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.