Monthly Archives: March 2008

while I have travelled around this country and into its neighbors, after six months I haven’t quite made it to the wednesday/saturday market 200 feet down the street.

thanks to a couchsurfer on a szentendre tour, I have remedied this situation. should I ever be in need of cheap clothing or pickled vegetables, I now know exactly where to go  ; )

I leave tonight for Budapest, so that I can be up early to pick up a rental car, to pick up Caley at a bus station in the middle of nowhere, to head… to Serbia. I’ll be surfing, thus with locals, and they don’t think there should be a problem. Even given the current frustration of Serbs over the recognition of Kosovo (Croatia, Bulgaria, and now even Hungary have just joined the chorus of voices in their favor). We won’t be in Belgrade, or Kosovo for that matter, but Novi Sad should be interesting on a number of levels. Since we’ll be properly mobile (get me, I’m driving around the Balkans!!) I’ve a feeling we’ll pop into Bosnia as well. Wish me luck  : )

Spiderman is in love with the fairies. But the fairies hate spiderman. He climbs the mount everest because that’s where the fairies live. the witches turn him into a pig. spiderman didn’t know that he was a pig. the fairies were having a picnic on a marsh. they were listening to music. spiderman went there. the fairies were scared. the fairies changed him into a homework board. the students went there and wrote on the board : stupid. the end.

- ék as an ending means they ___

ék = to split apart

I got all excited, thinking I’d found an insight into the linguistic motivations behind the cultural phenomenon of hungarians kicking each other when they’re down, until I realized that usually the -ék has no accent (-ek). thankfully, my generous friend salvaged my ego with this ::

“the ‘é’ is just an additional vocal, saving the hungarians pronounce two not matching consonant“

theory saved :: to pair unmatching hungarian bits, you must split them apart : )

wandering home after a night in budapest I found my lovely old neighbor wrangling her shrubbery. beautiful yellow flowers blanketed the dusty yard as she struggled to hold tree branches down whilst attacking them with pruning shears.

a little slow on the uptake, while wondering if I should dump my ginger ale and overnight bag before or after offering assistance, the aforementioned branch swings up as she bends down to gather trimmings and smilingly present them to me. I mime ‘really, for me’ in my polite / making sure said object is actually a gift way. she giggles and rushes into her house, returning moments later with a small pottery vase filled with blossoming sunshine. in case I didn’t entirely get the message, she returned to the house to drag out another example.

I use the opportunity presented by replacing half a dozen vases to put down my stuff, leaving my door open to avoid “I’ve accepted a gift then walked away without ado” miscommunication. hands free, I rejoin her under the tree and mime my intended offer. “jo, jo, jo!” I’ve no idea what aesthetic model she had in her mind but it was certainly vivid; she sheared twenty years off her appearance by the swift movement of her determined shears. job done we collected the remnants, which she ran off to present to another neighbor, a less mobile lovely old lady who’d been watching us quietly from a chair just inside her door.

chores done, my lovely star lady proceeded to walk me around the courtyard pointing out every single flowering blossom, no matter tiny or obscure. we got into a discussion of bulbs, and she brought out another example from what I can only imagine is a house entirely covered in flowers, this time to snag some of my nicely loamy store-bought soil with the world’s daintiest white plastic spoon. I showed her my own bulbs, still in their packaging, and she left after making me promise I’d plant them today. a smidge of dirt remains under my fingernails as I type even now.

I can’t honestly say which pleased me more – the childlike joy in sharing spring, or the well of hope produced by watching a 90 year old woman skipping.

late one night above the lights of buda, my friend posed a question that a number of hungarians seem to ponder, belying a unique ability to look directly at their own geographically influenced patterns of thought as though they were not indeed a part therein. to make comparisons, notice contradictions, and generally be more selfculturally aware than just about anyone I’ve ever known.

we all bear evidence of our civilizations. on occasion we can even catch a glimpse of our selves out of the corner of an eye. others still compare general cultural traits (loud americans…). but it’s a rare westerner indeed who routinely checks his own thought process for traces of ingrained perspectives.

a brilliantly dry wit, the number one justification of my draw to hungary. this new sort of question is undoubtably number two.