Posted by: Robin Tennenbaum

28Sep / 2014

Danke Ungarn

 

What happens to you after three weeks in Europe. Too many carbs!

 

We are, at present, seated on British Airways flight 865 from Budapest’s Lizst Ferenc Airport headed for Heathrow on the first of the three flights that will ultimately get us home. We are ready for home, I think. It’s been a month since we slept in our own bed, a month since I was last at the gym, a month since I saw a vegetable that wasn’t more than garnish.

But at the same time I don’t want to go. Not because this is a vacation – I work for myself, do what I like and on my own terms so this has actually been more work than my work. But, I don’t want to go home because I wish a lot of things about the US were more like Europe. I wish we were kinder, and quieter (really this; all over Europe we could hear entire conversations of Americans seated nowhere near us). I wish we acted less entitled. I wish we listened more and pretended we knew less. I wish we cared – not about the next sightseeing excursion, the next way to spend our almighty (not so much really) dollar, but about the people we are walking past and the lives they lead.

We watched boats full of people (mostly American) pour onto the shores of the Danube, and we listened to them, (couldn’t help but) at dinner, and were appalled. Appalled at how they could look at these people, at these proud, incredibly honorable and hardworking Hungarians and see a server to be bullied, a front desk agent to be argued with, a bartender who is working as such instead of as an Engineer, as someone to be looked down on, rather than understood. (The government here is a choice between bad and worse and the Hungarian unemployment rate is very high. The birth rate is drastically low as young Hungarians expatriate for better jobs.)

This is a remarkable country, Hungary. The people are remarkable. They wear their uniforms with a sense of pride you don’t see elsewhere. Taxi drivers are in suits, with tie. Servers in restaurants take great care to look sharp. Even ticket takers at museums are dressed to perfection, and that’s a thing ingrained. These are a people who value their work, and it shows. One of our guides said that to speak English well is not a badge of honor, but to not speak English well is shameful. This, coming from a country where the only other language taught until 1989 was Russian.

Ronald Reagan never visited Hungary, but there is a statue of him midway between Parlaiment and the US Embassy, and it comes off as something of a joke, if you know the truth.* The truth is that he stood at the Brandenberg Gate and implored Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, but it was Hungary which knocked out the first blocks. On the 11th of September 1989, Hungary did the unthinkable. With little fanfare, they simply opened the border to Austria and instructed the guards not to shoot any people from the Soviet Block nations who attempted transit without permission. As Hungary was one of the few countries to which East Germans could travel, it became the way out for many Germans, and whole families were reunited on the far side of the border outside Heygshalom.

Hungarians decided enough was enough and took their rights as a country back. Shortly after, so did the East Germans. And eventually all the rest.

But that’s not what we learn in History Class. We learn about Glastnost and Reagan and we watch filmstrips of David Hasslehoff singing on the Berlin Wall. Nobody talks about Hungary and their quiet act of revolution.

This billboard can be found just past the Margarit Bridge on the Buda side of the Danube. It is a thank you from Germany to Hungary for opening the border and beginning the end of a regime that meant heartbreak, terror, death and economic repression for millions of people.

We learn about East Germany in the US, but if you’re very smart and very lucky, you get to come to a place like Budapest, and have parts of your world that you knew needed upending tossed on their pretty, porcelain little heads and shattered. And that is all for the better.

If you listen, if you ask, and if you care, you become less a cog in the machine that is Ugly American Syndrome and become part of this world and the incredible people in it.

Danke, Ungarn (thank you, Hungary). We needed that.

Jim and I have another post we are planning, either late tonight (eastern) or tomorrow from JFK. A recap and awards presentation, so make sure to keep reading. For now my tray table is up and locked, my seat belt is fastened and it’s time to go home. Ready or not.

I love you all.

Robin

* To be fairly comparative, all Berlin has is a plaque in the sidewalk near the gate commemorating where Reagan gave his speech; it’s certainly no billboard.

 

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26Sep / 2014

No Pithy Title; I am Fresh Out of Pith

 

No pith so I’ll lead with the good stuff. How beautiful is that?
And yes, I actually took that picture, thanks. No postcard this time.

 

Those of you who know me well will find the following utterly unsurprising:

I got sick.

For someone as generally healthy as I am, I have the most porous immune system ever, and it bit me in the ass again. I got yet another traveling cold, and am sucking down hot tea at an astonishing rate.

So last night, Jim goes on an adventure to find me cold medicine after hours. A nice taxi driver takes him to an all night apoteke (drugstore) which, like a Las Vegas pawn shop operates out of a window at night. After some show and tell and some pointing, he comes back with a box, which I gladly take. Four hours of pacing later we realize the stuff had Sudafed in it. Full strength Sudafed. Up all night with the pacing around the room jitters. But no cold symptoms.

No sleep either.

But I am no wimp, Gang. There were tours to take and carbohydrates to eat, and so I bundled up in my heavy jacket, shoved tissues in every available pocket, and headed off with guide Aniko and our driver Zoltan to see the suburban town of Szentendre, which had been billed as an artist colony and cute little town with galleries and small shops and museums.

I’m sure by now you all know me and my blog well enough to know where this is headed. What was billed and what was observed were not exactly the same thing. Szentendre, while still a very pretty town with a substantive artist colony, was less a charming little village and more a tourist trap. Shlock souvenir stands filled the storefronts, most of them filled with the same kind of “paprika/tea towel/embroidered items/magnets and coffee mug” those stuff that we’ve seen all over. There was a Herren (high end Hungarian porcelain) store but even better, we found some quirky little museums that made the whole thing worthwhile.

In the Micro Museum you could see micro miniature art. This is a grain of rice on its side with a viewing microscope.

This is the view through the scope. A solid serving set of goblets and pitcher in solid gold, all invisible to the naked eye. The artist is Ukranian and has had a couple of exhibitions in the US. I don’t know why he has a permanent display in Szentendre, but it was cool to look at.

We also went to the permanent exhibition on Margit Kovacs, a Hungarian ceramic artist who really pushed the bounds of what can be done with ceramics. Many of her pieces look like they were made of wood or cast metal, they were beautifully created but you couldn’t take pictures and although I bought some postcards, I am sick and so no pictures for you today.

Instead, to honor the fact that we start heading home Sunday, you can have a picture of some cactuses made entirely out of marzipan, which is almond paste (like the stuff inside bear claw and almond croissants) that is colored, shaped and molded and left to harden. We went to an entire gallery of things made from marzipan (the marzipan museum) which was full of fun and playful displays made of the stuff. It mostly resembled very good polymer clay work, and so it was hard to remember that all of the items were (at one point anyway) entirely edible.

Marzipan Princess Diana
 

After the tour (which was filled with lots of good information from our guide on the area’s history, and the life of Kovacs and the founding of Herren) we came back to the hotel for me to try and nap, which didn’t work, and then we went for a very nice dinner and our evening jaunt up the river. But not before sharing one of these for dessert:

Those are hollow funnel shaped dough logs baked over a fire and then rolled in a topping of your choice, like vanilla sugar, cinnamon (what we had) nuts or coca. It’s a local “street food” and was really tasty.

Then Jim and I bypassed the crowded tour boats packed stem to stern with tourists and got on our tiny little boat for the trip up river. The guys who ran the boat were great, we got one trip up and back slowly so we could stand on the stern and take pictures, and then they sped up and did the whole thing again at speed, racing around the bridge abutments and whipping us around parliament. Despite how low we were to the water and how relatively choppy it was, we got some great pictures and had a blast.

Budapest is beautiful at night. (Budapest is beautiful any time of day but especially so at night.) And I’m so glad we took the private boat. We had so much fun and it was the exact right way to see the amazing place all lit up.

I don’t know what tomorrow holds, so I don’t know what to tease. I am pretty damn sick, and all the activity today didn’t help but it is our last day on our trip so I don’t know what we are going to do about me and the head cold of inevitability I finally came down with.

I have a couple of wrap up posts I wanted to write (one about the Hungarian people) and Jim and I were thinking about the Pflegenbaum Travel Awards for the best (and most Swarovski-like) parts of the trip so if we stick close to home and the lovely spa here at the Kempinski Hotel Corvinus, maybe I’ll work on those.

Either way I bid you a fond (and stuffy adieu), Home soon!

 

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