Postcards from Budapest

Labrynths

2010-05-22T16:11:00.002+02:00

Tour Guide #1
We went to the Great Synagogue on Monday morning and took the grand tour—the sanctuary, holocaust cemetery in the courtyard, the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park/ Tree of Life and the Jewish Museum. The main sanctuary is very large with a double balcony on two sides for the women and children. Like other German Reform synagogues it has a large organ. But it also features twin pulpits on either side about a third of the way down from the front. The synagogue was purposely build to resemble a Christian church. Apparently one rabbi would give his talks in Yiddish or German and the other in Hungarian. If you look closely in this website picture you can see the semi circular awning over the pulpits three columns down from the front on either side. http://z.about.com/d/honeymoons/1/0/y/b/1/03interior.jpg

The tree of life in the form of a weeping willow has the names of those who perished inscribed on the leaves. The Museum had information more or less arranged by Jewish Holidays. I saw a scroll that had colored lettering and asked what it was. I was told it was a scroll containing Haftorah sections from the book of prophets that is read after the Torah portion. The museum also had a section dedicated to the history of the holocaust. Many of the Synagogue’s sacred objects and museum pieces were hidden by two Catholic priests during the War.

Afterwards we decided to go to Spinoza’s for lunch but chanced to meet our Synagogue tour guide. She persuaded us to eat at the Carmel, a strictly Kosher restaurant next to Rumbach Street Synagogue. The food was good. Refreshed we took the metro up to Hosok tere (Hero’s Square) and the wooded Varosliget City park. Hosok tere has a huge monumental sculpture of the seven mounted Magyar chiefs who conquered what is now Hungary. Behind it is a pair of semi-circular colonnades each containing statues of seven heroes of Hungary and bas reliefs of famous battles.. This was constructed in the 1890s as part of the Millennium celebration of the Magyar state. Originally five of the statues were Habsburgs from Austria. But the area was damaged by bombing in World War II and when it was rebuilt the Habsburgs were replaced. We then walked through the park with the Vajadhunyad Castle and other replica buildings. Unfortunately the lagoon had been drained to permit some construction. I remember earlier trips to Budapest where we spent some quiet time along the shore of the lagoon watching the people, the ducks and a dog diving into the lagoon after sticks.

On Tuesday we returned to St. Stephen's Basilica and went inside. It was built rather late—starting in 1851 and completed in 1906. We walked through and saw the various mosaics, paintings, and sculptures. But we passed on seeing St. Stephen’s mummified right fist. [We had seen Charlemagne’s thigh bone in Aachen and that was enough]. The women then went shopping

The girls had their sightseeing bus tour of Pest on Wednesday morning but were free for the afternoon. So we had lunch and then walked across the chain bridge to the Buda side. We took the siklo (Buda Hill Funicular) to the Castle level. We walked around a bit and then went into the labyrinth under Castle Hill. Listed as one of the seven underground wonders of the world and part of the World Heritage site in Budapest, this is second only to the world’s oldest underground tourist trap, the Cave of Zeus on Crete. Nevertheless it was worth it. The labyrinth contained reproductions of cave drawing from Europe, a section devoted to shamans and magic deer, the inevitable section on the history of Hungary, and a section called “another world” filled with mysterious objects found unexpectedly when renovating the labyrinth in the 1990s. Don’t want to give away the surprise ending.

Academic Matters
I met with several sociologists at Corvinus on Thursday morning. I had discovered them in the process of looking for English language courses that sociology and social science students from MSU could take as part of an exchange program. The current exchange was through the faculty of business which did not have matching sociology or social science courses. The people I talked with were enthusiastic and proposed that we try a pilot program of exchanging one student each as early as winter/spring semester 2010. I told them that the departments would have to approve the courses as transferable, but I didn’t see any major problem with that. The University level agreements on tuition and other matters were beyond my ability to talk about. One of the faculty members will be in the US in mid June and offered to meet with people from MSU. I told them I wouldn’t be back by then but would email the MSU College of Social Science people, see if they were interested in the exchange and whether someone could meet in mid June. I did that and it looks like something may happen.

I had a few email exchanges with Julia, the graduate student who had invited us to her home for Sunday dinner a week earlier. She had turned in her dissertation which covered the history of US health care reform efforts during the twentieth century. She had received some early comments, one of which dealt with her interpretation of American’s being self reliant. We talked and she later emailed me the question and paragraph from the dissertation. I emailed back that I thought her examples were more about family values—Americans preferring nuclear family and independent households—than with self reliance. We exchanged emails over the next few days. She had a personal question about why evangelical Christians in Europe had supported national health insurance while in the US they seemed opposed. I pointed out the differences between mainline and traditional Protestant churches in the US both of which claim the term evangelical. I wrote that if one believed that salvation comes through grace and faith, then doing good work or deeds by helping others will not bring salvation. The Mainline Protestants were more likely to carry out good deeds and work for social justice than the more traditional churches.

Friday evening we went to another salon at Bruce’s. Laszlo the historian who had spoken to us at orientation back in February led the discussion. He was frustrated that Americans and Western Europeans have distorted the recent election results as an indication of Hungarian intolerance of or enthusiasm for racism and fascism. The cause was the rise of Jobbik the far right wing nationalist party that captured over 15% of the vote. [I pointed out that if we had the same party ballot system in the US, at least 15% would vote for the right wing “Tea Party” that had disrupted town hall meetings on health reform last summer.] One of the Hungarian professors said he had voted for Jobbik although he didn’t agree with everything they stood for. He claimed that many small rural communities had supported Jobbik because the villages had no real police to prevent or investigate “Gypsy” crime—which can range from petty theft on up. They relied on the Hungarian Guard Movement to protect them against Gypsy crime. The Guard was forced to dissolve, but had tried to reorganize under a different name. [Over one hundred years ago “Jewish” crime was similarly defined and politicized. The black uniforms and red insignia of the Guard resembled the uniforms worn by Hungarians who assisted the Nazi in World War II.]

But above all he was clearly a nationalist wanting to discuss the Treaty of Trianon that divided up Hungary after WWI and left sizeable Hungarian ethnic communities in newly created countries while Germany was left pretty much intact. Jobbik called for granting ethnic and/or linguistic Hungarians in neighboring countries dual citizenship. This is a classic case of nation not exactly corresponding with statehood boundaries. The dual citizenship could range from granting easier access into Hungary for education and jobs to voting rights on the party ballot for Parliament but not the local district Parliamentary elections. Fidesz, the right center party, also favors non-residential dual citizenship. Since it won over two-thirds of the seats in the April 2010 election, Fidesz can do just about anything it wants. In 2009 Slovakia passed a law requiring that Slovak must be used in all official contacts, including the police, fire brigade, postal services and local government, with fines up to 5,000 Euros after one warning. Both are members of the EU. Stay tuned…

On the Town
We were invited to Sunday dinner at Helga’s, one of the younger professors. She, her husband and children live in a large flat located on a side of Gellert Hill overlooking the Danube. Peter was there as well. We started with Hungarian meat pancakes (hortobágyi húsos palacsinta) which were delicious, followed by chicken paprika and a cherry tart. We were able to take a few of the pancakes and tart squares home with us.

We bought our fifth and last monthly BKV transit pass. It was a reminder that we have only a few weeks left. Tari can feel herself beginning to look forward to going home. Her biggest problem here has been the food. She never considered herself a picky eater but both here and in Japan she has not been able to get to like the local food. She does like Hungarian Gulyas soup, chicken paprikas, and of course the pastries. She is not a cook and spends as little time in the kitchen as possible. Good Hungarian cooking takes time. The meals we have had at the homes of local Hungarians were wonderful. Much of the Hungarian food in restaurants tends to be a bit on the heavy side. The beef in the food stores is not good.

On the bright side, we have been losing weight eating chicken, ground turkey and fish (salmon filets) at home. But that gets so tiresome. Since we have eaten out for the past week with Emily and Pam, Tari is even more intolerant of cooking at home. She is sooooo looking forward to getting home to her own kitchen and American grocery stores. Of course there is another week of eating out here with Harry's friends and she is learning what to stay away from in the restaurants.

All in all the past four months has been a good experience, but living in a foreign country for an extended period of time really is different from a vacation trip. At the beginning it's all a grand adventure but time wears you down with those things that you find difficult. For a vacation trip you go home before it gets hard. If people stay longer (like one or two years) they learn to cope better or can justify buying those items that make life easier.

Budapest in Bloom

2010-05-13T15:51:00.002+02:00

On the Town
Spring has finally arrived, albeit several weeks late. The trees are green, the lilacs are out and the pitypang (dandelions) are already turning puffy white. Statues and sculptures that were either covered during the winter or stored somewhere have appeared in squares and along the Pest side of the Danube. Many of the pedestrian streets are now half as wide as they were in early March. The restaurants have put down platform with tables, chairs, sun umbrellas or awnings. People sit, eat and drink outside in the early evening. Coats are gone and the boots of Budapest have been transformed into sneakers and sandals. The homeless have moved up out of the metro entrance passageways onto the benches in front of the street planters and sleep in doorways of empty shops. The weather is sometimes on the rainy side—clouds, drizzle, and occasionally a half hour down pour.

On Friday I went with the Fulbrighters to Eger. Tari and I had been there a few weeks earlier as guests of Helga. But Tari had to go to the airport to meet our daughter and her girl friend who were coming for a short visit. The Fulbright tour took us to the Lyceum library with the tromp l’oeil ceiling of the Council of Trent. But then we visited a second room which also had a tromp l’oeil ceiling, but this one had the four faculties in the Lyceum—law, philosophy (including natural sciences, military and political geography), medicine and theology. We climbed the stairs to the Camera Obscura, which is like a periscope that can look down upon the town. We were taken to lunch at a restaurant in the nearby Valley of the Beautiful Women (literally Mrs. Pretty Valley). They served us the famous Bull’s Blood Egri Bikaver wine (a red blend of several varieties of grapes). Allegedly the Hungarians defending Eger during the 38 day seige in 1552 had to mix the available red wines When they drank, the wine spilled onto their beards and armor. The invading Turks thought that they were drinking bull’s blood which was giving them the strength to resist the siege. It was certainly a heavy, full bodied red and I thought a little “creamy.” We then returned to Eger and went through the castle tunnel system.

Academic matters
This was the last week of classes. On Monday I gave a guest presentation for Edina on the rise of medical science from 1400-1900. I covered the early anatomists Bartolomeo Eustachi and Gabriele Fallopio who were the first to discover body parts names after them (Fallopio is said to have invented the first condom). I also discussed the first blind experiment to test Mesmerizing conducted by Ben Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Guillotin. I ended up the presentation with Virchow, Pasteur and Koch.

Wednesday was the last class for the English language medical students. Only four showed up. Nevertheless I gave my presentation on doctor patient relationships including some US case law concerning obligations to patients and ethical issues. The students were allowed to have two absences, so most of them had an absence to use up and took it. Several may have had a major exam on Thursday. For the class I helped teach, they are to write a short 2500 word paper in English on what they learned in our class. About half agreed to turn in the paper by May 17th and the other half at the end of June. Since they will submit their papers as email attachments I told Peter I would be happy to read them even after I returned to the US.

I spent the rest of the time plugging away at my writing assignments for articles, presentations and the case studies on social science research ethics.

Tour Guide #1
Our daughter and her girl friend are the first of three sets of visitors we expect over the next five weeks. We took them to some places that were not on the schedule of their river cruise tour. After Tari picked them up at the airport on Friday morning and dropped their bags at the apartment, she took the girls up to Nyugati pu, the western railroad station which was built by Eiffel. The did a brief tour of the large Westend mall. They later walked along Vaci Utca, the main tourist drag. That kept them awake sufficiently to begin to acclimate to European time. After Harry’s return from Eger, we all went out to dinner at the Central Kavehaz for Hungarian food.

On Saturday we walked to the central market hall which was also built by Eiffel. We crossed over to the Buda side and went into the Gellert Spa. It features two thermal baths one for men, one for women and a swimming pool in between. We then went across the street and up the hill to the Cave Church, originally home to Saint Istvan, a hermit monk who cured the sick with thermal waters that sprung in front of the cave. A grotto chapel was carved out starting in 1926 and is now taken care of by the Hungarian Paulite order of monks. We took a tram to Moscova Ter in search of a nearby street fair. We found it but it was mainly for small children. Later that afternoon we went by St. Stephen’s church but it was closed for a wedding. When the newly weds emerged, the groom was in a dark uniform with a white cap. Six soldiers held their swords aloft for the couple to pass under as they walked down the church steps. That night we attended a concert at St. Michael's Church on Vaci Utca. A small string orchestra played the greatest classical hits—Pachelbel,Vivaldi, Bach, Handel and Mozart. The acoustics were great and the solo violinist for Vivaldi’s Winter from the Four Seasons, Gabora Gyula, was spectacular.

On Sunday we had breakfast at Spinoza’s. Afterwards we went across the street and through the Gozsdu Bazaar which is open Sunday mornings during the summer and features a variety of people selling all sorts of arts and crafts as well as old books and touristy nicknacks. The three women bought a number of things. We then spent the afternoon at Aquincum, the remains of the Roman town dating back to the first century. The new museum had some recent findings from digs where the new M-0 ring highway will go. The main part of the site consists of the remains of stone walls showing the various buildings in the town. Interestingly, the Roman bath was set up exactly like the Gellert Spa (or maybe it should be the other way around—the more things change the more they remain the same). The Roman bath had heated changing rooms and thermal baths for men on one side and women on the other with a pool in the middle. We also looked at the remains of stellae/ tombstones and other statuary. On our way back we stopped at a pancake dessert house at Batthyány tér that one of the Fulbrighters had recommended. It was a nice sweet pickup after two hours at Aquincum.

More on Tour Guide #1 next week!

A Hungarian Movie and Sunday Dinner

2010-05-03T10:31:00.002+02:00

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.

April colds travel and work

2010-04-30T16:09:00.002+02:00

I came down with a major cold—sore throat, post nasal drip and a cough. I also had quite a bit of work to do. Back in early February I had promised to give four lectures to students of Helga and Edina in the Faculty of Health Sciences. I was about to work on them when Peter reminded me that I had agreed to write up my US Health Care Reform presentations into an article which he would then comment on and translate into Hungarian. It would be submitted to a Hungarian journal and was due Apr 26. So in the spirit of publish and perish, I mustered my strength and typed away despite the cold. I lucked out when Peter told me that classes were called off on Wednesday. Apparently the sports hygiene faculty is part of the Medical complex and Wednesday was declared a sports day for everyone including the medical students.

On Thursday Tari and I took the train to Veszprem, a town near Lake Balaton. It has an American Corners which was hosting an America Week. This was started three years ago by philosophy professor Scott Campbell, a Fulbrighter from Nazareth College, Rochester NY. It brings together Hungarian and American lecturers, professors, officials and professionals to talk on various topics. I was asked to talk about US Health Care Reform. Since Scott Campbell was talking on American Pragmatism, I entitled my talk Obama’s Pragmatic Strategy. We were not sure where to get off the train as it made several short stops about the time we expected to arrive at Veszprem. The station signs are usually high above the main station doors and hard to see if one is in a back car or facing the wrong direction.

We were met at the train station by a Dean and taken to the campus of Pannon University. Since it was drizzling we sat and talked in his office instead of sight seeing in the town. Tom Burns showed up followed by a younger Pannon faculty member who then walked us through the town to lunch. Huba and Annamaria were meeting us for lunch, but they drove from Budapest and ran into some heavy traffic due to the rain. Eventually we all assembled and had a nice lunch.

The presentations went very well. Someone put the conference on utube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzXAxbVe348. It covers the whole week and I appear in it along with my title slide. Don’t know what was said since it was all in Hungarian. The Americans in the audience really liked what I had to say. They thought it explained quite a lot of what had happened and what was in the legislation.

I spent Friday working on the paper for Peter. We went out to dinner and happened to sit next to a woman from Germany. She had met with some people at Corvinus University, but was stranded because of the volcano. She said she would probably take a ten hour train ride on Saturday. We later learned that the contingent from Nazareth College at America Week in Veszprem was also stranded for several days.

Early Saturday morning I put the final touches on the first draft of my paper and emailed it to Peter. We then got on a train to visit Helga in Eger. Unfortunately we didn't realize that we had to switch trains. When I had looked up the train schedule, unlike airplane schedules, I saw no indication that I would need to transfer trains. The train stopped very briefly and as it pulled away I asked about Eger. Several people told us we should have gotten off and they were very helpful in explaining the situation to both us and the conductor. We had to ride an extra half hour to the next station, buy a ticket to return to where we should have transferred and get on the train to Eger. We arrived two hours late. In addition neither Tari nor I had Helga’s cell phone number. She had emailed it to me but I forgot my cell phone. Cell phones are not my thing.

All that said, we had a very nice relaxing weekend in Eger. We ate lunch at an outdoor restaurant Helga recommended. She then took us on a tour of the famous Castle which held out against a Turkish siege in 1552. I had just about finished reading the historical novel Eclipse of the Crescent Moon (Egri csillagok) which is about the siege. I was told this was mandatory reading for all students in Hungary. The equivalent in the US would be if everyone in junior high had to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

We saw just about everything at the Castle except the underground tunnels. We walked back to our hotel and promptly fell asleep. When we awoke it was well after 8pm. We were not hungry for a complete dinner and found the only short order place in the area was the local McDonalds.

On Sunday Helga took us to the Baroque library in Eger's Lyceum which had a very old library with very old books. The ceiling had a magnificent trompe l'oeil painting of Council of Trent and its four major decisions in each corner. In one corner scholarship is encouraged but a lightning bolt is setting censored books on fire. (cant quite see it in this picture) http://www.pbase.com/richardmartin/image/123133258 . We stopped for some ice cream at her favorite place. We were then met by her husband and children. We walked through the large city park with many tables selling a variety of things. The train ride home was direct to Budapest Keleti pu and uneventful.

Monday I answered a few outstanding questions that Peter had and then began putting together the lecture for Hegla’s class. I had two lectures on Tuesday. The first was in the morning for Helga’s class on health law and ethics. The second was for Laszlo at Corvinus and was on Clinton and Obama. I spoke in a room in the new building’s library. The room, which probably holds at least 50 people, was overflowing. It had been advertised on the Corvinus website. A few had called Laszlo and asked if I was able to come because of the Iceland volcano. In my talk I mentioned that the pharmaceutical industy got a twelve year patent protection for biologics and bio-similar drugs. In the question and answer time I learned that these types of drugs are allowed in the EU but not in the US. The reform billcreates a pathway for biologics and bio-similar drugs to enter the US market.

On Wednesday gave a lecture to the English language medical students on US state experiments in health care—Hawaii’s employer mandate from the 1970’s, Oregon’s rationing system for people on Medicaid based on budget and importance of procedure, Tennessee’s good intentions at expanding coverage through TENNCARE that was spoiled by overzealous attempts to contain costs and finally Massachusetts’s 2006 individual mandate..

On Thursday I moderated the second half of a Fulbright session for Hungarians who had returned from Fulbrights in the US. The first presenter in my portion of the meeting was stranded in Paris because of the Iceland volcano. I had to call time on two of the presenters who had run well over the 20 minute allotment. Afterwards several people told me I had done the right thing. The presentations ranged from music to history to philosophy. I learned something about the role of Princeton Theological Seminar in promoting Presbyterianism in Hungary. I knew Harvard was more Unitarian and Yale Congregationalist New Light, but didn’t know how Princeton fit in.

By this time Tari came down with a sore throat and a cough. We were concerned that she might have strep. I asked around and was told to go to a clinic near Moscova Ter. On Wednesday Tari went to the NAWA book club lunch meeting. But when the book club chair was stranded in Malta because of the volcano, they called it off. Tari didn’t know and went to the restaurant. Fortunately one of the other women stopped by and they had lunch. At the regular Friday NAWA meeting someone recommended a clinic up in Buda that had American trained doctors. Tari called and got an appointment for that same afternoon. The doctor was very nice, gave her a test and told her she didn’t have strep. It cost a ton of money but then we learned we were paying “expat” prices. Tari got a receipt and we can get reimbursed from our US health insurance when we return.

On Friday morning I presented on three topics over three hours to a masters degree class at Corvinus. The students seemed very interested and I thought it went very well Afterwards Norbert and I had a nice lunch at a restaurant that specialized in a large variety of wines.

That night we saw The Magic Flute sung in Hungarian. It was not at the state opera house. The singers were very good and the Queen of the Night easily hit every note in her famous aria. The costumes were modern day. The Queen of the Night wore a black dress with a gold cape like coat (I would have preferred silver for the moon) and in the seduction scene her three attendants are in their Victoria’s Secret lingerie. The three boys are in soccer uniforms and kick a ball back and forth with Tomino. The stage sets had their pluses and minuses. The first act settings were primarily Tomino’s and Pamina’s bedrooms, his with a large toy castle, hers with a large doll house. But the room was cleverly turned on its side or upside down for other first act scenes. Clever but we didn’t quite get it. In the second act the trial by fire was represented by Pamina and Tomino stepping over theatre seats that glowed red, but we did not see anything the reminded us of the trial by water.

Tari rested on Saturday and I plugged away at preparing the extra lectures. She was feeling better that night and so we really treated ourselves. We went to the Argentine steak house and had tenderloin and baked potatoes. After months of not having a real steak it was fantastic. The prices and quality were similar to a Ruth Chris steak house in the US.

April Cold

2010-04-13T23:49:00.003+02:00

I came down with a heavy cold this past week. I had a very sore throat on Sunday which gradually progressed up to the back and roof of my mouth during the week. It was aggravated by a post nasal drip. We ran out of aspirin and had to buy some. While Americans may overpay for prescription drugs the cost of an over the counter drug like aspirin was over $4 for 20 big old fashioned round tablets sold only in an apothecary. We did pick up some antibacterial mouth wash at what would be a drug store in US but here sells everything but the drugs. Tari put in the ear plugs for a few nights and we both survived the week.

On Tuesday I met with Zita Paprika and Gitta at Corvinus to talk about a possible exchange program with MSU College of Social Science and Department of Sociology. They had sent me a copy of their latest catalogue to look up courses that might be a good match for exchange students. I didn’t find much for sociology in their catalogue but went on line and found a degree program in English for Sociology. That had quite a few courses with similar titles and even texts that we might use in our Sociology courses.

But when I met Zita and Gitta, I discovered that the program and those courses were offered by a different faculty. Zita was in the faculty of business and directed its international program. Not that some things couldn’t be worked out but it clearly was not her first choice. So we went over other courses her faculty offered. The best matches were in economics and political science. One or two psych courses were possibilities as were two of the sociology courses in her catalogue. I said I would go back and see about matching the courses to the MSU course descriptions, and would report back to the MSU people on our discussion.

Finding the MSU course description was a minor problem since the MSU website had been totally revamped from scratch and opened April 2. In my opinion whenever programmers redo something from scratch the new version is twice as bad as they say it is going to be good, and inevitably has to be revised.
The new home page has big rotating pictures (including our final four basketball appearance), seven dropdown tabs: About, Admission, Academics, Research, Global, Engagement, and Athletics. Below the rotating pictures were three panels containing a video promotional, three news headlines and one or two upcoming events. While I could navigate to the course descriptions without too much difficulty under the academics tab, I couldn’t even figure out how to get to the faculty pages I use for class records, grading etc. The faculty page contained all sorts of links to human resources. It is as if the faculty never has to use the website for class related tasks. After several emails a few people told me how to get where I wanted to go, but it took a minimum of four clicks. So I simply created icons on my desktop that allows me a one click access to where I want to be and I no longer have the MSU website as my home page. [by the next Tuesday, mirabile dictu they have added “logins” for instructor menu and the ANGEL site that has all our course syllabi, assignments etc under the smaller faculty tab on the front page!] But despite my cold and frustration, I managed to find corresponding course titles and descriptions and send off my report.

On Wednesday I managed to give my class presentation on Clinton to Obama health care reform in a very hoarse voice. The students were understanding and the one or two Americans asked about how they or ex-pats would be treated if and when they returned to US. Very good questions and my only response was that it would hopefully be covered in the rules and to contact the US embassy.

I stayed home the rest of the week working on an article on the Obama Health Reforms that Peter will translate into Hungarian and publish at the end of April. Tari meanwhile had to go clothes shopping. Between her continued efforts to eat less and walk more she has dropped a size or two and desperately needed new pants and tops. After checking out a few of the higher end stores at one of the malls on a peanut butter run, she found a reasonably priced clothing store and bought several tops and a pair of pants. She has said several thank yous to whatever impulse led her to buy 3 paris of pants in the US hat were almost too small. They have become a mainstay of her wardrobe.

On Thursday night we treated Kristin and her husband to dinner at their favorite restaurant. She had helped us get through those first few weeks—dealing with the condo manager, getting us cell phones, finding all the heating, water and electric meters in the flat, giving us additional book on Hungary, Budapest, and Hungarian, and explaining how the washing machine worked. The food was great and we had a very nice conversation with them. None of us wanted to leave.

On Friday Fulbright took us to Pecs, one of three or four European Cultural Capitals for 2010. Pecs is a university town with the famous Zsolnay Ceramics and porcelain factory. We met with several of the Fulbrighters who were teaching or working in Pecs. One gave us a tour of the high school where he taught English as a second language and American literature studies. We also had tours of the Zsolnay museum and the Csontvary Museum, the latter containing the works of a rather eccentric 20th century painter. On Friday night we selected tickets to a Varadi Roma Concert. Unfortunately as I have discovered, almost all concerts these days are amplified as if they were blasting into an open field at Woodstock. But this was in a packed small room that couldn’t have seated more that 250 people. The music was good but our ears were ringing. On Saturday afternoon we had free time. We had lunch with Tom, Carol and Lori at a nice restaurant and then Tom took us on a tour of the countryside. We visited an old castle monastery north of Pecs, got lost looking for a second historical ruin and then couldn’t find the monument marking some major battle against the Turks. Afterwards we had a nice snack at Tom and Carol’s apartment before taking the train back to Budapest.

Cluj

2010-04-05T17:46:00.001+02:00

We returned to Budapest on Saturday. Tari did several loads of laundry so we would have enough to last us for the next week in Cluj, Romania. On Sunday we went to Deak ter Erzsébet tér and took pictures of the art work representing inventions for women—a large washing machine you could stand in, a vacuum cleaner, an electric iron, a giant lipstick and eyelash mascara applicator with a woman’s pant suit in between, a giant leg with a nylon stocking and a bra.

We got up bright and early Monday morning to catch the train at Keleti pu for Cluj. It is about a seven hour train ride, but it was cheaper than flying and we arrived about the same time we would have if we had flown. We were in first class which had electric outlets so I could plug in my computer and work for quite a while.

We were met by Eugen and Melita his graduate student at the train station. I had met Eugen on my first trip to Cluj in 1999. MSU and Roger Hamlin had sent me there for a month as part of an exchange program with Babes Bolyai University on the topic of civil society. I was sent back two years later for another month and Eugen and I worked on a paper we later presented at APHA in Chicago. I was in Cluj a third time for a week on my own in 2003.

Eugen was going to arrange a conference presentation for me on Health Care Reform: Clinton to Obama. I thought it was going to be on Tuesday but he said it had to be moved to Thursday to accommodate some people who had classes on Tuesday. I had been revising my presentation almost daily as events over the past two week culminated in the passage of the Senate’s health care bill by the House, Obama signing it, and then the passage of the side car fix it bill in the House, then by the Senate. I expected Obama to sign it on Monday but he made a surprise visit to Afghanistan. He did sign on it Wednesday so with that last revision, my presentation was complete.

On Monday night we went to the Cluj Jewish Community Seder. We arrive about 7:40 around sunset, but learned the actual service had begun around 7. It looked like they had gone straight through the service, for as we entered they were singing the traditional songs accompanied by a piano and violin. A woman with a trained voice sang Next Year in Jerusalem. So we sat down and after a few minutes began to eat. The food was very good—the matzo balls were really light. We guess about 100 people were there and two tables seemed to have the cantor and choir for they occasionally broke into song and at the end led a chain dance around the room. We sat at what was the head table with the congregation religious leader who was a professor of physical chemistry and his wife, the retired head of the Judaic studies and his wife, and the president of the community group.

On Tuesday we walked around the downtown area. It had changed quite a bit over the ten years. Two way streets were now one way—a sure sign of urban maturity; and a boulevard now has traffic in only one diretion, and thre traffic lanes on the other side were made into a pedestrian walkway. Several of the older hotels and restaurants were closed, and a few rather upscale restaurants had opened. The streets and sidewalks were in good condition. Our hotel, which was an old one had been refurbished.

That evening we had dinner with Shari a Fulbrighter from Rutgers teaching in Social Work. She was in the same department as Eugen but she didn’t know him. She had become very ill during the Fulbright orientation in Bucharest in February and had to be hospitalized. She was grateful for the visits from both the Romanian Fulbright office and someone from the US embassy in Bucharest. She was able to return to Cluj but had taken things easy the past several weeks. She had earned her bachelors and PhD degree from MSU and we quickly found many people in common, including one of her professors who had been a neighbor of ours in East Lansing. He retired and she had been unable to get in touch with him. We had visited him on the West Coast a few years ago and I later sent them both emails to put them back in touch.

We had lunch with the Brubecks on Wednesday. We got more details on their activities in Cluj and the complications of trying to arrange charity concerts in May despite the Cluj airport being closed for a week.

That afternoon we attended a social work class involving dealing with teen pregnancy and smoking. One of the student had planned a set of exercises, role playing etc. It was interesting. Someone sat near us and gave us a rough translation of the main points during the role playing.

My presentation was on Thursday afternoon. Before it began I was interviewed by two local TV stations and a newspaper reported. They wanted to know what could be learned for Romania from the US experience. I said that it was more a matter of political will and politics than rational economic decision making. A large majority was needed and Obama had just enough votes to carry in the Senate. Building a large majority in a Parliamentary system such as Romania might prove to be difficult. The Conservatives would not want anything changed and the liberals would want more than they could possibly get. Obama had spent the previous year making deals with the pharmaceutical companies, American Medical Association, the hospitals, unions etc. I also said that Romania was coming from a different situation than the US. Most Romanian physicians were either hospital employees or got paid by the one single insurance company, compared to US physicians who at one point were more like small businesses and were paid differing amounts by various insurance plans. Many US hospitals had been developed by religious groups so there were Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist and Jewish hospitals. These had their own financial resources, and the hospitals also were paid by several different insurance plans. Finally physicians and hospital staff in Central and Eastern Europe were often given extra money under the table by patients and their families. When the move towards market insurance and deductibles was put in place a few years earlier, people rebelled. Why pay above the table for something that might be less than what you would get under the “old” system of paying under the table.

The presentation itself went about an hour with a translation after each slide. At first no one asked questions but then some did and the session went on for another twenty minutes or so. Shari was there as was Paul, another Fulbrighter whom I had met on his first Fulbright in 1999. He asked me what I thought would happen in the November elections. I said for the democrats, they would have trouble selling umbrellas on a rainy day. They just never seemed able to get their point across in a way that both captured the media attention and explained what their positions were. But the phasing in of the Health Care reforms over the year—things starting April 1st July 1st and October 1st would give them three built in opportunities to get the word out to different constituencies that would gain benefits. For the republicans, they might be able to take advantage of the confusion and hostility related to such a large change, but for the first time their slogan of Repeal and Restart was not on a par with Contract for America that they used in 1994 after defeating Clinton. While the right wing tea party could keep up the emotional fervor they could also split the party in the forthcoming primaries and possibly in November as well. I thought that was an even handed assessment without a true prediction.

The train ride back was uneventful. It was strange to realize that our home was now the flat, and it was good to get back to familiar surroundings. Having been in Germany and Romania, we were, however, afraid that we had lost what little Hungarian we had picked up.

Berlin

2010-03-28T16:10:00.002+02:00

We flew to Berlin on Saturday. We took the Blue Metro to the last stop and got on the airport bus so the trip was covered by our monthly pass. The only trouble was that our flight to Munich was delayed an hour and a half, which meant we would miss our connection from Munich to Berlin. Lufthansa gave no explanation at all, which was duly noted on the satisfaction survey we were given at the end of the flight. We were booked on the next flight to Berlin and had some time to spend in Munich. While at the airport we found a store that sold stuffed animals, including lambs. Our grandson is really into lambs like other kids are into blankets or teddy bears. Tari was looking around and found a wolf in sheep’s clothing. We bought it and plan to add “Wolfie” to our grandson’s flock.

We were a bit anxious about the delays since we desperately needed to exchange dollars for Euros in order to pay for the registration in cash. We had ‘gambled’ correctly that the Euro would fall. But the currency exchanges closed at 8pm on Saturday and would not open again until Monday morning. We got to Berlin, hopped on the TXL bus that wound its way through the city, but terminated at Alexanderplatz, where our hotel was. We got off and finally found the Park Inn hotel entrance. We went to the concierge who directed us to the currency exchange in the train station. We found it at 7:35 but it looked closed. We paced back and forth wondering what to do when suddenly someone else opened the door. We dashed in and got our dollars changed. We then went back to the hotel and up to the restaurant where Fulbright was sponsoring a dinner for early arrivals. It was almost 8pm and we asked if the Fulbright dinner was still on. Since it was a giant buffet they said no problem. So we found a table with the requisite green paper napkins, parked our luggage and took turns going to the buffet. After eating we finally checked in.

The Fulbright Seminar in Berlin brings together the American Fulbrighters in Germany and other European countries along with those German students selected to study in US academic year 2010-11. The number attending the seminar, including spouses and significant others was over 500. Our name tags had our name and Hungary, while the American Fulbrighters in Germany had the name of their German university or location. The German students going to the US in the fall had their names, their German University and then in very small letters, their US destination school.

Tari found one couple who had Romania on their nametags. We found out they were in Cluj where we were going next week. So we sat with Darius and Catherine Brubeck for dinner. He was teaching jazz music (being the son of Dave Brubeck), but we talked about a lot of things ranging from health care reform which was being voted on that day to grandchildren. On Tuesday night Darius played at a Fulbright music gala that included performances by several other Fulbright musicians and singers.

Tari and I “networked” with some students. One was going to visit Budapest next week and we talked about what she should see. She then added she was going to Poland; Tari mentioned that one of the Fulbrighters in Hungary was going to Poland. On our way out we met Lori and brought her back to the student’s table to introduce them.

German shops are closed from late Saturday afternoon until Monday morning. But for some reason, this Sunday was one of the handful of exceptions during the year. As a result the stores were open. We went to the Galeria department store across from the hotel. On the fifth floor in house wares we found an oven thermometer which we purchased on the spot. We can take it back to Budapest and then perhaps mark up the oven knob for major temperature settings.

The opening session was entitled “When will my money be safe?” The first speaker was a managing partner in a Frankfurt investing firm. As with most economists, he started with what I thought was an untenable assumption: that all market bubbles were not over until the downside bottomed out at the point where the bubble first started expanding. He was some sort of free market economist who firmly believed that the market was a zero sum game. That is, all market losses should be accounted for and the lost value transferred to someone else; in the current downturn he argued that the value transferred from the West to China. He was convinced that a second mortgage collapse in the US was imminent because too many middle class had taken out loans on second or even third homes about three years earlier (but of course no one I knew did that). Finally turning to the hot topic of the day, he thought that the EU should not try to bail out Greece, or possibly Ireland, Portugal and Spain (facetiously known as the PIGS), after all would the US bail out California or Illinois?

Some of the other seminar panels were better than expected. A set of project reports mostly by research students were well chosen and were more interesting than their narrow titles suggested. In another session seven Fulbrighters discussed their experiences and the challenges they faced. None of them, however, was a visiting lecturer like me and so I thought a perspective was missing. The Fulbright Alumni Association encouraged everyone to keep in touch when they returned. Perhaps the most interesting session featured a visiting political science professor who wrote a book on the Berlin wall and a German who was the former coordinator of German American relations and a former politician. His historical and political insights were fantastic. He said that Germany in particular believed that social democracy required keeping the lower classes involved politically and this meant providing social support and welfare programs as compared to the US where the lower classes were not encouraged to participate politically. In answer to a question he pointed out that denial and conspiracy theories are an indication of an anti-democratic mentality whether it was of the holocaust, the moon landing, 9-11 or Darwinian evolution.

I found Berlin frustrating in one respect. I cannot find things on the street that I see on the maps. The U and S Bahn (metros) are well marked on the map, but we had difficulty finding out where we were once we got to street level, as streets go off in at least five directions. We have been in cities lacking strict grid patterns like Paris or Vienna, but those have a ring and spoke pattern that is easy enough to follow. Many cities grew up around a castle with several defensive walls, but I was told that Berlin was a merger of two cities that expanded into each other and then grew out to absorb other nearby towns. Travel by conference or city buses were along broad avenues that gently twisted and turned through the city, giving a false impression of straight direction, but again once off the bus it took a few minutes to figure out which of several streets we wanted to go down. Several times we were intently studying our maps when we heard a bell because we were in the middle of the bicycle lane and had to move out of the way.

After several meals in the Park Inn restaurant/buffet, I jokingly said to Tari, “Let’s eat at a real German restaurant." So she went though a handout Berlin guide and found a small list of regional restaurants, one was on Grosse Hamburger only a few blocks from Alexanderplatz. But of course we walked several block out of our way before we figured out how to get there. Another night I wanted wiener schnitzel and found an Austrian restaurant on Bergmann Str. But what seemed like a few short blocks from the U-Bahn station turned out to be several very long ones. When we got to the restaurant we found the first opening for two would be in an hour and a half. We retraced our steps and found another Austrian restaurant. The food at both restaurants we ate at was very good.

During free time on Tuesday Tari and I walked down Unter den Linden (although it was too early for the trees to have leaves.) to the Brandenburg gate. We went over to the holocaust memorial, an interesting array of stone slabs of different heights on a somewhat rolling surface. You could walk down and be overwhelmed as if lost in a maze except for the precise grid pattern that allowed you to get out straight ahead or to either side. We continued on to Checkpoint Charlie, a shack in the middle of the street, a symbolic memento of the cold war. Several of the senior people attending the Seminar had been to Berlin while the wall was up and more had travelled to Berlin when the wall came down in 1989. I suspect the city had an enthralling tension that appealed to them that I didn’t feel. It turns out that several years after the wall was torn down, people wanted to know where it had been, so a double row of bricks now marks its former encirclement of West Berlin. Nevertheless a few days later in Potsdamer Platz I swuccumbed. I paid 2,50 Euro to have the last page of my passport stamped with the official 1960’s border crossing visas and Tari took a picture of me in front of one of the wall segments.

On Thursday we went with fellow Hungarian Fulbrighters the Kellems to Schloss Charlotte, and saw the private rooms. On Friday Tari and I spent almost five hours in the Pergamon Museum looking at the Greek edifices and sculptures and the Gates of Ishtar along with other Mesopotamian statues and artifacts.

The Fulbright Seminar ended on Thursday and I thought I would save a few Euros by moving to a slightly cheaper hotel for the extra two nights. But I hadn’t noticed that the breakfast was not included and that brought it back up to the price at the Park Inn. The Fulbright must have gotten a fantastic rate at the Park Inn for taking several hundred rooms. Our new lodgings were more minimalist than hotels we have stayed at in Japan—no dressers or closets, or bars of soap (only small containers of body shampoo wash), and only one wall plug in the whole room.

Life in Budapest

2010-03-20T06:58:00.003+01:00

On the Town
Monday Mar 15th was a national holiday commemorating the 1848 revolution. We decided to go out that afternoon for a walk. But when we got to the street, it was crowded with people coming up from the metro and off the busses carrying signs for Fidesz, a centre-right political party that is expected to win the Apr 11th elections and take over from the Hungarian Socialist Party. It was cold and blustery so we walked down to the Danube and decided to ride the trams. We ended up on Tram #1 which makes an outer ring around central Pest and then ends up on the Buda side. We then took Tram #17 down Bécsi útca with its restaurants to the metro and home. As we came out of the metro we saw all the Fidesz supporters on their way home from their rally, probably at Petofi Ter.

One of the guide books reported that Hungarians are not into queuing to which I can add they don’t shove but will cut lines at grocery stores, or movie theatres if you’re not watching. They also do not stick to one side or the other on metro stairs. Of course when fifty or more get off a metro train they take over the whole staircase leading to the street. It is best to wait until the pack has come up and then go down sticking to one side or the other as the stairs are often a bit slippery in rainy or snowy weather. I’ve learned it’s best to go up the middle of the staircase behind someone else, although about half way up they inevitably begin veering towards one side where they want to exit to the street, while I want to go off to the other.

I thought I was making headway on at least reading signs and advertisements in the subway. I already knew that a “k” at the end made the word (noun or verb) plural, like adding an “s” in English. Then I learned that “bb” at the end of a word made in comparative, equivalent to “er” [nagy = big; nagyobb = bigger]. So I thought I could concentrate on finding the root word in the first few letters. No such luck. I discovered that putting “leg” at the very front of a word that ended in “bb” makes it superlative [legnagyobb = biggest]

When we first got here Tari got some info on the North American Women’s Association leaders, including things they missed here in Budapest. We laughed when one wrote all she wanted was to be able to do grocery shopping at one store. But we’ve learned it is oh so true. Not only do different chains carry different types of products, store size also makes a difference. Packaging is not big here, so many things come sealed in plastic rather than placed in boxes or canisters we are used to. We really missed plastic wrap in a box with a cutting edge, and this week we finally found what may be the one store that carries it. We also discovered one store that imports salmon fillets and shrimp though they are very expensive. We plan to try the salmon offered at the Central Market to see if it is as good.

You can’t get a dozen eggs in Budapest. Eggs come in cases of ten. All are brown shelled which is not a problem except the shells are very tough and don’t crack easily. Similarly, finding low fat milk is difficult as well. Only a few stores carry a small quantity of the 0.5% “Lite.” The most prevalent, at least in shelf display, is 2.8% (which is less than the 3.5% of whole milk) and 1.5% (which is less than the 2% that is common in the US.)

The Home Front
We have been in the apartment for two months and it has slowly become home. But we have had to make a few adjustments beyond the European shower system which consists of a hand held shower sprayer. The kitchen sink has a very small water heater and the hot water comes out scalding. That makes it dangerous to simply run a little hot water on your hands or a utensil to get rid of some grease. But the amount of hot water is very limited. So I’ve leaned to fill a big pot or bowl with the scalding water, add some cold water and wait a few minutes before washing the other pots, pans and bowls that will not fit in the dishwasher.

I am convinced we have a Communist era stove. It has no burner pilot lights so every time we want to boil water or cook something, we need to use a match and hold the burner knob in for at least 30 seconds until the gas really starts flowing. The oven has no broiler and no thermostat to control the level of heat. We have yet to find an over thermometer. As a result we are left with either pan frying or microwaving. Apparently Hungarians are not into grilling or barbequing, so we are now into pastas with chopped chicken or ground beef which yields at least one day of leftovers. I don’t know how long I can hold out before I need a steak fix at the Argentine steak house no matter how expensive it is.

Academic Matter
On Tuesday I met with a few faculty and a senior graduate student from the Health Economics and Technology Assessment Research Centre at Corvinus. I had sent them my slide presentation on health policy—Clinton and Obama. They asked some good questions and realized that part of the US problem rested more in American values and politics than on economics and rational choice. They will have me present this to their students and other faculty in April. I told them I had read on the internet that the House was going to vote on health care by the end of the week and I would have to hold off on sending them a final abstract for the announcement until I knew what had happened.

On Wednesday Peter and I went to Szeged, a University town about two hours southeast of Budapest. We arrived a bit early and went into the Dom (Catholic Church) that occupied part of the square that the public health and medical school was on. The Dom was large but the transept only had pillars in front rather than the four as I have seen in other churches. In contrast to the four intellectuals depicted in Esztergom, the Szeged Dom depicted “Justice” representing the virtue of temperance and “Fortuna” as a warning against the sin of envy.

I gave two lectures. The morning lecture dealt with US Health Care Policy, which I updated given the developing events, and the afternoon lecture presented an overview of the US health care system.

In-between we were taken to the standard fish restaurant near the Tisza river (which was very wide and fast flowing), to have the standard Szeged fish soup—some river fish, perhaps carp, and plenty of paprika. I was assured by the department chair, an expert in toxicology, that all the fish came from a nearby lake and not the Tisza itself. I liked it and also had the perch-pike as the main course. As we were leaving the restaurant another group came in. I looked at one of the men and finally recognized Huba, that is Dr. Bruckner, who is the executive director of the Hungarian Fulbright Commission. I thought he was in Washington DC for some meeting, so I tentatively said “Huba?’ and he gave me a big smile and nod. I then tried to introduce him to my lunch companions, but since I couldn’t bring up everyone’s name and only knew Dr. Bruckner as Huba, I just said this is Huba, head of the Hungarian Fulbright Commission. Huba took over and introduced himself as I am sure he has done many times in his career.

Calvin and Hobbes
As a final aside, I found that the newspaper handed out in the Metro carried the cartoon. Kázmér és Huba, that is Calvin and Hobbes. But I think the Hungarians are missing the innuendoes of the conflict between (John) Calvin a leader of the Protestant Reformation and (Thomas) Hobbes the British political philosopher. I noted this because one of the metro stops on my way to my office (and a major inner ring tram stop) is Kálvin tér which was named for the early 19th century Hungarian Reformed Church that still stands on one corner.

like déjà vu

2010-03-15T17:33:00.002+01:00

Phone calls in the Night
We were woken up twice by our US cell phone in the wee hours of Sunday morning. But the caller phone number was blocked, and at a dollar a minute we decided not to answer it. Then in the wee hours of Monday morning we received another call, but this time a caller phone number appeared. Tari answered and found it was from the fraud squad from one of our credit cards. Somehow the number had been used on the US west coast although we had both cards in our possession and had not used it very often in Budapest. We denied the charges and had a temporary block put on the card. We used the secure online email system to verify the situation. We were told to download an affidavit concerning the rejected charges and then go to the US Embassy to have it notarized. The Embassy has an online reservation system and the first opening was Tuesday of next week. We then made arrangements to have the new credit cards sent to us. We have been exchanging emails, and received a phone call confirming our intention to have the affidavit notarized and saying they would remove the unauthorized charge.

Academic Matters
I have been eating lunch by myself in the building bufe (cafeteria). Once or twice I have seen another faculty member come down but they didn’t sit with me. Wednesday that changed. I was eating and concentrating on some Hungarian words to learn when two of the younger faculty came up and asked if they could join me. I said of course. One of them had been to Chicago. He knew I was originally from Chicago, and then went on about the Cubs, baseball being a very slow game which allowed for plenty of hotdogs, beer and conversation. He mentioned the people watching the game from the roofs of apartment buildings that overlook Wrigley Field.

I gave my Wednesday afternoon lecture on private health insurance in US which raised much less discussion than the previous week’s on Medicare and Medicaid. In my preparation I did learn about company and union benefit societies that existed in the late 1800s and early 1900s, so that Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance just didn’t emerge suddenly during the depression and commercial insurance after World War II. On Friday I gave my delayed presentation to the faculty on Clinton and Obama Health Reform efforts. I apologized for missing the previously scheduled meeting, but told them that things had progressed in the ensuing two weeks including the President’s televised meeting at Blair House with Congressional leaders, the President’s own proposal (at long last), and the official decision to pass Health Care Reform under the reconciliation process requiring only 51 votes in the Senate for the corrective bill if the bill already passed by the Senate was approved without amendment by the House. Because of a special convocation that morning I was told to limit my talk to an hour. I cut a bit but still felt rushed. In the end I think the details of the Clinton and the current House and Senate bills along with the cutthroat politics must have seemed Byzantine to the faculty. The department chair did comment that lobbies like tobacco had great influence in Hungary as in the US. I did learn that in 1993 staff for Senate minority leader Robert Dole told Republican Senators not to talk with Mrs. Clinton and then Rep. Newt Gingrich vowed that no House Republican would vote for the Clinton legislation. Clearly in 2009 and2010 Republicans are following the same strategy. As the great philosopher Yogi Berra put it, “This is like déjà vu all over again!”

Ceremony
The Semmelweis University convocation on Friday began with the singing of Gaudeamus Igitur, the alma mater, for which everyone stood. One verse reads, “Long live academia, Long live the professors, long live the male and female students.” Another verse goes … "Long live the state and those who rule it. Long live our city, and the charity of benefactors," which tied into the March 15th national holiday on Monday. During the song, a color guard led the speakers, with green, white and red cockades (circular paper badges) into the hall and to their seats in front. This was followed by the playing of the Hungarian National Anthem, Himnusz (literally Hymn) which begins “O Lord, bless the nation of Hungary with your grace and bounty” but goes on in a vein similar to the Star Spangled Banner, on the perseverance of Hungary in the face of Mongol and Turkish invasions as well as the victories of King Mátyás Corvinus. It ends with a prayer for relief for those who have suffered for all sins of the past and of the future.

The awards ceremony itself took about an hour and recognized faculty, staff and students for their contributions and activities to the University. It ended with the playing of the other major anthem (perhaps akin to God Bless America although though much more fatalistic) Szózat (literally Summons) which calls on Hungarians to be ever faithful to your homeland because in the great world outside of here there is no place for you, and a thousand years of suffering would enliven you or bring death. The speakers were then escorted out by the color guard again to Gaudeamus Igitur.

March 15th is a national holiday celebrating the 1848 revolution. Following similar “revolutions” in France, Germany and Italy, a large demonstration of ten thousand people was held in Pest on March 15th. Petõfi Sándor read his poem, National Song, which begins “On your feet, Magyar, the homeland calls!
The time is here, now or never! Shall we be slaves or free?” The writer Jókai Mór read the Twelve Points for change which the Mayor of Pest and the Imperial Governing Council in Buda were forced to sign. An independent government was established and passed a series of legal reforms and then in July 1849 the Hungarian Parliament enacted a law giving ethnic and minorities rights. But it was too late: Emperor Franz Joseph (who had deposed his ailing uncle) called on Nicholas I of Russia to help suppress the Hungarians, who were no match for the Russian army. Shades of 1956 or as Yogi Berra put it…

On Saturday morning we went to services at the Dohany Utca Great Synagogue. I wanted to say the memorial prayers (yartzeit) for my parents. We passed through security and into a small chapel, not the large main sanctuary with its balconies. We estimated thirty people attended about two-thirds men and one-third women. We received English prayer books from the Conservative United Synagogues (mine was a gift from a couple in Cleveland, OH). I alos picked up the Hungarian prayer book and a small thin volume containing the Book of Exodus in Hebrew and Hungarian without the numerous rabbinical commentaries. I asked what the reading for the week was and was told it was a double parshat of Vayekhel/Pekudei that come at the end of Exodus. I only later realized it was in Hebrew on signs on either side of the ark.

The Chapel, in the mid nineteenth century German liberal tradition, had an organ and choir that accompanied the Cantor. The Cantor had a very Ashkenazi accent, but not as slurred as I have heard in Orthodox services in Detroit and Chicago. Every once in a while the tunes were familiar and I recognized the call to the amidah and stood up for it. At the end I think they said the Kadish, the memorial prayer, twice, perhaps the first time for the holocaust victims and the second for individual mourners. I stood and said both.

Although the trappings were “liberal” or “modern”, the atmosphere was very orthodox. Tari sat with the women on one side and I with the men on the other. The men who arrived late would stand and begin their personal opening prayers while the services moved on. The men conversed with each other and several of the women talked almost the whole time. Except for the Cantor, the prayer leaders were at a prayer niche against the wall next to the ark or at the prayer table facing the ark and could barely be heard. As far as I could tell, no page numbers were announced as the service, as in most congregations, skipped along through the prayer book. At one point the man who handed out the prayer books went to the front and encouraged everyone to stand for the Hazak that is said when a Torah book is completed. When the services were over, everyone left and went home, no Kiddush or greeting of strangers.

On the Town
Last Sunday we decided to take the 59 Tram in Buda that Constance described at the Fulbright orientation as going from birth (near the hospital) to death (near the cemetery). We caught it at Moszkva ter and took it north in the direction of the hospital. Nothing much, so we rode it all the way to the other end up the Buda hills to the Farkasréti cemetery. What had started as a few snowflakes was now a wet snow that was piling up at the top of the hill. At the end of the line is the original Auguszt pastry shop, so we stopped in for a four o’clock tea.. Started in the 1870s Auguszt has been a family business ever since surviving World War II and the Soviet imprisonment of some members during the 1950s. The pastry was good and the hot chocolate very rich, reminding us of Ghirardelli in San Francisco. When we got back to Pest, only a few flakes were on the ground.

A Fulbright Week

2010-03-07T14:01:00.003+01:00

Penitence
I was sent the power points to review for the Semmelweis English Language Medical Program late last week. I emailed back my comments over the weekend. When I arrived at the faculty meeting on Monday afternoon they were passing around the sign in sheet. I had not been asked to sign in at the previous faculty meetings, but today they said I should sign in. So I printed my name on a blank line and signed in. They then commented that I would now be eligible for continuing medical education credits from the Hungarian Medical Chamber. It may have been a bit of a joke but I was flattered and felt I had been accepted. Then they proceeded to hold the whole meeting in Hungarian, explaining that they had forgotten to bring the flash drive with the English overheads on it. I accepted this as perhaps penitence for my failure to show up the previous Friday for my talk. Actually earlier that morning the faculty member who arranged the seminars came up to see me. He apologized for not having reminded me of the seminar and I apologized that I had misunderstood about meetings and seminars. We agreed to try to hold it in two weeks, but needed approval from the dept chair.

Lecture on the Athenian Plague
I gave two lectures this week. The first was on the Athenian Plague of 429 BC. I had spent over a week gathering the information and putting it together in a power point. I personally learned a lot. The lecture was on Monday afternoon and it was pouring when I left for ELTE to give the talk. About twenty people attended including several faculty and graduate students in the Ancient History Dept. Things went pretty smoothly. When I was done I faced dead silence. This has only happened a few times in my over 40 years of teaching. I interpret as meaning I have presenting something that was not expected and brought a different perspective on the topic. One of the students did say it would take some time to digest what I had presented. George (check name) the chair of the dept who invited me to give the lecture then asked a question about typhus as the cause of the plague. I had come across a report of finding a mass burial grave in Athens during construction of a new subway for the 1996 Olympics.

One student then asked whether this could be applied to other eras in history. So I mentioned the Cholera epidemics of the 1840-70s and how they contributed to the building of sewers in major European cities, and then HIV AIDS. I argued that since modern science had been able to identify and then create a treatment for HIV AIDS within a very short time period—less than 20 years—the forces that could have led to a religious revival movement didn’t have a chance to take hold, although such reactions were most evident in South Africa. I also said that Asclepius represented a combination of the new Hippocratic medicine approach blended with the rise of a new healing god.

I then went to Corvinus and had an interesting hour discussion with Norbert Kiss who is in public administration and management. I mentioned my evaluation research and policy, and he told me about an HMO pilot study, his work on hospital quality assurance and some work of his colleagues on pharmaceutical purchasing. We agreed to exchange some papers and he would see about having me give a presentation in a class or two in April.

Classroom Challenges over Medicare and Medicaid
On Wednesday I presented a lecture on US Medicare and Medicaid to the 25 medical students. I worked my way through Medicare parts A B C and D. By the time I got to D the students were incensed. How could a first world country have such a disorganized and irresponsible health care system? I realized that they were assuming Medicare would cover everyone, not just those over 65. I also explained that if someone came in with a bleeding broken arm that they would be treated in the ER but not admitted to the hospital. The initial high deductible really bothered them. One of the students remarked that with all the deductibles, copays and other requirements it seemed as if the Medicare was designed to encourage old people to die. I told him that Sarah Palin had expressed similar thoughts (although I am not sure they knew who she was and they didn’t ask).

One student asked me what I thought of Michael Moore’s’ film Sicko. I said that much of it was true—for example, his Canadian relatives thought they had it much better than his relatives in Flint Michigan. I mentioned that he interviewed a very upper bourgeois young couple in Paris who had a fabulous apartment and had no problems with health insurance or health for that matter. I said I had looked more closely into how the French system worked and was paid for. The French merely show their insurance card and the system then takes care of everything for them—no visible paper work and no apparent difficulties in receiving treatment. While they do pay high taxes and premiums, these are automatically deducted and presented no real choices for them to make. The student from France supported me and said that the health system was adding to the national debt. Peter, my sponsor, pointed out that in France and Hungary the complexity of the system is behind the scenes while in the US it is all front stage.

Fulbright First Friday
Lori, one of the Fulbright faculty at Pecs, suggested that a group of us get together for dinner on Thursday evening before the First Friday trip to Piliscaba, Parkany-Struvo, and Esztergom. We ate at the small French restaurant and had a very nice time. Tom Burns, a specialist in Roman history and former chair at Emory. His wife had worked in the medical library. They had extensive travels and work in Europe. He had many interesting stories and the next day would comment on where the Roman camps and settlements were and what went on in them. His wife and I played small world and found some mutual acquaintances.

On Friday morning we boarded a bus and went to visit the Pazamany Peter Catholic University in Piliscaba. The university was founded in 1636, the same year as Harvard, although representing opposite ends of the Counter Reformation. The Pazamany acquired a new campus in Piliscaba when the Soviet army abandoned its barracks in the early 1990s. New buildings were designed and the outside of the barracks redone by the group of Imre Makovecz and it has become an architectural landmark. You can check them out at http://www.pbase.com/bauer/stephaneum_campus_in_piliscsaba_hungary Lazlo Muntrean, a former Fulbrighter at Univ of San Francisco who is teaching at Pazamany, presented a talk about the architecture and Makovecz.

We then went across the Danube into Solvakia to have lunch at the best Hungarian restaurant in the area. We were reminded that this part of Solvakia had been a part of the Hungary until the end of World War I and still had a very large Hungarian population. The food at the Casablanca was excellent, especially the chestnut puree (gesztenyepüré) dessert.

After lunch we crossed back to see the Basilica at Esztergom. Esztergom, originally a Roman outpost on the Danube, became the center of the Catholic Church in Hungary. Stephen was crowned king here in 1000, and a recently completed sculpture commemorates the event. After it was sacked by the Tartars, King Bela IV moved the crown to Buda which was more defensible, but the Church stayed and the current Basilica is the largest church in Hungary. The central vault features Saints Gregory, Jerome, Ambrose and Augustine. Tom Burns pointed out that these were four intellectual leaders of the Church and stand in contrast to the usual four apostles.

A large side chapel in the Basilica was moved, stone by stone from its original sight on a near by hill that was named after St. Thomas Becket. While studying in Paris, Becket who became archbishop of Canterbury befriended Lukács Bánfy, who became archbishop of Esztergom. Both were advocates for church autonomy but after Becket was martyred the hill was named in his memory. So Becket not only helps Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, he protects Esztergom The Basilica holds the remains of Cardinal Mindszenty who opposed the Communist takeover of Hungary in 1948, was imprisoned, released during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and then lived in the American embassy after the Russians retook Budapest.

On the Town
On Wednesday night we did BurgerKing and an opera. The opera starts at seven and I lecture until 5:30. So I rushed home, we took the metro to Oktogon, ate at the BurgerKing and then went to the Opera. At BK we sat at a small table near which was a sign that explained the charge for using the bathroom could be waived on showing a meal receipt from that day or getting a receipt in the bathroom and having it deducted from the meal purchase.

We saw Turondot, Tari’s favorite opera, which she knows very well. The opera really carries and has a lot of good music and arias. The staging encouraged the singers to move around. The scene of Ping, Pang and Pong talking with Calaf was done in front of the curtain with the three ministers first removing their ceremonial make up and then putting it back on. At one point they briefly opened their portfolios to allow Calaf to see the Chinese character each contained. Turned out these were the answers to the three riddles.

Time Warp

2010-02-28T22:00:00.002+01:00

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.

Tari’s Busy Week

2010-02-21T22:54:00.002+01:00

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.

Back to Normalcy

2010-02-13T16:39:00.003+01:00

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.

Orientation Week

2010-02-06T15:50:00.002+01:00

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.

Winter in Budapest

2010-01-31T12:34:00.002+01:00

On the Town
The normal high temperature in Budapest for mid to late January is just above freezing. But its only been above freezing one or two days since we’ve got here. So it’s a real cold snap. Last week Tari had to buy a hat. It is a sort of tam but can be pulled down over her ears. This week she bought a scarf. It’s a good thing we brought our long johns to keep our legs warm!

On Wednesday we went to scout out a set of apartments that my college friends were interested in staying at when they come to visit in late May. It was in the Jewish Quarter next to a café restaurant. They had found out about these apartments from a friend of a friend. The landlady took us up to see the apartments. She was very nice and spoke good English. The rooms were very nice and clean. We ate lunch at the Spinoza café—the cream of carrot soup was delicious and the bagels and lox very good as well. We emailed our friends and they made the reservations. On the way back we discovered some recycling bins that were fairly close to our apartment.

What to you do if it’s a rainy, or in this case, snowy Saturday? You go to the Muzeum of Fine Arts. We first went on an English docent tour of the Spanish collection. Apparently the Muzeum has one of the largest collections this side of the Prado in Madrid. Then we went to see the special exhibit “Botticelli to Titian.” It was very extensive—130 paintings—and took over two hours to go through. The central painting in the exhibit, and the one featured on the subway posters and tourist magazines, is da Vinci’s “Lady with the Ermine,” on loan from the museum in Krakow, Poland.

On Friday Tari took a bus up to the hills of Budapest to attend a monthly meeting of the North American Women’s Association. She found out about this group before we left. The speaker was Marion Merrick, a teacher who wrote two books, Now You See It, Now You Don't (Hungary 1982-1989) and House of Cards about living in Hungary over a 28 year period. Tari met several of the women, and found out about a once a month happy hour that would include spouses and friends. Before we left the US, she bought and has now read Julia Child’s My Life in France which will be discussed at a book club meeting in February. At the meeting she bought the Merrick books and Surviving & Thriving: A Guide to Living in Budapest, a booklet the group puts out that has all kinds of information. That night we tried a recommended Thai restaurant and it was very good.

Academic Matters
On Monday morning I went to meet with Helga about helping her with the history of the English Public Health Act of 1848 and giving some lectures. But the minute I walked in I was introduced to Professor Gyorgy Mémeth, Helga's doctoral professor, and his wife, Edina Gradvohl, a colleague of Helga’s. He had seen my Social Epidemiology syllabus which covered the Great Athenian Plague of 429 BC. As the head of the Dept of Ancient History at ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University), the oldest in Budapest, he was all excited. He promptly whisked me away to his office which was located several blocks away. We talked for a short time and I agreed to give a talk in late February or early March on Plagues in Antiquity. He said he could offer nothing, but I said "no problem, since I was over on a Fulbright."

We then walked back to Helga’s office. She introduced me to Attila, her office mate, who is a cultural anthropologist. She had a copy of my US Health Care Policy and Politics syllabus and had highlighted my proposed lecture on the Hill-Burton Act and on the Legal System—Costs of Practice in US. She teaches Social Norms in Health Care which covers legal and ethical issues. The first half of the course dealt with theoretical issues whiles the second half with practical issues. She thought I might give a talk on Power and Administration in health Care—Public Health Regulation from the first half and on Patients’ rights and liabilities from the second. Later I was not sure if the students would get much out of US Public Health regulations. But I did have a lecture on provider-patient relationships which included power differentials between providers and patients, compliance, informed consent with two US legal cases, and malpractice. This would fit with patients’ rights and liabilities. I could also talk on the ethics of social behavioral research and the US ethics review boards, and on minorities and US health disparities.

In the afternoon I was back at the Public Health Institute. I had sent Peter a list of 11 topics from the 15 on my US Health Care Policy and Politics syllabus. We met and paired it down to the eight lectures by combining several of them like history of US Health Care Professions and History of US Hospitals. It will be a challenge to squeeze this into one 45 minute lecture. He also invited me to give a presentation to the faculty on the general topic of US Health Care Policy and Politics. I decided to compare and contrast the Clinton and Obama health care reform efforts, and that this would become my “stump” lecture to be repeated in different venues during my stay.

I had to put together two complete 15 week syllabi as part of my Fulbright application. It now appears that I will not be giving two complete classes, but a selection of lectures across two Universities and three departments.

On Tuesday I attended a conference for all instructors in the Public Health Institute program. I was sent a power point for the first lecture on General Epidemiology—Communicable Diseases. I originally looked it over for “accuracy.” But before the meeting, Peter explained to me they also wanted me to look at the English and actual wording. On John Snow’s 1854 map of water pumps and cholera cases in the Broad Street area, they had inserted the label “penitentiary institution” on the work house. I knew that a work house did not house convicts. One slide stated that they had “unsetted” the pump on Broad street, where as most English versions say they “took the handle off the pump.” I presented these and a few other comments at the meeting. Afterwards Peter invited me to the next meeting of the group which is held every other week.

On the Home Front.
The dollar has gained seven cents against the forint since we arrived. As we were running out of cash, we went to a nearby ATM. After the standard 3% change fee, we were only charged $1 for the transaction. The rate at the ATM was two cents better than the best rate we saw on the street, and after the fees, it was in the middle of the street rates. So we felt pretty good.

The apartment has a large living room between the kitchen area and the bedroom. We had been keeping the living room at very low heat and it was always cold going between the kitchen and bedroom. Tari convinced me that a lot of the cold air in that room was seeping into the bedroom. So I turned up the heat a bit and it seems to have worked. But the door in the kitchen opening on a small balcony had major drafts. On Monday morning we went to the Oktogon area in search of a hardware store that Annamaria at the Fulbright Office had told us about. We found it and “draft prevention” (weather) stripping. We put it up on Wednesday. The drafts have been reduced considerably and the kitchen stays much warmer.

The other main issue is the influx of household bills. We thought it would be a simple matter of getting some coupons and going to the post office to pay them at the beginning of each month, when we get our Fulbright housing allowance in forints. In addition to the costs of restarting the cable and wireless, we think one bill was for the installation of the building’s new heating system. But several of the Nov-Dec bills were not paid. The bills, of course, are all in Hungarian and Tari tried valiantly to translate them using a large dictionary we found in the apartment. In the end we asked Kristin to come over and help us sort them out. She figured out most of them. Then her husband stopped by on his way home from work. He also thought the billings were somewhat confusing. He did, however, discover that each heating element/radiator had a meter that automatically sent usage readings to somewhere in the building. In the end we scanned in all the bills we had and emailed them to the landlord to let them puzzle it all out.

The First Full Week

2010-01-23T20:12:00.002+01:00

Getting Plugged In
One wonders how we ever got along without the internet and TV. When we first moved in the cable TV, internet and wifi were all disconnected. It took the usual 24-48 hours to get it up and working. I managed to sporadically get on an unsecured wifi but the MSU email system is very slow and I would be timed out before I could really go through all the emails. On Saturday I saw several emails I had to read but could not, so we went to a nearby internet café. We got an email telling us the system should be up and running. All we had to do was just reboot. We figured out that to reboot the system, we simply flipped the on/off switch off and then on. David our landlord had sent us the codes for his wifi and we successfully got on. We get several TV stations in English—CNN, Animal Planet, Discovery, Disney and the BBC. Most of the others are either Hungarian or dubbed in Hungarian. A few are in French or Italian.

On Sunday we set up a skype call with our daughter Emily from St. Louis. She called in and it worked very nicely. We both could see and hear each other. We plan to set up a call next weekend with our son Roger and his family including the two grandsons.

We got two local cell phones with Budapest numbers so that we can call each other locally and locals can contact us easily. Through Kristie Foley, who had been at Semmelweis two years ago we made contact with Kristen, a grad student living in Budapest and married to a Hungarian—social networking works! She helped us find a reasonably inexpensive set of phones and a pre-paid plan. They are plain non-flip phones, no cameras, and most important, no side buttons! On my regular cell phone I am constantly either turning off the ringer or taking a picture of the inside of my pocket or the floor.

Kristen also took us to WestEnd, a humongous shopping mall to find some electronic plug adapters for our computers etc. We also purchased a printer/scanner/copier for a very reasonable price, but the black and color cartridges together cost more than the printer. The unit works just fine. We scanned in some bills and receipts, saved them in pdf to the lap top and then emailed them to the landlords so we would know what to pay and when.

Academic Matters
Peter met me Monday morning and showed me how to get to the Public Health Institute. From our apartment it is four metro stops on the Blue line. The Institute is in a 30 story building. I was shown around the Institute and introduced to a number of faculty and staff. I will undoubtedly get to know them better in the coming weeks. My office is on the 21st floor. I will bring my laptop and plug into an ether net for web access. I am not plugged into the local server, which is all in Hungarian. It took another two days but I finally got a magnetic card that lets me into the building and elevators after hours and weekends, and at any time into the office hallways without having to ring a bell to get buzzed into the hallways like the students do.

The most interesting and intensive part of Monday morning involved oral examinations for several students in the English language program who had not passed the written exam. The students were at a table in Peter’s office. A younger professor handed out three slips of paper each with a question to each of the students. They were then given about a half hour to write down notes for their oral answers to the questions. Each in turn discussed their three questions. Peter listened attentively and would interrupt to ask a “why” question or “what is the most important aspect of ____.” His questions were aimed at eliciting a key point the students should have known.

One student did not pass and was very upset. The student could have had a second retry three days later, but had already booked an air flight home. After that another student indicated that it might be best if the oral part was taken next semester. I was aware from my trips to Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj Romania that the examination period extended over almost four weeks. This time is allocated to the oral retesting if the written test was failed—repechage (second-chance round). It is a lot more formal and public than the US practice of having individual students come and petition to find a few more points to raise their grade.

Afterwards, Peter and I sat down and I told him of the dates when I had Fulbright obligations—orientation the whole first week of February, the first Fridays of Feb, Mar, Apr and May when all the Fulbrighters in Hungary come to Budapest for an all day meeting and get together, and the third week in March when we will be in Berlin for the German Fulbright spring seminar. He told me that spring break was the last week in March just before Easter. He will finalize my teaching program at the Institute and also inquire about some possible lectures at the Health Services Management Training Center.

On Tuesday Tari and I went to the Fulbright office to meet with Annamaria Sas. She made sure we were settled in with respect to the transit cards, shopping etc. She filled us in a bit on what to expect during the Fulbright orientation week. But the best thing was that my two boxes of books had arrived. The Fulbright grant provided money to purchase books and educational materials that would remain in Hungary. In the fall I had asked Peter if he and his colleagues wanted any books. He emailed back a list of seven. I then went on Amazon and ordered the seven plus another seven that I had listed in the two syllabi I had submitted as part of my application. I added two or three other books on public health and medical sociology I had in my office that were either duplicates or the previous edition. Just before Christmas we put them in two large US post office priority mail flat rate boxes that had been advertised on TV. We shipped them to DC where they were put in a diplomatic pouch and sent to Budapest. Since the Fulbright office was half way between our apartment and my Semmelweis office, we took them directly to the office. One of the books order by a faculty member was of interest to me, so I am taking some notes from it before handing out the books.

On Wednesday Peter took me to the Faculty of Health Science to meet a young colleague of his. Helga is an assistant professor in the Department of History of Health Culture with an interest in history and sociology. The Faculty of Health Science is an undergraduate bachelor’s degree program added to Semmelweis University a few years ago. It is located in an old hospital building that has been nicely refurbished. The courtyard has become a covered atrium and is very open and airy. We discussed the possibility of my giving some lectures to the students in the program and also a lecture at a University in Eger. Helga teaches Social Norms. She is doing research comparing the English Public Health Act of 1848 and the first Hungarian Health Act of 1876. I said I would be happy to help her out by reading the English Act and discussing it with her. She talked with her faculty and it looks like I will be asked to give a few lectures in April and May.

On Thursday I found out I would be giving eight lectures on Wednesday afternoons. I would have given three more but the first Wednesday was in the Fulbright orientation week, and then two in March were taken up with a lecture in Szeged that Peter had arranged, and the German Fulbright Spring Seminar that I wanted to attend in Berlin. I had to condense two 15 week syllabi. I proposed a list of 11 topics. Peter and I will meet next week with the coordinator of the English language program at Semmelweis to finalize the eight topics I will present.

On the Home Front
When we are at the WestEnd Mall we looked at the new washing machines. We found several that were like the one in the apartment. The door opens on the top but the drum stands on its side just like a front loader. To put clothes in the washer you slide open a panel and two panels in the drum flip up. The drum is very small, about 16" in diameter by 9" wide. Tari felt much better about using the one in the apartment. It was big enough for eight shirts or eight sets of men’s underwear. In a way it's a good thing the washer is so small because the drying rack would not hold much more. Kristin warned us that it might take two days for a load of laundry to dry but the underwear only took one afternoon and night.

And yes I finally found a jar of peanut butter at the Match in the basement of the Central Market. It was the last one on a shelf between the canned salted peanuts and the beer!

Settling In

2010-01-17T16:49:00.002+01:00

Arrival
My sponsor Péter Balázs from the Public Health Institute at Semmelweis University was kind enough to meet us at the airport. I recognized him from his website picture. I emailed him to look for two people pushing luggage carts piled high; I in a green parka and Tari in a purple coat. You will be unmistakable, he emailed back. He got us a large taxi and then followed us into the city in his own car.

The taxi left us and our luggage on the curb at Ferenciek Tere in front of Parisi Udvar, (a turn of the 20th Century arcade that has not done well in the current recession.). Péter arrived and we lugged the luggage through the arcade to the gate in front of the entrance to the apartment elevator. We rang the bell but no one was in. Then just before noon Bobby arrived and let us in. Aunt Klara showed up a few minutes later. They showed us the apartment and how the heat and appliances worked, with Bobby and Péter doing the translating. Péter told us it was an apartment typical for middle class people in the pre World War II era. It has high ceilings, a large bedroom with a side room containing a sink, bath and small ancient European washing machine; a nice sized parlor/sitting room; a kitchen, with a small side room that may have been either a pantry or maid’s room now converted into a study; a balcony off the kitchen that overlooks an inner court, a small second bedroom with a bunk bed, and the one toilet just off the front door.

We have a set of five keys which we have on a ring in the following order: the first key is to the outer gate to the Parisi Udvar which is lowered at 20:00 (8pm); the second is to the gate in front of the entrance to the apartment elevator; the third is to the gate in front of the apartment; the fourth to the front door bolt; and the fifth to the front door latch handle. In European fashion, one must use the keys to lock up the apartment gate and door from the inside at night. We don’t expect to get out in case of fire—too many locks and gates to negotiate!

Shopping
Gyöngy, our landlord, told us that the Match grocery store was a short walk from the apartment. We crossed the street and walked straight head for quite some distance. We eventually came to the large Central Market Hall at the foot of Szabadság hid (bridge) that crosses the Danube. The market was very large, filled with many stalls teeming with meats, veggies, fruits and folk crafts. In size, it reminded me of the Reading Terminal Market in downtown Philadelphia. We wandered through the first floor but didn’t find the Match. Since it was already early afternoon (we had slept in much later than we expected –jet lag!), we decided to go to the lower level to get something to eat. At the foot of the escalator was the Match. We ate gyros in a büfé (lunch place) and then went shopping. (a few days later we crossed the street, turned left and found our local Match a block away)

We had made a shopping list and copied some key food words in Hungarian. Fortunately most food packages have pictures or have words like parboiled for rice. But Tari wanted to know the sodium content on packaged sandwich meats and we had no idea what the Hungarian word for sodium was. We found most of what we wanted. We looked for ½ percent milk but only found it at 2 and 1½ percent. Worst of all, we could not find that universal staple-peanut butter. The equivalent was either a hazelnut or walnut spread with cocoa. Apparently this is now entering the US market as a high protein food kids will like.

The Match’s small shopping baskets had two handles and wheels. One handle was for carrying in your hand, but the other was a long handle that lowered the wheels and allowed you to pull the basket on the floor once heavy items were put in. Pretty clever!

Tari had the foresight to bring some shopping tote bags from the US so we were in good shape carrying our purchases back to the apartment. When we got home we discovered a wheeled, folding shopping cart in one of the closets.

Afterwards, Tari sat down with the food receipt. We can deduct food and living expenses from the Fulbright allowance before figuring taxes for 2010 (over a year from now). She had some difficulty identifying Q-tips (literally ear cleaner in Hungarian) and a box of tissues (it read: Reg.WB Doboz with Regina being the company, WB for Warner Brothers Bugs Bunny / Tasmanian Devil/ Daffy Duck design, and doboz for box).

Everyday It’s a Gettin Closer

2009-12-24T03:18:00.001+01:00

Only a few weeks left. A few things were resolved but a major bureaucratic hassle emerged over medicines.

Housing
We signed a lease for a two bedroom apartment in Pest, centrally located near the metro and bus lines. We found it on a list distributed by the Hungarian Fulbright Commission. It is furnished and comes with dishes, silverware, pots and pans, washing machine, dishwasher, cable TV, and broadband internet. The owner is an American professor who teaches in the US during the school year but spends summers in Budapest. I can pay the rent in US dollars which means we can use the housing allowance in Hungarian forints for local purchases. That way we don’t have to convert as much from dollars to forints and pay the 3% fees.

He wanted the apartment back a week before our return flight. We agreed to vacate early and will spend our last week in Europe in Venice (well not on the island but 15 minutes by water taxi.)

But now we have to get a proof of ownership (Tulajdoni lap) document from the owners and fill out a accommodation reporting forms for third country nationals (one for each of us). The Hungarian authorities want signed originals on standard European sized paper. Annamaria at the Hungarian Fulbright Office is working with all of us so we can bring the signed documents with us when we arrive in early January.

Money Matters
I requested a leave of absence without pay. It took a letter to the Provost from me counter signed by my chair and dean. I got a bit antsy after a few weeks, but it was approved. Since the Fulbright is a prestigious award, Michigan State is willing to continue to pay its share of our health premiums. When I called MSU Human Resources they had it in their system. They are going to bill me each month, but I think the easiest thing for us to do is to prepay it all before we leave.

Most of our monthly bills at home—mortgage, communications, and utilities—are deducted monthly directly from a checking account. So all we have to do is make sure we have enough to cover the next six months. Our credit card can also be paid directly from a checking account. The Fulbright stipend will go into the account in mid January (to be on the 2010 rather than 2009 taxes). We can monitor and shift money electronically if necessary.

Prescription Medicines
We have had a lot of bureaucratic red tape getting a six months supply of our medicines. We discovered we needed to request a vacation override. These are given out in three month 90 day allotments, and fortunately Michigan State’s policy allows for two a year. We hoped we could request two at the same time.

When I checked the Caremark website and also the MSU human resources website, I found absolutely nothing on how to go about this. This was exasperating since a vacation override would be requested by retirees going to Florida or Arizona for the winter. A call to Caremark revealed Caremark deals with a lot of employers with varying coverages, so nothing is standardized. (Just ask anyone dealing with Medicare Part D!). They also wondered why we need six months. Couldn’t we simply have them mail us the drugs like they do for most other people? I then learned that the standard operating procedure is to automatically deny any and all submitted vacation overrides. Caremark then promises to review these within 72 hours.

We then contacted our physicians and requested they file prescriptions for a 180 day supply. Sure enough I got a call from Olin Health Center on campus informing me that my prescription had been denied. Tom the pharmacist explained that since my prescription was generic, I could pay $33.00, which was less than the co-pay if I were to fill two separate three month refills. So I did that.

Tari’s was another story. She went to Olin and Tom agreed to call in her scripts. When he was through he said it seemed too easy and something was probably wrong. Caremark took slightly more than the promised 72 hours to approve only three of her scripts. Turns out the Caremark computerized form only provided for three scripts. Tom found out that the person he spoke with when he called it in said that the additional scripts would be “attached.” Either that didn’t happen, or the review committee didn’t notice the attachment. So Tom called them again and urged them to turn it around ASAP. After another 72 hours Caremark approved the remaining scripts, but for a 90 day supply. Tari need a 180 day supply. So Tom called them again, explained that they had already approved the first three for 180 days and got them to approve the rest for 180 days as well.

Getting There is Half the Fun!

2009-10-30T17:33:00.003+01:00

We’ve been slowly preparing for our trip.

Airfares. We will receive what we thought was a reasonable reimbursement for our travel expenses to and from Budapest. A round trip was between $900 and $1,000, but then I got emails from Fulbrighters going in August who were aghast at the prices. When we tried to book more than three months out, we found that the price doubled. The university travel office explained that airlines are very reluctant to book more than three months ahead given fuel prices, uncertain demand and expected scheduling changes. We thought of flying to Amsterdam or Pairs and then taking a train, but that was equally expensive and required some transfers as well. We could have bought two round trips and not used the return portion, but that saved only a little bit. Finally we bit the bullet and used our frequent flyer miles which we had been accumulating over the years. So we fly first class from JFK to Budapest overnight but then coach on the way back. We have separate tickets from Detroit to Newark (which even six months out was much cheaper than flying from Detroit to JFK or LaGuardia.) Fortunately we have family in New York we can crash with and the taxi fare from Newark to NYC and NYC to JFK is still less expensive than the difference of flying from Detroit to JFK

Health. We looked up Hungary on the CDC travel website and got an idea of what inoculations we needed. We then went to the University Health Center’s travel office. We met with a nurse for almost an hour who filled us in many things from rabies to ticks to water and food precautions. We received Hep A and B shots, were given a set of four pills for preventing Typhoid (which we had to take every other day and it really did something to our intestines), and got some anti diarrheal prescriptions. The day before we had received our seasonal flu shots before they ran out. Since we were around in 1958, 1969 and 1975 we figured we were exposed to the H1N1. We still have to petition our drug insurance authorities to grant us vacation extensions so we can take purchase and take more than a 90 days supply.

Housing We were given a housing rental allowance of approximately $475 from Fulbright plus a bit for utilities which are always extra. We asked around and found a faculty couple who went to Budapest fairly regularly. They knew of a nice apartment but it turned out to be more of a medium stay hotel and more expensive than our housing allowance and what we were willing to put in on top of that. We found a number of websites offering rentals in Budapest and spent some time looking at them. We finally asked the Fulbright people in Hungary if they had a list of apartments that previous Fulbrighters had used. The list proved very useful. We currently are following up on two possibilities.

Visas We have started to work through the visa process. Since we are staying for more than 90 days we have to apply for a residence permit. In addition being a Fulbright lecturer means we are in the “other reasons” category. We wanted to get most of the paper work done before we left. The residence visa requires not only passports but original wedding licenses, documents including the Fulbright appointment, our health insurance, savings accounts to show we would not be a burden on the Hungarian state, and of course the roundtrip airline tickets. We cannot complete the local address and landlord information at this time. Fulbright strongly recommended we work with the Hungarian Embassy in Washington DC since they handle a lot of Fulbright paperwork. But since Tari was going to visit her mother and sister in New York anyway, she made contact with the Consulate in Manhattan. They said she didn’t have to come, but they finally agreed to see her if she showed up during the visa office hours. We filled out as much as we could and signed them. Tari will meet with them and get the answers on how to fill out the rest.

Leave of Absence I have applied for a leave of absence without pay from the University. I did this for two reasons. First the University is in dire economic straits and I wanted to be a good citizen and free up some salary money. Second, since it was a Fulbright, the University was willing to cover its share of my health insurance during the leave.

Getting Started

2009-07-22T20:35:00.002+02:00

I was notified that I received the Fulbright Award in mid April. Since then we have started to think about what we have to do in preparation--renting an apartment, making sure our bills will be paid, health insurance coverage, etc etc etc