Last days in Budapest
Since the last days were the most un-structured, but the most interesting (to me), I think it’s about time I captured it. After all, I’m home and memories get fuzzier when suddenly in a different location. They become ancient history very quickly.
Sunday, October 9
Our morning lecture was a wonderfully enthusiastic Hungarian named Sandor Stricker who teaches sociology at a local university. He reminded me in looks and demeanor of Nick Alex. He was harder to understand than Zoltan had been, but equally knowledgeable. He had an interesting theory on the two types of Hungarians: Nomads and Farmers. His distinction was if you were a nomad and owned sheep, these sheep in time might produce four lambs – a net addition to your flock which occurred without your taking anything from your fellow nomads; while if you were a farmer, and you gained four acres, it was likely that someone near you would have lost those four acres. This difference he felt explained the personalities that exist in Hungary today the optimist and the pessimist.
· For Hungary the halcyon period was from 1880 to 1920. But the Treaty of Trianon after WW I changed everything: 75% of Hungary was taken away; 60% of the population disappeared; and again, Jews became the scapegoats for this loss. Like in the Czech Republic, there is a sense of having been victimized first by the Ottomans, then by the Hapsburgs, then by the Treaty of Trianon and most recently by the Communists.
· The result of living under an oppressive regime is that since everything is insecure, one tends to live in the present: you eat too much, drink too much, and live too flamboyantly. That mood still exists and is evidenced by people who tend to buy too fancy cars, too fancy foods and eat in too fancy restaurants. One lives for the day since you don’t know what will happen next.
· In 1990 when the Communist regime left, they also left over 25 billion in debt. Western companies came in and bought up firms right and left and those individuals who had been communists last year became capitalists overnight.
· One of the sad things during the communist era was that salaries were strictly controlled. They rose at .02% per year – no matter what your profession, which meant that simple laborers who started working at age 18 would always make more money than those in college who only started working at age 22. It would take almost ten years for a college student to catch up to a simple worker of his own age.
· The theme was “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay”.
· Currently in Hungary there are approx. 10 million people, of which only 3.8 million are working and adding new revenues, and of those .8 million are civil servants (whose salary is really just a drain from the other 3 million. The rest are either pensioners over age 62, students and children under age 18 or the unemployed.
· During the communist era the state had to run continual deficits to support the ‘free’ services which were part of their mantra – be it education, health, pensions or living quarters. So to make ends meet the black market economy took hold in all professions. For example, to have a new baby, you ‘tipped’ the doctor 40,000 florints.
· While the multi-national companies have come in since 1990, Sandor felt that their money left the country rather than staying in Hungary, and since they paid taxes outside of Hungary in their home country poor Hungary had to survive on property and salary taxes only.
· Another reasons that there are no monies coming into the coffers is that of the 800,000 local Hungarian firms, over 700,000 are one-person companies. This is a way for individual citizens not to pay taxes since these companies must only pay taxes on their ‘profits’. Magically, these small one-man firms make sure that they don’t make any profits – they lease their cars, they have lots of ‘business expenses’ and voila! No profit. BUT, while they pay nothing into the system, they still get to take advantage of free health care and free education. Until these problems can be sorted out, Hungary will be in severe financial straits.
· [Great new quote: instead of saying ‘people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, the Hungarian phrase is ‘if you have butter on your head don’t go stand in the sunshine’].
Sandor left us with more questions than answers after his three hour talk, but it was time for lunch so his talk ended fairly abruptly.
During the afternoon there were tours of two different museums which I skipped since I find that guides show you what they want to discuss, which may not be what I’m interested in. Since I felt that I was in a data-overload state, I chose to stay at the hotel, relax and read and do some blogging instead.
For Sunday evening, Katalin had arranged that we would be divided up into small groups of four and have an opportunity to visit a local family in Budapest after dinner. My quartet was picked up by our host, Christoph Koos, and we drove to the Buda side of the river, high in the hills to a lovely condominium complex. We were met by his wife Agnes and son Misha and sat down around a large coffee table to chat about anything that came to mind. Well, each of us had lots of questions which we wanted to ask, so the rest of the evening was spent in lively conversation re-living the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, talking about the role of the media (which can never be trusted), and learning about each other’s lives, careers and aspirations. Misha is in college and training to become a mechanical engineer which he hopes will result in a job since many in Hungary are currently unemployed. His English was by far the best, having spent a semester in the UK. He was a delightful young man, somewhat embarrassed that his parents’ English was not quite ‘up to snuff’. He had that wonderful youthful confidence which believes it knows how the world really works. Christoph, whose family originally came from Transylvania is a geo-physicist who has lived in Cuba, Latin America and Denver for his career. He was passionate about the arts, Hungarian history, and life under the communist regime. He was so impassioned at certain points that he had to launch into Latin (rather than English), or turn to Misha for quick translation of Hungarian words. Agnes, his second wife, was retired as of three weeks but previously had been a head-hunter for those multi-national firms coming into Hungary who need local workers. Her frustration was that since 1948 the primary languages of Hungary had become – in order: Hungarian, Russian and Latin. None of which helped firms, like Mercedes, to find the thousands of workers they needed who had to speak German. [ It was a common theme from a variety of people we met, that Russian while forced to be learned by all citizens, was absolutely useless since they rarely met any Russians, and Latin was even farther afield. But English or German were simply not allowed, or not encouraged.]
We could tell that the Koos family had fared well during the communist era based on their careers, the look of their apartment, and the many lap-tops which existed for the three of them. We learned a lot about Hungarian poets and novelists, and were given a wonderful array of books to look into once we got home.
I have been concerned throughout our visit about the cynicism which is expressed by all the lecturers and guides we had met, Misha admitted that this was their way of coping with the idiocy which they saw around them, and he felt that this attitude would not disappear for a few more generations. After all the Hungarians have only been ‘independent’ for twenty years or so, and prior to that they had been treated poorly by the Germans, and before THAT by the Treaty of Trianon which took away major portions of Hungary. Christoph is still upset about the fact that Croatia and Transylvania just disappeared and that Hungary was 1/4th of what it had been in the past. For him it was almost a personal affront, and yet it had happened almost a hundred years ago.
I will be interested to see how Hungary develops over the next ten years. The economy is in serious trouble, the communist era left the country not only in debt, but with financial commitments that can’t be fulfilled – like pensions. The average citizen must live on very small incomes (the average being about $15,000/year), very high taxes, and very expensive goods and food. As a result, there is a second economy which is based on the ‘black’ or ‘gray’ market – not unlike what existed during the communist era. We talked about this for a bit, but then got back to arts, literature and history.
After a lovely desert accompanied by some ‘barack’ liqueur (the word for apricot in Hungarian), we were driven back to our hotel. While I had been skeptical about these visits, it was a delightful experience to be welcomed into someone’s home and to sit around chatting with people who were living their lives as best they could in a country going through difficult changes.
Monday, October 10th
Our morning was spent on a “Jewish history walk”. Budapest had the largest Jewish community in Central Europe, and our hotel was very close to this former district. We were told about how the Jews were all squashed into a very small area during WW II, but that luckily, the Germans were so busy transporting Jews from the countryside of Hungary, that those within the city Ghetto actually lived through the war. That is, all those who didn’t die of starvation, disease or other ailments which result from living in very tight quarters. As a result there is still a fairly good sized population of Jews in Budapest.
We visited the Dohany Street Jewish Synagogue – the second largest in the world – after Temple Emmanuel in New York. Our guide for the synagogue was a very amusing Hungarian woman who could easily have been a New Yorker. She had biting humor, flaming orange hair, and knew everything there was to know about the synagogue. Attached to the synagogue complex was: the Jewish Museum built on the site of the home of Theodor Hertzl; a memorial park dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg and other righteous among nations (those who were not Jewish, but who risked their lives to save other Jews); and a cemetery for those who died in the ghetto. The most moving piece, for me, was a construction which resembled a silver weeping willow tree, but where each leaf was the name of a person who had died during the holocaust.
We walked back to the hotel for lunch and in the afternoon took the tram to the large three-storied indoor market. The lowest level was for ‘smelly things’ such as fish, cheese and other foods; the entry floor was for fruits, vegetables, paprika and other food stalls; and the top tier was filled with small cubby-hole stalls selling any sort of Hungarian tourist tchotchke.
Gay and I wandered through the main and upper floors where one is immediately tempted to buy ‘stuff’. But we both knew, that once we got it home we’d say ‘what were we thinking? And so while we were tempted, we limited ourselves to buying paprika and a few scarves. But it was a fabulous place to take photographs and to watch the locals buying food for themselves.
A little foot-weary, we returned to the hotel for a rest before the evening activities. We had dinner at the Ferenc Jozsef restaurant (Franz Joseph) where we had chicken paprikash and cucumber salad. The dessert was chestnut puree, but we two agreed that it didn’t come close to the puree which mother used to make at the holidays.
The wonderful thing which Katalin did throughout our visit to Hungary was to make sure that at every meal we had a different Hungarian dish which is considered to be a typical food eaten by locals. She told me that when she went to one restaurant and asked them to make stuffed peppers the chef was upset because this was a type of food eaten in the home, and he could do so much better – but she insisted, and so we had stuffed peppers. [Katalin was a true ‘force of nature’ and I’m sure she got her way in every place we visited.]
From the restaurant we walked to the home of a local pianist named Adam Fellegi. Talk about entrepreneurs! Mr. Fellegi who lives on the third floor of a very old building provides concerts (for a fee) to the public in his home. His apartment consisted of three rooms: a teeny kitchen, a bathroom and a book-lined living room/bedroom. This good-sized room contained at one end two beds covered or disguised under an array of wonderful rugs, and at the other end a large Steinway piano. The floors were coated in layers of sad, old oriental rugs (to dull the noise, I’m sure) and he had set up rows of plastic garden chairs for his audience. We were told he does this twice a week for local Hungarians, but for us it was something special.
Since he understands that his audience may not be lovers of classical music, he provides a series of ‘multi-media’ experiences. His first piece was a movement from the Moonlight Sonata, and for that he dimmed the room to dark, with only a candle on the piano. For the next piece he wanted to play a Beethoven trio – but he’s only one man, so he had a video made with the missing two musicians and conductor, and while the video played on a large screen (for his audience) and on a small screen which he could see at his piano, he played ‘live’ while his fellow musicians were ‘taped’.
His next multi-media experience was to show a video of a gentleman who makes art pictures with sand while music is playing. For this piece, the artist created a continuous set of scenes from war while Mr. Fellegi played Moussorgski’s At the Gates of Kiev from Pictures at an Exhibition. The last multi-media experience was a short clip from a Zefferelli movie while he played a piece by Mascagni. The evening’s concert ended with a tribute to us Americans: Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin.
During the ‘intermission’ we were served miniscule paper cups of Tokay wine with cookies, and of course, there were CD’s on sale. (If he does this twice a week, he must be racking in the florints).
The whole thing was for me a major kitsch experience, but I had to give him credit – he’s figured out how to make a buck while living in his own home, doing what he loves to do. While his neighbors must get tired of the noise, his audiences must be grateful. Afterall, how many salons have we been to in America? (Other than those at Julie Lang’s home in Peacham).
Tuesday, October 11
Last full day in Budapest and on our tour. Our morning classroom lecture was an interesting repartee between our two previous speakers: Zoltan and Sandor. Zoltan the economist and cynical realist, Sandor the sociologist and romantic dreamer. All the questions we hadn’t had answered, we had a chance to ask as the two played off of each other. Interesting tid-bit: for doctors in Hungary who make very low wages, it is not uncommon to fly to England for a week-end when the English doctors aren’t at work, and in one week-end they can make as much as a months’ Hungarian wages.
Zoltans dramatic predictions were: China is a bubble in the economy; the Euro will collapse; the US is on the verge of collapse; Japan has collapsed; there will be uprisings in all countries, and it will be like the fall of Rome.
And on that note we ended the educational part of our tour.
In the afternoon a group of us went to the Szechenyi Bath Complex – a marvelous experience . (I thought of our Peacham Zoltan who loved the bathes both in Hungary and in Florida). The complex which is easily two square blocks in size is a trulyl Hungarian experience, and not a tourist trap (as evidenced by the fact that almost no one spoke a word of English, and all signs were in Hungarian only). After one entered an enormous baroque entry hall where you chose your treatments (in my case entry to all bathes and a private massage), you were given an electronic bracelet and led down to the lady’s or men’s locker room. Here were row upon row of lockers broken into small ‘rooms’, or if one was modest one could rent a ‘cabin’ where attendants had keys and watched your goods. After we had donned our bathing suits, we went back upstairs and into the open-air bath area which was easily the length and width of two football fields. It consisted of three different thermal opportunities: a whirlpool like area; a lap swimming area; and a chest-high thermal wading area. We started here, enjoying the scene around us: men up to their chest in warm water were playing chess in two areas ; the statuary was distinctly erotic; and all manner of shapes and sizes of people splashed around, chatted with their friends, drank a beer, or sat under the spraying fountains. We Americans got our share of stares in return – it was a place to see and be seen.
After an hour of this, feeling warm and buoyant, I headed to my personal massage which was an indoor complex opposite from the one we had entered. Once inside, I walked past a series of indoor heated pool where there were physical therapy sessions being taught, past saunas, and whirling hot tubs. I climbed a beautifully carved wooden staircase to the upper floor where there were a seemingly endless series of rooms for private massages. It cost a mere $45.00 for a full sixty-minute massage and while it lacked a bit in ambience ( the massage table resembled a hospital table with modest cushioning) , there was the obligatory background music (not new age flutes, but droning, repetitive Gregorian chants) and a young massage therapist who gave me a fabulous massage.
Thoroughly relaxed, I took the ‘underground’ back alone since my fellow bathers hadn’t chosen to have a massage. A quick change to evening wear and our entire group gathered in the hotel dining room for our farewell dinner. Ingrid had a little gift of chocolates for each of us, a gift was given to our guide Katalin and to end the evening we had a trio of folk artists playing a most interesting array of folk instruments. The female who had an amazing voice sang songs in a minor key (not unlike Greek or Turkish songs) while playing a Hit Gardon. I’d never seen such an instrument: it looks like a small, squat cello, is held in the lap, but instead of bowing the strings, it is used as a percussion instrument with three strings tuned to the same tone, and the fourth string used for plucking. The other instruments played by the two men included a Koboz that looks like a lyre; a Jew’s harp; a Tilinko which is a shepherd’s pipe; a single reed pipe and a violin. I loved every minute of this authentic music – unlike the evening we had of folk music in the Czech Republic.
And so to bed, to finish packing and head back to America.
This entire trip was a delight for me. I had gone with modest expectations, and a lot of curiosity and I came away wanting to return to both Prague and Budapest. I feel like I skimmed the history of the countries, and saw only a small sampling of the two cities. We had days that were packed, and I look forward to re-visiting at a more leisurely pace. The many concerts we attended and the various folk music opportunities were great fun, and all our guides were knowledgeable and pleasant. Unlike the tours we get from the various cruise ships we’ve been on, this was more in-depth information.
Our fellow Roads Scholars were a mixed lot, but all of them were curious and understood this was not designed as a shopping experience but a learning experience. I made some new friends and there were others I don’t care if I ever see again. But this re-confirmed for me that these types of trips are far more ‘up my alley’ than cruise trips and while I felt that I was in data-overload most of the time, I feel that I really got to know quite a bit about each country and it only leaves me wanting to learn more.
Only the next time Bob will be with me.
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