Orientation Week

This week was consumed by the Fulbright orientation. We met the other Fulbrighters who were starting in February, along with some spouses. We went around the room and introduced ourselves. We are a diverse group including a free lance writer, an animal nutrition specialist, an IT systems guy, and two health people including myself. Two of the spouses were also in a health related area.

We were greeted by the head of the Hungarian Fulbright Program, Huba Bruchner, and Edward Loo, the public affairs counselor from the US Embassy and one of five Americans on the Hungarian Fulbright Commission. Loo was wearing a lapel pin featuring both the US and Hungarian flags. When he was about to leave I asked him if he could get us some. He said he’d try and at dinner that night he passed them out. Over dinner he asked me a bit more about health care reform. I told him I had become a political wonk since finding out about my Fulbright assignment. He then said he had mentioned me to some people at the embassy and the press might be contacting me.

Most of the day was spent learning about Hungarian history. Although populated since Neolithic times and occupied by the Romans, the Hungarian tribes arrived between 800 and 900. In the year 1000 King Istvan (Stephen) the Saint converted to Christianity and was allegedly sent a holy crown from Pope Sylvester II with the approval of Otto III, the Holy Roman Emperor. The crown still survives and is on display in the Parliament Building. But it spent about 30 years in Ft. Knox, KY. The crown guards had taken it to Vienna when the Russians invaded in late 1944-early 1945. The US then came into possession of it and stored it in Ft. Knox for safe keeping. (It would have added an interesting twist to James Bond Goldfinger). It was returned to Hungary in 1978 and marked the beginning of good relations between Hungary and US.

The Hungarians managed to keep a linguistic and national identity despite being surrounded by Slavic, Germanic and Romance language groups and a Turkish occupation of 150 years. They gained some quasi independence from the Austrian Hapsburgs between 1848 and 1867. The major political figures of this time have bridges or metro stops named after them. Hungary was on the losing side in WWI and lost about two-thirds of its territory. They thought they could get these territories back from Czechoslovakia, Romania and Croatia by siding with the Germans in WWII but lost again. The Hungarians didn’t cooperate with the Germans on the Jews until Eichmann was sent in 1944. Then the Soviet army arrived in the late fall, and like at Warsaw, camped on one side of the river and exchanged bombardments with the German artillery entrenched in the Buda hills for a long and bloody siege of 100 days. The damage was extensive but not as great as in Warsaw. Very few scars remain today. The Hungarians tried to revolt in 1956 but failed. In the late 1960’s they started to slowly break away from the Soviet domination. OK, enough history.

The last part of the day was our first Hungarian lesson. The teacher is a linguist and started out in Hungarian getting us to catch on that she was saying my name is ____and then motioning to us to repeat using our names. It was an interesting session. At one point one of the men asked how to say “yes dear” to his wife in Hungarian. So she wrote igenis dragom which is literally yes, dear (or expensive one). We noted that dragom was close to dragon in English and had a good laugh. Also the word for economics (közgazdaságtan) included the letters gaz and someone asked if economics was full of gas. I joked to the free lance writer that this could end up in one of his short stories.

The next evening we went to the opera to see Eugene Onegin, sung in Russian with Hungarian supertitles. In the first act we saw the word dragom. The singers were very good and the production excellent. Tatiana wore a white dress in the first act, a grey pants suit type outfit in the second and a black dress in the third. Onegin wears a white suit throughout (although one wonders if he is really that good a guy). Olga, the flirty younger sister and Lensky, Olga’s suitor, wear red. In the first act the peasants’ chorus is dressed in Soviet style Mr. Green Jeans outfits. In the second the chorus wears red 1920s gangster/flapper outfits and does some sort of closed swing to the famous waltz. In the final act, they are dressed in gold, the men wearing eighteenth century suits and the women in gowns with panniers that extended the width of the skirt. The 24 couples pulled off a magnificent Polonaise on the stage which is tilted about 30 degrees to the right. Tari and I hadn’t seen this kind of costuming since a Hamlet at the Public Theatre in NYC in the l960s with Claudius dressed as Fidel Castro.

We had a whole series of other presentations on Hungarian politics (a Parliamentary election will be held in April and most expect a change in government), music (Liszt, Kodály, Bartok) and architecture (complete with a short tour of the city pointing out various architectural styles. We learned that our apartment building is practically over Contra Aquincum, the first Roman legion fort on the east side of the Danube). We had two additional Hungarian lessons as well. The teacher had made a book and some CDs to work on once the class was finished. When explaining the Hungarian grammar of adding everything—personal identifiers, direct object identifiers, prepositions etc—at the end of the root word, she said that English was becoming the world language because of its word order which didn’t require a variety of endings etc. I didn’t mention that my contribution to the epidemiology class power points was to straighten out the word order on a few of the slides.

On Friday we were joined by the students and high school teachers who were in Hungary for the whole academic year. The newly appointed US Ambassador to Hungary Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis came and said a few words. She mentioned that her husband, Markos Kounalakis, had covered the fall of Communism in Budapest in 1989 for Newsweek. He had taken her around the city recalling how things were twenty years ago compared to now. She then asked the American Fulbright students if any of them had Hungarian heritage. Three raised their hands and the ambassador engaged them in some brief conversations. At the end, she answered a few general questions on US policy towards Hungary but couched it in the bigger US—Russian—Eastern Europe approach of the Obama Administration.

We then went to the Library of the National Academy of Sciences, and were privileged to have lunch in the Akademia Club, a private dining room that overlooks the Danube. Afterwards it was up to Castle Hill to the Music Museum and a tour of the Haydn exhibit. Like Prague and Vienna, Budapest claims that every major composer has slept and/or conducted in Budapest.

By the end of the week we were totally exhausted. We celebrated by going to a NAWA party Friday night where we met some interesting “expats” (more in the next installment). We woke up on Saturday and found ourselves a week behind on our laundry schedule with clothes to wear for only two days.