Back to Normalcy

On the Town
NAWA held a wine and appetizer get together for the women and their spouses. It was held in what was originally a small villa off Andrássy Ut. Once through the street door we went up the stairs to the next level. It opened on a walkway to the apartment overlooking a courtyard that had two levels of what must have been smaller apartments. We entered the main apartment and were greeted by the hostess. The room was fairly large, had a very high decorated ceiling with a chandelier. The walls were solid mahogany from floor to about three meters and above which was some nice stripped wallpaper followed by some arch designs up to the ceiling. The host told us this whole building had originally been the home of a very wealthy man. When the Russian army arrived in about 1953 they commandeered his villa. He committed suicide. The Russians made his apartment into the officers club and bordello with the smaller apartments, which formerly housed his personal staff, serving as living quarters (possibly for the girls). At some point a false ceiling was installed and the mahogany covered with gypsum board. Then the main apartment was divided up into three smaller units. It remained that way until 2000 when a new owner arrived with the original plans and photos of the villa. The villa was restored. Our host’s lease said he could not do anything at all to the entrance room and that it was now a national treasure. The rest of the apartment was very nice with two large bedrooms, two bathrooms, a dining room, a sitting room, and a kitchen.

We spoke at length with two couples. The first had met in Moscow several years earlier where they had run away to after divorces. Their two staffs played matchmaker. He was trained as an attorney but now was some sort of business advisor and she had run some health care facilities in the states, Moscow and now Budapest. She and I had some discussions about my Fulbright and she was interested in my lectures. I got her email address and said I would keep her posted.

The other couple was from Canada; he was assigned to consult with the Hungarian military while she was taking care of their two teenaged children. We discussed our summer trips to Canada to see the plays at the Shaw and Shakespeare Festivals. He and I chatted about the apartment and my Fulbright while Tari and the wife talked about teenagers, schools and working while raising children as well as some gossip about a couple of people.

Academic Matters
On Wednesday afternoon I presented my first lecture. Twenty-two students had signed up and almost all showed up. All were medical students past their first year. The largest group was from Spain and I got a bit of a cheer when I mentioned we had been in Barcelona last spring when the football team won the League Champions Cup. Other students were from Cyprus, France, Canada, and Israel.

I had prepared 25 powerpoint slides covering American Values, Overview of US governmental structure and the History of Public Health in US from Dr. Boylston getting arrested for giving small pox inoculations in 1721 to the creation of Dept of Health and Human Services in 1980. The students asked some interesting questions and I thought it went well.

Bureaucratic Details
We finally received the residency document from the Landlord that had been mailed at least two weeks earlier. We checked off everything we needed and learned the lease should be in both English and Hungarian. We only had the original English. So I went to an online web translator and managed to get what I think is a reasonable translation into Hungarian. I could only get a paragraph or two translated at a time, but patience paid off. I then went over it and found some untranslated words such as “must.” I decided a synonym could be “required to” and that worked.

We then met with Annamaria at the Fulbright Office. She reviewed everything, had one or two documents “witnessed” and told us how to get to the immigration office in Buda. It was two busses from in front of our building.

Things went very efficiently at the immigration office. We were there by 9:30 and finished before 10:30. They had our materials that Tari submitted in New York in the fall and already had the new six month visas with our pictures. The person at the desk told us that we could carry a copy of the passport, visa and residential permit on us within Hungary but if we went outside the country we would need to carry all originals.

As a bonus, the immigration office was across the road from Ujbuda (New Buda) mall with a Tesco. We went in and found crunchy Peanut Butter! We noticed this store had a different variety of items, undoubtedly catering to the ex-pat community with kids that lives on the Buda side. We will come here occasionally to get our “American” staples.

Remote Control
The beauty of the electronic age is that one can do all sorts of things from a distance. Before I left I had Eric the Soc Dept IT guy install remote desktop on my laptop. This would enable me to work from my computer at Michigan State and the internet would think I was actually located in East Lansing. This makes it possible for me to access my backup files as well as the department server. I also use it if I am booking flights, otherwise the web pages come up in Hungarian and the prices are either in forints or if in dollars, I may be charged an exchange rate. Once I wanted to listen to some fm radio stream and turned it on. The visual showed the music playing but I couldn’t hear anything. I then realized it was playing in my office at MSU. Similarly I occasionally want to print something and it does print, but not in Budapest.

Tari’s computer has a built in webcam. We have signed on to skype and aol live. This enables us to keep in touch with our kids and more especially our two grandsons, ages 4 and 2. It was fun seeing them. We carried the laptop around our apartment to show them the layout. When we got to the long entrance hall the older boy shouted, “can you run in the hall?” So I ran in the hall and then they ran in their hall. We had a good laugh.

I am on the executive committee of the American Lung Association of Midland States (MI, OH, KY and TN). I have been able to participate in meetings using the webcam. Budapest is six hours ahead of US Eastern Time and seven a head of Chicago and St. Louis. This means that morning meetings in US are late afternoon for me and afternoon meetings are from dinner until bed time. But it has taken us a while to first set it up on both ends and then to make it work. At one point I was asked to accept and join Logictech, but when I clicked to join, that page came up in Hungarian and I was lost as to what to click on. But we restarted the call and after some adjustments I was able to participate on the conference call.