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.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Tari’s Busy Week
A Slow Start.
We took a walk on Sunday afternoon. Our son had mentioned that during his semester abroad in Budapest in the mid 1990s, he liked eating and studying at a small café behind the US Embassy. So we walked around the area looking for the place. We saw a couple that might be the right one. The neighborhood is very nice and has a park in front of the Embassy. Then we rode the No. 2 Tram along the Danube back towards our apartment. We decide to stay on and ride to the end of the line and discovered the Palace of Arts is right on that line. As we rode back home we looked for Corvinus University where we had a meeting on Thursday.
On Monday Tari only had a trip to the post office and the vegetable stand planned. She went to the post office to pay the heating bill and send postcards to the grandsons. There is a street underpass in front of our building that has several small shops in it. Tari had decided to become a regular at the vegetable stand and purchase fruits, vegetables and eggs there instead of at the bigger chain stores. The stand has cabbages, potatoes, onions, oranges zucchini and tomatoes (paradicsom which sounds sort of like paradise. Are tomatoes from the Garden of Eden?). He occasionally has a head of lettuce.
Ceramicist's Shop
On Tuesday, as part of a NAWA program, Tari went to a ceramicist's studio and shop located in Buda. She took the metro to Moszkva ter and figured out where to catch the bus which would stop across the street from the studio. Crossing the street after she got off the bus, she slipped on some ice and landed on her knee. No lasting damage but it got a bit swollen and has since turned a lovely black and blue. The ceramicist, Edit Bukran, spoke about her background and her career in ceramics. She uses several techniques to make her bowls, vases and boxes. One method is to pour a very liquid form of clay into a mold. How long you wait before pouring the excess liquid clay out of the mold determines the thickness of the wall of the piece. Another technique with the molds is to shape small bits of clay into balls, "worms", spirals and other shapes. These are pressed into the bowl shaped molds to form a design and then painted and fired several times. The resulting bowl has a pebbly looking surface on the inside and outside. This has become a trademark of Bukran's current work. Bukran's attitude is that you should be having fun when you make your pots. Tari bought a small bowl and a pendant.
Book Club
Wednesday and another NAWA program, this one was for the Book Club. The book for the month was Julia Child's My Life in France. The meeting was held in a rather unique restaurant called "The Kitchen". The diner picks the meat and accompaniments from the menu and specifies how they wish the items prepared (e.g.. grilled or roasted). Of course the wait staff is well versed in possibilities just in case. No, it's not a Hungarian version of the Mongolian Grill. The restaurant provided a demonstration of how to make Hollandaise sauce and how to bone a duck. For lunch they had beef bourguignon in honor of Julia Child and wok fried vegetables with Hollandaise. The beef was very tender and the whole meal was delicious. The book discussion focused on how Julia adjusted to Paris and how the women in the group had adjusted to Budapest.
Lunch at Corvinus
Corvinus University has an exchange program with Michigan State. Gitta had been at MSU in January to discuss expanding the program. By chance Brett, our house sitter, is head of international studies at MSU and identified Harry as "our man in Budapest." So Harry contacted Gitta and set up a meeting. Gitta and Zita, the head of the program director for International Studies, took us to lunch at Fatal, a very nice Hungarian restaurant just off Vaci Utca. For the most part it was a "getting to know you" lunch with very little business conducted. At the very beginning Zita gave Harry a list of contacts at Corvinus, mentioning that he could possibly give a presentation or meet with some classes. At the very end Harry asked about the international exchange program and was told we would set up another meeting. The rest of the time was a friendly discussion about our past trips to Budapest, where else in Hungary we should try to visit, our general housing and travel plans. The three women got into cooking, child rearing, family etc. They told us about the American Corner, one of several places in Hungary where people could come to learn about America, read books, watch DVDs, and practice their English. It was having a get together later that day. We said we were free and Gitta sent us some info via email after the lunch. The American Corner in Budapest was celebrating its one year anniversary that evening with a brief reception and a talk by Michael Simmons on the Freedom Riders trip during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's. It was interesting and informative.
Friday
Friday was the monthly NAWA meeting. The theme was A Taste of Hungary and there were varieties of cheeses, cold cuts and pastries to sample. Tari even brought some home for Harry. One of the women was leaving Budapest and brought many of her books for the charity sale. Tari bought a novel and a food and restaurant guide. Tari chatted with two of the women we had met at the Friday evening get together two weeks earlier. She also talked with a woman she had met at the first NAWA meeting in January about perhaps going for walks together.
Friday evening we had tickets to the ballet. We saw La Bayadere, or The Temple Dancer. It was a new ballet for us. We had forgotten to look it up on the internet before we went but were able to follow the story enough to get by. Although set in India the original and current versions were not culturally or historically accurate. For example in the opening scene, Festival of Fire, the fakirs were dressed as Amazonian Indians who might have crept out of Le Sacre de Printemps (The Rites of Spring). The plot, such as it was, concerned a Temple Dancer caught in several love triangles that ended tragically. We almost left after the second act when she died, but no one else was going for their coats. The third act didn't seem to add anything to the story. We found out later that The Kingdom of the Shades is a famous set piece, a grand pas classique. Harry thinks he saw Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn dance it in the 1960s.
Harry’s less active week.
He attended the faculty meeting for the English language medical school program and also met with Helga on the 1948 British Health Care Act. The class on Wednesday was cancelled. He was able to do the power point for next week and then spent the week working on the major presentation on the Clinton – Obama health plans. It turned out that the web had lots of information on what went wrong with the Clinton plan but very little on what was actually in it. He finally found enough to include in the power points. In contrast there was almost too much on the events of the past year, but it was still a moving, if slow, target.
We took a walk on Sunday afternoon. Our son had mentioned that during his semester abroad in Budapest in the mid 1990s, he liked eating and studying at a small café behind the US Embassy. So we walked around the area looking for the place. We saw a couple that might be the right one. The neighborhood is very nice and has a park in front of the Embassy. Then we rode the No. 2 Tram along the Danube back towards our apartment. We decide to stay on and ride to the end of the line and discovered the Palace of Arts is right on that line. As we rode back home we looked for Corvinus University where we had a meeting on Thursday.
On Monday Tari only had a trip to the post office and the vegetable stand planned. She went to the post office to pay the heating bill and send postcards to the grandsons. There is a street underpass in front of our building that has several small shops in it. Tari had decided to become a regular at the vegetable stand and purchase fruits, vegetables and eggs there instead of at the bigger chain stores. The stand has cabbages, potatoes, onions, oranges zucchini and tomatoes (paradicsom which sounds sort of like paradise. Are tomatoes from the Garden of Eden?). He occasionally has a head of lettuce.
Ceramicist's Shop
On Tuesday, as part of a NAWA program, Tari went to a ceramicist's studio and shop located in Buda. She took the metro to Moszkva ter and figured out where to catch the bus which would stop across the street from the studio. Crossing the street after she got off the bus, she slipped on some ice and landed on her knee. No lasting damage but it got a bit swollen and has since turned a lovely black and blue. The ceramicist, Edit Bukran, spoke about her background and her career in ceramics. She uses several techniques to make her bowls, vases and boxes. One method is to pour a very liquid form of clay into a mold. How long you wait before pouring the excess liquid clay out of the mold determines the thickness of the wall of the piece. Another technique with the molds is to shape small bits of clay into balls, "worms", spirals and other shapes. These are pressed into the bowl shaped molds to form a design and then painted and fired several times. The resulting bowl has a pebbly looking surface on the inside and outside. This has become a trademark of Bukran's current work. Bukran's attitude is that you should be having fun when you make your pots. Tari bought a small bowl and a pendant.
Book Club
Wednesday and another NAWA program, this one was for the Book Club. The book for the month was Julia Child's My Life in France. The meeting was held in a rather unique restaurant called "The Kitchen". The diner picks the meat and accompaniments from the menu and specifies how they wish the items prepared (e.g.. grilled or roasted). Of course the wait staff is well versed in possibilities just in case. No, it's not a Hungarian version of the Mongolian Grill. The restaurant provided a demonstration of how to make Hollandaise sauce and how to bone a duck. For lunch they had beef bourguignon in honor of Julia Child and wok fried vegetables with Hollandaise. The beef was very tender and the whole meal was delicious. The book discussion focused on how Julia adjusted to Paris and how the women in the group had adjusted to Budapest.
Lunch at Corvinus
Corvinus University has an exchange program with Michigan State. Gitta had been at MSU in January to discuss expanding the program. By chance Brett, our house sitter, is head of international studies at MSU and identified Harry as "our man in Budapest." So Harry contacted Gitta and set up a meeting. Gitta and Zita, the head of the program director for International Studies, took us to lunch at Fatal, a very nice Hungarian restaurant just off Vaci Utca. For the most part it was a "getting to know you" lunch with very little business conducted. At the very beginning Zita gave Harry a list of contacts at Corvinus, mentioning that he could possibly give a presentation or meet with some classes. At the very end Harry asked about the international exchange program and was told we would set up another meeting. The rest of the time was a friendly discussion about our past trips to Budapest, where else in Hungary we should try to visit, our general housing and travel plans. The three women got into cooking, child rearing, family etc. They told us about the American Corner, one of several places in Hungary where people could come to learn about America, read books, watch DVDs, and practice their English. It was having a get together later that day. We said we were free and Gitta sent us some info via email after the lunch. The American Corner in Budapest was celebrating its one year anniversary that evening with a brief reception and a talk by Michael Simmons on the Freedom Riders trip during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's. It was interesting and informative.
Friday
Friday was the monthly NAWA meeting. The theme was A Taste of Hungary and there were varieties of cheeses, cold cuts and pastries to sample. Tari even brought some home for Harry. One of the women was leaving Budapest and brought many of her books for the charity sale. Tari bought a novel and a food and restaurant guide. Tari chatted with two of the women we had met at the Friday evening get together two weeks earlier. She also talked with a woman she had met at the first NAWA meeting in January about perhaps going for walks together.
Friday evening we had tickets to the ballet. We saw La Bayadere, or The Temple Dancer. It was a new ballet for us. We had forgotten to look it up on the internet before we went but were able to follow the story enough to get by. Although set in India the original and current versions were not culturally or historically accurate. For example in the opening scene, Festival of Fire, the fakirs were dressed as Amazonian Indians who might have crept out of Le Sacre de Printemps (The Rites of Spring). The plot, such as it was, concerned a Temple Dancer caught in several love triangles that ended tragically. We almost left after the second act when she died, but no one else was going for their coats. The third act didn't seem to add anything to the story. We found out later that The Kingdom of the Shades is a famous set piece, a grand pas classique. Harry thinks he saw Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn dance it in the 1960s.
Harry’s less active week.
He attended the faculty meeting for the English language medical school program and also met with Helga on the 1948 British Health Care Act. The class on Wednesday was cancelled. He was able to do the power point for next week and then spent the week working on the major presentation on the Clinton – Obama health plans. It turned out that the web had lots of information on what went wrong with the Clinton plan but very little on what was actually in it. He finally found enough to include in the power points. In contrast there was almost too much on the events of the past year, but it was still a moving, if slow, target.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
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.
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.
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