A Hungarian Movie and Sunday Dinner

On Sunday we went for our bagel and lox fix at Spinoza’s. When we walked in we noticed that the back room was quite full of people. At one point a young child came out and started looking at the old victrola record player in the corner behind my chair. The father talked to her in English. We got to chatting and discovered that the brunch was for Democrats Abroad in Hungary. I told him I was here on a Fulbright and giving a talk on US Health Care Reform. He checked with the president and I was allowed to announce my talk on Monday on the Obama plan at the Fulbright Office.

Academic Matters

On Monday I presented at Edina’s class on cultural anthropology and health. She had suddenly taken ill and had gone home. I was shown to the classroom and prepared for the presentation. I was warned that the students were from all over the world. Their expectations of class ranged from a very orderly outlined lecture in which they would never ask a question to wanting to give their uninformed opinions on anything but the presentation topic. I was the true substitute teacher—the students didn’t pay much attention, and those in the back talked almost the whole time. I only spoke for about an hour for a class that was supposed to go for an hour and a half.

Later on Monday I gave the Clinton / Obama Health Care Reform presentation at the Fulbright office. Only a few people showed up, but one was a young woman named Julia. She had just finished her dissertation in history on Health Care in the US. She was a bit disappointed that she did not know I was here so she could have gotten some last minute advice for her dissertation. When she learned I was from MSU she said her father had been their in the late 1980s and she had spent a year at East Lansing High. Small world department, our daughter had been at ELHS the same time. So I sent her to talk with Tari before the talk. They got as far as perhaps getting together on the weekend but then I started the presentation. During the presentation I could see her nodding her head and talking notes. Afterwards I gave her my card in case she wanted to keep in touch.

After my successful moderation of a session for the returning Hungarian Fulbrighters, I was asked to chair a session for the current US Fulbright students who would be making their presentations. I chaired the first session and then sat in on the second. The students ranged from senior undergraduates to doctoral students doing their dissertation research. Several had run into what they considered to be unexpected difficulties accessing documents or data. Of course students everywhere run into these difficulties as well, but these students persevered. One was passed along a chain of potential data sources and finally ended up pretty much where he started with little to show for it. Another realized that she was not going to get access to information on Hungarians in Slovakia without several letters of support and introduction which were not going to come. The two math student gave presentations that non math people could understand. One did a math lesson on finding prime numbers from a “Hungarian” perspective. Essentially he asked a set of questions about how to approach the problem and develop a strategy for a proof rather than trying to logically deduce the proof. In essence he showed me how to “think” like a mathematician. The math grad student explained how computers could check and correct data streams sent in binary for typos and entry errors.

Two other students had developed a short survey on faculty and student reaction to the Bologna Process for harmonizing higher education in Europe by 2010. Bologna called for a three year bachelor’s degree followed by a two year master’s degree and then a standardized three year doctoral degree. Prior to Bologna education was a mix of three to five year bachelor that in Hungary often included a double undergraduate major befoe moving on to a master’s program. The two students had the right idea but their questions were naively worded and not synchronized with their answer foils which ran strongly agree to strongly disagree. Unfortunately many people think that all surveys can be constructed like psychology personality tests. But questions about frequency or awareness or satisfaction should have answer foils ranging from never to always, not at all aware to fully aware or completely dissatisfied to completely satisfied.

I then gave my presentation to the Semmelweis English language medical students. They have organized an international student club that put out a glossy magazine complete with pictures. They also told me they had a Facebook page featuring interviews with various faculty members. I asked if they wanted to interview me although I was only going to be there for the semester which was almost over. They said yes and sent me the ten item survey that had been approved by the dean. Here is the Facebook page. You may have to scroll down to get to me.
http://isas.hu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2290&Itemid=314

On the town

On Thursday I worked on my last lectures—one for the medical students and the other for Edina on the growth of medical science 1400-1900. I had made good progress by early afternoon and decided to take a break. We figured out how to get to Amadeus hotel and restaurant where we had stayed the very first time we were in Budapest in 1999. Tari remembered it had great goulash soup. We took the metro and a bus. We sat outside in the shade, had soft drinks and sweets and thoroughly enjoyed the spring weather. We plan to come here for dinner with our friends and family who will be visiting us in May.

On Friday afternoon we went grocery shopping. What was an adventure in January and February has now become more of a chore. We had to go to three different neighborhood stores to get the items we wanted, and even then several were not available anywhere. If we were staying here longer, we’d have to make a list of which stores at which locations carried which items. The only good thing is that I keep on finding crunch peanut butter in unexpected places, so I no longer face a shortage.

A Hungarian Movie

We then went to a small gathering organized by Bruce, one of the Fulbright professors. He teaches and has been inviting some of his students to get together on Friday evenings for discussions. This Friday he was showing the film A Tanú or The Witness. Made in 1969, it was suppressed for over ten years and but was well received when shown at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. Set in 1949 shortly after the Communist takeover of Hungary, a simple dike watchman on the Danube is arrested for slaughtering a pig in his basement. But the watchman, whose name is Pelikán like the bird, had helped the anti Nazi underground during the war and now has friends in high places. They get him out of jail, give him jobs that he admittedly is ideologically unprepared for, cover up his naïve mistakes that expose the duplicity of the system, and get him out of jail yet again. He is eventually asked to be a witness at a show trial for the man he helped hide during the war.

One of Bruce’s guest was a woman who had lived through it all. She gave us some insight into how life really was during that period and a few explanations that we might not have understood. One of Pelikán’s sponsors is Comrade Virág. She explained that virág means flowers or blooms and Bloom was a typical Hungarian Jewish name. One of Virág’s fellow comrades was formerly a Nazi, and they both have to work with the army general Bástya (bastion or castle). An American student asked how come no one could really stand up to the system. The older woman pointed to the scenes where Pelikán is put in charge of research to grow oranges in Hungary which doesn’t have the climate for it. Unfortunately the one successful orange is eaten by Pelikán’s son before it can be presented at the ceremony. Virag then pulls a lemon from his pocket to replace the orange. In those days a lemon was an orange and no one dared question it. She then recalled the first time she had seen an orange and that she was much older before she actually ate one. She suggested that people are unaware of how bad things are when everyone is in the same boat. It is only when looking back from better times that people realize what they lived through.

She went on to mention Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, although the Hungarian purges were not as extensive as the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. I described the McCarthy witch hunts and the blacklisting of Hollywood writers and directors as an American example from the same period. I also mentioned the Rosenberg trials. The older woman then explained how a street in Budapest was named for the Rosenbergs during the Communist era but now it had been changed back to its original name

On Saturday we cleaned up the flat. Our daughter and her girl friend will be here next week. They will stay with us over the weekend and then go on a river cruise up the Danube to Vienna and on to Prague.

Sunday dinner

We were invited to have Sunday dinner with Julia and her family in Buda. We took a tram to the end of the line and were then picked up and driven to her home. She, her husband and two children lived in the bottom floor. We think, her parents lived on the floor above them and possibly her grandparents above them. Her father, who had been at MSU during the late 1980s, stopped by to say hello. But unfortunately we didn’t know anyone in common since I was in social science and he was in the agriculture and natural resources school doing research.

Julia prepared a meal of chicken noodle soup, chicken paprikas and cheese filled strudel. All were Hungarian specialties which take a long time to prepare. She hardly ever cooks them and when she does, she uses an English cookbook of traditional Hungarian recipes (available for tourists on Vaci utca). Once the children were finished eating we had a nice long conversation. We exchanged family histories, which included her family hiding Jews in their large cellar during the war and working with Raoul Wallenberg. We got home late Sunday afternoon and didn’t really need another meal.