to the top of the Parliament (Reichstag) to gaze at the illuminated city at night, and  see the remains of the Berlin Wall, the fall of which is my first memory of seeing something on the news (my father pulling me out of playing dress-up or whatever I was doing at the age of 7 to plunk me down in front of the T.V. and say “You need to see this. It is important”).

Obligatory Tourist Shot in front of Brandenburg Gate

Remains of The Wall, near Checkpoint Charlie

But more so that just the city itself, the people we met made the weekend. The conference programming was mostly centered on Fulbrighters to Germany — the German Fulbright program is huge, about 300 people, and they host — but for those of us outside of Germany, especially those of us in less-than-common destinations, the evening receptions and such were really the point: we got to talk about an experience few people can understand. Like the second night, at dinner, when Natalie, Sarah and I met a group of Fulbright English Teaching Assistants to Slovakia. Immediately, Natalie made a joke about the tense Hungarian-Slovakian relationship (no joking matter, really, with both the historical issue over Hungary’s division following WWII, and the recent bitterness by Hungarians over Slovakia moving to the Euro, whilst Hungary remains on the continually-depreciating forint, but I digress…), which led to a very amusing discussion over dinner of all the “joys” of living in Eastern Europe (i.e. misspeaks in the difficult new languages; the Budapest Kontroll vs. the Slovakian “foreign police”; the never-ending process which is getting a residency permit; etc.) — which, in many ways, only made me happier to be here.

See, while the large mass of students from Germany (and many of the Western European countries) were all very nice and interesting, they still kind of seemed like college kids on study-abroad. Germany has a different culture than the US, no doubt — but it is harder to distinguish that difference after living somewhere in the East. As Margaret, one of the visiting professors to Hungary put it in her presentation, “I know there is a financial crisis here in Germany too, but compared to Hungary, I can’t believe it.”  These places in the East — while still part of the EU, part of globalization, part of all that sphere of cultural melding together — still require a little more work, a little more flexibility, a little more openness to see the frustrations and challenges as something lovable.

One of the Slovakian ETAs, for instance,  in his presentation, referred to his command of Slovak as “I tell my students I am like a dog. I can kind of understand everything you say, I just can’t speak.” Funny, and terribly fitting for my feelings about struggling with my own new language (only I would say I am more like a very slow dog…I need large hand gestures, too).

One of the other bonuses to travel when living somewhere strange? How much more your adopted home becomes home-like when you return. One of the other Slovakian ETAs, Claire, landed on our flight home, and we rode the metro together back into town. My Hungarian is good enough that I could buy her a ticket, and then, on the metro, I suddenly realized I could understand some of the conversations I could overhear. “Oh, that woman said ‘we only had to wait three minutes!’ That one just said ‘I don’t have time today!’” I babbled, surprised that even little things made some sense after a week in German, a language I do not know at all.

Berlin was beautiful; the more-developed West has its advantages. But even though I’m feeling that bit of post-travel let-down, missing new friends and not looking forward to piles of work, I am still feeling happier to have settled in my sometimes-challenging Eastern Europe “home.”  A beauty found in imperfections, I think, is somehow stronger than the clean-and-easy sparkle.

(more Berlin in pictures below)

 

Premature Nostaglia

The great Toni Morrison, in the dedication to her novel Sula, wrote: “It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.”

With just about three months left (three?!? where did it all go?) in my Hungarian/European adventures  — being due back in the U.S. by late June for my “second job” … professional bridesmaid — I am feeling that way, only about a city, not a person. I am nostaglic for Budapest before I have even left it.

Last night, I met an old friend of mine, Marynia, a Polish-Canadian-American girl I met some ten years ago while at Governor’s School. Three years ago, Marynia took leave of her New York life to begin working as a correspondent for Reuters in Warsaw, and was coming through Budapest with her boyfriend, a Dutch radio correspondent covering Eastern Europe. As we sat in Szimpla, rhapsodizing on our love of Eastern Europe,  how much fun we were having and how happy we were not to be lawyers (a path taken by so many of our friends, it seems), Marynia asked me if I was ready to go back to the States.

No, I emphatically said. She asked why I didn’t think of staying more, and I explained how I do have a dream job awaiting at home and how as much as I love teaching here, I know that the terribly low salaries a Hungarian English teacher makes mean I couldn’t really feasibly make this move permanent.

But I’m still feeling a premature ache of missing Budapest. How is it that nearly seven months have passed since I landed? How has the 4/6 villamos become as familar as the Orange Line metro? And how is it that I have somehow felt more like myself here, where I barely understand a word, where I have no ties of culture or heiritage, than I have in many years? As Marynia and I discussed over száraz vörös bor last night, there is something immensely beneficial in moving out of the norm you have established for yourself.  We talked about the “crossroads”  feeling you face in your 20s — not sure where to go, and worrying about wrong turns. I certainly felt that before I left last August … and I worried I had somehow turned the “wrong” way a lot.  Now, I’m remembering there are a lot of ways to be happy, a lot of shapes for a life.

I caught a glimpse of the Chain Bridge last night on my way home from Hungarian class, and, all lit up over the Duna, it almost made me cry. I’ll miss you, I thought, staring at it. I’ll miss this, I thought the day before, wandering the Central Market stalls.  It’s hard to grapple with.

But if Morrison is right, that is the true beauty and blessing: to have been somewhere so wonderful, lived something so lovely that it already hurts me to think of leaving makes me quite lucky indeed.

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