Time Warp

Budapest is six hours ahead of US Eastern Time Zone. Adjusting to jet lag after the flight is one thing. But trying to keep track of appointments and video cam calls in two time zones six hours apart is quite another. I had hoped to keep this blog focused on events in Budapest, but that is no longer possible. The past two weeks have involved frequent real time interactions in which I had to make allowances for time difference and let others know that as well.

Olympics
Maybe it started with the Olympics. We discovered all the figure skating started at midnight Budapest time and ended at 4 am in the morning. Tari finally figured out that we could tape using the TV system in the apartment. By then we had missed both the pairs and men’s competitions. When we tried to tape the dance competition we missed the final six teams in the original dance since EuroSports cut away from live coverage (probably at 3 am) and showed the final group later when we weren’t taping. Tari persisted and by the time the free dancing started we were able to tape all night and watch it the next day.

Lung Association Business
My time warp problems involved a series of video cam calls for the lung association located in Columbus OH. I found out about Skype and we tried it once in January, but the sound and picture were very poor. So I went on line and bought a nice video cam from Amazon and had it delivered to the Columbus office. We did get it to work on both ends. The morning meeting in Columbus became a mid afternoon meeting in Budapest, and lunch break in Columbus was dinner time in Budapest. I told them I couldn’t do evening meetings because, like the Olympics, seven pm in Columbus was one am here.

Then in early February the executive committee starting having calls at least twice a week. I would call into one of the officers via computer using Windows live. I was able to hear the others on speaker phone just fine, but they had problems hearing me.

Luckily the time warp doesn’t affect our video cam calls to see our grandsons. Eight am Central (4 pm in Budapest) is a great time for them—they are up, fed, and running. At one point we showed them a Thomas the Train book we bought that had both Hungarian and English in it. Our son pointed out that the words appeared backwards. That was in Skype. When we switched to Windows live and showed the book, he could read it. We have no idea why Skype shows things reversed.

Publish and Publicity
Ten days ago I got an email about an article I co-authored which had just appeared in Public Health Reports on determining which children to test for elevated blood lead levels. My coauthors and I knew the article would appear in the March-April issue but didn’t quite expect to be asked about it in mid February. Word spread quickly and we were contacted by the MSU State News, the campus newspaper, and the MSU Media Communications Office. The student reporter emailed me some questions but wasn’t out of class until 3:30 pm which was already 9:30 pm in Budapest. We exchanged a few emails and she made her evening deadline just before I went to bed. The MSU Media Communications Office didn’t have a tight deadline, but still most of the email exchanges were late afternoon to late evening for me.

Missed Time
Unfortunately, I messed up and missed a major presentation. I was asked to talk to a group of faculty. I later asked about the faculty meeting on that Friday but was told there was no such meeting. So I erased it from my calendar. I then scheduled a lunch on Friday and was about to leave when I got a call asking if I was coming to make the presentation to the faculty seminar. I had mistakenly assumed that faculty meetings were the same as faculty seminars. I was upset and felt badly because I had clearly inconvenienced many people. Hopefully it will be rescheduled and I will double check before erasing things from my calendar, making sure exactly what the event is called.

On the Town
Tari has been here six weeks and it was time to have her hair done. Helga kindly made an appointment at her hair salon in Buda for Tari. The woman spoke some English but Helga made sure everyone was on the same page. Tari’s hair stylist at home had given her the color information and assured it it would be understood. It was. Helga left and Tari had her hair cut and colored just like at home.

That night we celebrated by going to a very nice French restaurant near our flat. The food was excellent, the price reasonable. A harpist played a variety of melodies, some of which we recognized amidst his jazzing them up. The music gave atmosphere without drowning out the ability to hold a conversation.

Academic Matters
On Monday I briefly met the faculty in Helga’s department of Social Science in Health at Semmelweis. I had already agreed to give a few presentations in two of the classes later this spring. I am not sure what else I might be involved with. On Friday I met with a health economist at Corvinus. He was interested in my views on Clinton-Obama health reform. I tentatively agreed to give a presentation on that and then one on my experiences doing program evaluation.

I gave my class lecture on Wednesday but spent most of my free time putting together my talk for next Monday on a Sociologist’s Perspective on the Plague of Athens, 429 BC for faculty and graduate students in history at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). I was basically staring from scratch since at MSU this was a graduate seminar topic in which the students did the presenting and I guided the discussion. This time I had to really lay out the application of collective behavior and social movements to Thucydides account of the plague. At one point I discovered that Sophocles had written Oedipus Rex right after the plague and had added some references to the plague into his version of the traditional story. One reference to the plague was translated as Aries “though without targe or steel he stalks.” I looked up targe and discovered it was an infantry shield used in the 13th to 16th centuries. Sorry but Aries didn’t have a targe and certainly didn’t carry steel. I finally found a translation that said he was without his bronze shield which made a whole lot more sense.