Music and Art -- Hungarian Style

We visited Vorosmarty Square on Easter Sunday, a week ago. It's a lovely outdoor market in snazzy downtown Pest with wooden stalls that sell Hungarian food and quality crafts. Very little schlock to be found, though you have to watch the prices -- I somehow spent about $10 for a very little bit of dried apricots and pineapple. And our Hungarian lunch there of sausage and stew was tasty but quite pricey and not hot enough.

We ended up there on the right day, though (we keep having some pretty good luck this way). It was a little cold, but sunny and as part of Budapest Spring Festival which has been all week there was a live folk (as in Hungarian folk) music performance and traditional crafts for kids.

In a Bronxites Abroad! video debut, here are the folk music performers. You can really hear the roots of the hora and other Jewish music in their songs. Devin LOVED the music. After a few songs we turned to leave, but she wanted to stay, so we stayed. I shot this little bit of video on my point-and-shoot camera and learned it's really easy to upload to the blog. Haven't experimented much with our new video camera but I imagine there's more of this sort of thing coming your way :-) Just click on the sideway triangle play button on the screen itself or right below it to play it.

Devin made a traditional doll from cloth with the help of an extremely helpful festival staffer ...



In the shed where the kids were working on the crafts was this beautiful display of hand-painted Easter eggs and a traditional groom's outfit from Transylvania (a part of Romania where many ethnic Hungarians live as it was once part of Hungary).


The woman who painted the eggs above was just outside painting a giant one ...


... and the organizers of this event obviously have a lot on the ball, because they also provided another giant blank egg for festival goers young and old to paint on ...

Eating in Budapest

Requiem for a Restaurant: We went to Zsoka Mama, a lovely little family restaurant for the second time tonight. We wanted to say goodbye. It's closing on Saturday. Here's Jordan's first meal there -- chicken stew or chicken paprika. Our friends Keith and Susan will recognize it as being identical to a meal we had at a European restaurant in Brooklyn shortly before we left.

It's a little hard to believe it's our 4th Friday night in Budapest. We went to Zhoka Mama for dinner. We really like the place, but we learned the last time we were there that they close for good tomorrow night.

What is Hungarian food like? If you've been reading our blog, you can see that we've been eating Middle Eastern food, tacos and even once (gasp!) Burger King. We have also, however, sampled Hungarian food. What I would say so far based on my limited experience:

1. Hungarians really like soup. Goulash is a soup (or a stew). There are lots of other really good soups. Lots of places have a lunch special which is soup, a main course and a sweet of some kind. We've had a lot of soup here. Strangely, or perhaps not, you can't buy, it seems, canned soup in the supermarket. All I see are packaged powdered soups (like Knorr's). The other day I saw outside a butcher's shop that they had MARHA LEVES HUS for sale (BEEF SOUP MEAT). I thought that meant they had some homemade soup for sale -- but when I went in and asked for it in my best Hungarian, I was offered a hunk of raw beef with which I could make soup. I couldn't explain the misunderstanding; I hope the butcher didn't think I didn't approve of his product.

2. Sometimes what looks like soup might not be soup but Fozelek. When I was spending the day at Devin's Hungarian school, the kids were eating and I said to the teacher, "Devin really likes the soup." She looked at me funny and my first thought was, once again I've managed to screw up a simple sentence. Then she said, oh, that's not soup, its Fozelek. F is basically a pureed vegetable, just slightly less liquid than a pureed soup. One friend derides it as baby food, but adults eat it.

3.Hungarian food has a reputation for being spicy, but so far I find SOME Hungarian food is mildly spicy, some is quite bland. We've had some kind of spicy soup (red with noodles and potatoes in it), but there are also some dishes that are quite bland -- this casserole of cabbage, potatoes, a little ground beef, cheese and yogurt sauce (nice, filling, but not spicy). We have a friend here, a long term resident who says she doesn't like Hungarian food, and that Hungarians always say to her, "Oh, too spicy for you, eh?" It's hard to imagine that anyone finds Hungarian food in general too spicy.

4. There is SO MUCH Middle Eastern food here! There are felafel-gyro-shwarma places on every commercial block here. And although we randomly enter them, I don't think we've found a bad one yet. I think Kebabs are honorarily Hungarian food.

5. Dessert is a specialty here. Nice cake. Enough said.

6. Ice cream too. We hear that as the weather gets warmer, there will be more ice cream. Another reason we're eagerly awaiting spring weather.

A Day at the Zoo

Devin, right outside our flat overlooking the courtyard.

We went to the Zoo today, which is only 10 minutes by bus from where we live (except that we took the wrong bus on the way there, so it was a little longer). It's a wonderful zoo -- the buildings for the animals are really, lovely especially the monkey house, where you can walk in among little exotic monkeys as they climb trees, etc. Light pours in from the large windows and the glass sections of the ceiling -- sort of like a mini Conservatory at the Botanical Garden in the Bronx. The Budapest Zoo is apparently the third largest in all of Europe.

As you can see, Devin got her face painted (a butterfly), and there were tons of other activities for kids today, sponsored by Duracell.

Other highlights were the giraffes, and the hippos which we literally came face to face with as they stuck their wide open mouths almost through the gates.

Devin also met a big bunny today, significant because she's always been afraid of masks and people in big costumes. She even shook the bunny's hand!

And here's a shot Margaret took of an alligator carved beautifully in wood, in the terrific little playground they have for the kids at the zoo.

Buildings, Buildings, Buildings ...

As I may have mentioned before, the architecture and streetscapes here in Budapest are fascinating. I don't know a lot about the styles yet, except that much of it is 'Historicist' architecture meaning that the designs of many bldgs. reflected earlier periods than the time they were created.

These photos are in no particular order, just buildings and images, and contrasts that caught my eye. I'm taken with seeing some ornate building, next to a non-descript one, or a spotless one next to a filthy one, etc. ...

Two very different buildings joined at the hip near Vaci ut ...
Pest's beautiful outdoor shopping area.

I thought this was a residential building at first, but then I realized it was a parking garage.

The old reflected, literally, in the new. This is around the block from our flat.
Lots of new construction going on around us.

I turned a corner and was sort of mesemerized by these incredible buidlings near the Astoria Metro stop that seemed oddly thrown together like someone had randomly thrown the buildings of Pest up in the air and came down in this unlikely combination.

Even some of the McDonalds' here are in classy, historic buildings.

There's a new Groarke!!!

We had a great time today looking at pictures of the newest addition to the Groarke clan, Chloe Groarke, born to Lynn Donnavan and Michael Groarke (my bro if you don't know) on March 18th. We can't wait to meet her.

Living and learning

I am sure most of you will think we were kind of crazy to think this (and perhaps those of you we told were nice enough not to tell us), but Jordan and I thought that Devin would attend a Hungarian pre-school here a few days a week. Although it was entirely Hungarian, she would be in class with the neighbor's boy, who is bilingual, and one of the teachers spoke some English.

It was, as we've said before, a lovely, lovely place, with wonderful teachers. It was, actually, a historic place, the first of a tradition of pre-schools created here 150 years ago. (I should add here that pre-school like this is free for Hungarian citizens -- American politicians, take note). It was, however, not somewhere Dev felt comfortable. She is an immensely adaptable child, but the language barrier was too much for her.

So we set out to find an English-language pre-school. We're living in Pest, the more urban half of the city, and the school we found is in Buda, the hillier, leafier, quieter section. Around the corner from the British Ambassador's lovely residence is Superkids. We three went to visit. We told Dev we were going to see whether it would be a nice school for her, and if we liked it she would go there. She struggled a bit to communicate this (I paraphrase): "But only if all three of us like it, will I go there?"

So we arrive, we meet the director (A Hungarian woman fluent in English), other people float by and chat with us (Americans, Canadians, Hungarians), and the director says to Devin as we talk, "Would you like to go in and see what they are doing in class?" She peeked in and they were making Easter Egg baskets -- in two minutes she was in a chair at a table making a basket. Next thing it was out to the garden to play (they have a spacious yard with two playgrounds pitched at different age groups and some garden space in between). We went too. There were slides, swings, riding toys, a sandbox, a playhouse, a wooden horse to ride. She ran around and played, checking back in with us frequently. Dev and I made "chocolate" and "strawberry" cakes with some of the girls in the sandbox.

The children at the school currently come from 24 different nations. Many have parents whose work brings them to Hungary for a few months or a few years. Some are Hungarians whose parents want them to be fluent in English. Although many speak English, some don't -- a Japanese parent working in Hungary for two years, for example, may prefer their child learn English than Hungarian.

We were going to leave after outside play, but Dev said she wanted to stay for lunch. They had soup (soup is really really big here), chicken and potatoes. You really couldn't plan a better meal for Devin. She had a second helping of soup before digging in to her chicken and potatoes.
Then we all said goodbye, promising to return for the next day's Easter festivities.

This morning, Dev woke at 7:30 for the first time in the trip I think. She was bouncing around, picking out clothes for school, reminding us to bring extra shoes. We got to school and she beelined for the classroom, leaving us sitting on the couch in the foyer. At 11, we told her we were going out for a while and would come back to get her. She whimpered a bit, but didn't seem too upset. When Christina, one of her teachers, said, but Devin, we're going to play a game and see who wins the sweets, we were very quickly left behind buttoning our coats. (Her other two teachers are Kevin and Robert).

She had a great time, and told us she wants to go there all the time (Not to say she doesn't miss Mosholu Montefiore, which she talks about all the time. Today she pretended she was calling Kira and Miss Alice and Miss Maria on her 'cell phone'). So we are thrilled to have found a place she is happy, even if we have to cross the Danube and scale a small hill every morning to get her there.

Pastry

There are so many stories to tell, it's hard to know where to start . . .

But are you all aware that Budapest is a city devoted to pastry? Jordan has become convinced that it is impermissible to have bad pastry here. Everywhere you go there are delicious cakes and flaky little croissants and buns and tarts of various kinds. There are of course the fancy coffee houses Budapest is famous for. Then there are ever so many peksegs (bakeries) everywhere you go, with delicious fresh bread, baguettes, buns, sweet breads and cakes and such. There are even little bakery shops at each Metro shop, it seems, in the large underground passageway that leads out to the street. There's one chain of them called Princess, where we often pick up a few little chocolate croissants and cinnamon ones to snack on, or these little puffy slightly cheese-kissed square pastries that hit the spot. They seem to always be very fresh.

Anyway. I don't know how come everyone here isn't 300 lbs.

In Search of St. Patrick's Day

Monday was St. Patrick's Day. I wasn't in the best mood starting out. I stumbled around a local supermarket a couple of blocks from our flat for what seemed like an hour, trying to find the few things I needed and find the lettuce button on a fruit-weighing/pricing machine (which works great otherwise), and screwing up the courage to ask one of the stock clerks what the darned code was for the leafy thing in my hand. With an exchange of hand motions, I understood that the cashier would deal with it when I got there. Then there was looking for the vinegar -- no dice -- and wanting some of the nice-looking meat behind the butcher's counter, but settling for a packaged ham in the meat aisle. I've been willing to point at things and just blurt out English words when I wanted things on previous visits, but I just didn't have it in me that morning.

Travel is a wonderful thing. It inevitably contributes to one's growth and understanding of the world -- and I couldn't be more happy that we've made this trip. But occasionally I just feel like a complete idiot, like a blathering infant trying to make the adults around me understand what it is I need. Today I somehow succeeded in acquiring a SIM card for a cell phone, but if it weren't for the divine intervention that sent a young woman with a decent command of English to be on line behind me at the precise moment the salesperson and I had arrived at our own little Tower of Babel, I think I would have sailed right over the edge.

(Margaret has been much better at diving into the language than I. I'm good at buying the books -- dictionary, phrase books, etc. -- but not in cracking them.)

Anyway, back to St. Patrick's Day. Later that day, I headed out to the tourist information office. I was looking forward to an encounter with a friendly English-speaking Hungarian whose job it would surely be to make me feel right at home here.

First I had to find the place. It was literally about 100 feet from the Metro stop, and I did end up there about an hour later after walking straight by it, then around and around in circles and into a book store where the clerk showed me where it was on a map, which I then bought.

But then I reached it and all was well ... until I decided that the younger of the two women behind the counter would be more able to answer my questions about where to celebrate St. Patrick's Day and where to get a cell phone, than the older woman next to her. So I began to ask the young woman about the latter, and she said, "What is your question? What are you asking me?" I had successfully located the only sourpuss in the entire Hungarian tourist information industry; she told me she had absolutely no idea where I could get a cell phone -- like she didn't have one herself! And then after interrupting my next question a couple of times, she informed me that St. Patrick's Day is celebrated nowhere in all of Hungary. I thanked her quietly, and left, practically tripping over the tail between my legs.

I went to lick my wounds (OK, I wasn't really feeling as terrible as all this, but it just wasn't my finest hour here) at a bookstore/cafe run by an American to recover and sipped some tea and looked at some of the literature I had picked up at the tourist office. As I flipped through the English-language 'Funzine' I stopped cold at a 2-page spread telling me several places where I could -- can you guess? -- celebrate St. Patrick's Day! It included Beckett's, a bar Margaret's uncle had also told her about.

So it was late when I got home and when we got done with dinner. Against our better parental instincts, but not wanting to miss the novelty of saluting St. Patrick in Budapest, we headed off with Devin on the trolley to Beckett's. By more than a decade, Dev was the youngest one there, and drew more than a little attention, particularly from a young Australian tourist who just had to take our picture. "We don't ever see children in bars!" she said, snapping away.

Well here we all are ... If only Madame Sourpus could've seen us ...


And here are Margaret and Devin toasting with their Guinness and OJ respectively.

Hungary Celebrates and We Explore

After a few hours on the local playground with Devin's new best friend, Cash, Margaret planned the rest of our day, featuring a visit to Gellert Hill and the Citadel in Buda, which offers the most magnificent view of the city -- really, I think it's the best view of any city I've ever seen firsthand. This pic probalby doesn't do the view justice, but it's the best one I've got.


We headed down the hill -- quite a walk -- and just when Devin needed something to pick her spirits up a bit (she didn't find the view and other attractions as cool as we did -- can you believe it?) this incredible playground of slides and only slides, appeared out of nowhere, with dozens of little kids crawling all over them. Devin went down a couple of them again and again and again.

(The playgrounds here -- we've only been to two, so I have a little more research to do -- are much more interesting and respectful of kids' abilities than the ones in NYC. More on this in a later post.)

Our destination after the slides was the cafe (in the truest sense of the word) at the immense and historic Gellert Hotel, where people happily sit for as long as they want, drinking coffee eating pastries, chatting, and listening to a terrific piano player who seemed, making eye contact with us, like he was playing "My Way" and "New York, New York" just to make us feel at home. Here's the Devster kicking back and enjoying her chocolate piano ...


In Hungary, today -- March 15 -- is like our July 4. It's the day to celebrate their 1848 revolution, which unlike ours, was unsuccessful. Everyone we saw -- from the very young to the very old -- was sporting a ribbon with the colors of the Hungarian flag, and various other insignias we would have love to been able to recognize. Here's a photo of one of the many flags we saw hanging on houses and buildings, this one on a quiet block in Buda.


It was also a day of demonstrations throughout the city. There are a zillion political factions here, from the far left to the far right, all furious with the current government for its crimes against the republic (we have a lot more to learn about Hungarian politics, but suffice it to say for now that we'd be lucky to have a similar list of grievances in the U.S., like whether people should be required to pay the $2 doctor's visit fee a national referendum just voted to repeal.)

We stayed away from the hot locations the U.S. Embassy warned us against in an e-mail (we registered there the other day, because we'd been told it's a good thing to do when living abroad); there was violence in several areas a year ago. But there was no vibe of tension in any of the places we were today -- only a near-universal display of national pride.

The Embassy did, however, alert us that our metro stop was one of the places where anti-government demonstrations may be taking place. There are several exits in the station, though, and we figured we'd check out the vibe underground and then head out the exit closest to where we live (2 very short blocks) if things seemed OK. But the train skipped that stop and we ended up about five blocks beyond where we live. But we had a map basically knew where we were when we exited the station. As we headed home, several groups of people, many with flags, headed the opposite way, toward the large train stations that probably. None looked angry or anything -- they just looked like peole who had spend to a demonstration or celebration, hard to tell which, and were headed home. When we got to our block we heard a speech through loudspeakers, and saw people gathered still near the subway station the train had skipped. But there was calm in the air, and the only signal that trouble might still be expected, maybe later in the evening, was a lineup of riot police, much like you'd see at any big demo in the U.S. Anyway, we made it home safely and made dinner.

Most of this past week we've spent helping Devin acclimate to her new school, so we hadn't done a heck of a lot of sightseeing, so today we felt like residents (hanging out with our neighbors at the local playground) but also like tourists again, which in a nutshell describes the kind of hybrid existence we're living here.

Here's a shot of Budpest at night, as we walked across a bridge spanning the Danube River from Buda to Pest that was closed to cars for the holiday ...

Good night, everyone, and thanks for all the comments! We love them!

Dancing on the Danube

We made a brief jaunt to downtown Pest today after Devin's third day at school. (She's getting more and more comfortable there. Today, Margaret spent the day with her there and played "hair salon" with some of Dev's classmates. I'll be going with her tomorrow). This photo of Devin shaking her groove thing is in front of the gorgeous, grand Parliament building -- where much dickering and bickering is going on in the aftermath of a successful referendum to repeal some state fees for education and health care. (Margaret wrote about this in an earlier post.) We hope to tour Parliament some day soon. The building sits right on the east bank of the Danube.

Here's me and Devin ...


And here's Devin's portrait of Margaret and me. She held the camera still and everything! No kidding.

Nursery School in Budapest

Devin and her new friend Cash during a juice break in the schoolyard.

Today and yesterday, we spent the morning at a nursery school with Devin. It's a really beautiful building -- the Mosholu Montefiore staff would LOVE to have a facility like this! It's a 19th century building, probably the home of a wealthy family, with a walled in garden. Very tall ceilings, big windows, big rooms. The teachers and director have been lovely toward us and toward Devin, and are obviously very loving toward the children.

Devin is joining her new friend Cash in his class. There are two antechambers to their actual classroom -- one is a room to change out of coats and such, and to change your outdoor shoes for indoor shoes (keep the room clean since the kids play on the floor so much). Then there's a bathroom, then the classroom. It's quite large, has a couple of oriental rugs, and about 5 little tables with chairs for the kids. There's shelves of all sorts of toys -- blocks, stuffed animals, lego, books, trains, phones, etc. There's a kitchen area with pots and pans and "food." Someone also had created a "hair salon" -- there were hair dryers with the electrical parts removed, empty shampoo bottles, and a plastic trash bin tacked upside down to the wall at just the right height to be an old fashioned hair dryer. Dev and I had fun with that. In the backyard, which is enormous, there are maybe 20 tricycles, 3 or 4 strollers, a couple of slides, and other fun. It's quite a place.

The kids are adorable (of course, what kids their age aren't)? A few have walked up to me and tried to communicate with me. I learned how to say "I don't understand" and "what's your name?" Tonight I'm going to memorize, "How old are you?" and "Want to play?"

Although Hungarian is unlike any Romance language, it does not seem in and of itself a particularly hard language to learn. Unlike English, each letter can only make one sound. (Unfortunately for me, there are actually a lot more vowels, because a vowel with an accent, two accents, or a dot, or two dots over it is a different vowel -- so I think you can say Hungarian has 14 vowels). If you know the rules of pronunciation, you can pronounce any word (think how many different rules there are in English, and then exceptions to all of them). I'm trying to learn a little bit. We'll see how that goes.

In Hungarian, kids refer to adults as Nene (f) and Bacsi (m) -- so the kids call the teachers Katya-nene and such. I explained to Devin that it was similar (one of her favorite words) to the way she calls her teachers in the Bronx Miss Maria and Miss Alice, and that here they would be Maria-nene and Alice-nene. This made her smile.

Yesterday -- A Tale of Food

Yesterday was a mellow day of meandering. We're still catching up from jet lag and we all slept until 10:30 -- unprecedented. By the time we had breakfast and got ourselves together and out of the house (apt.) it was already time for lunch. We discovered this new taco joint (see photo I took there, above) on this great Budapest food blog -- it was only a couple of trolley stops away.
So, we headed that way and it was quite a hit with the Devster, who informed us that she LOVES tacos, because she's had them in school, something neither of us knew. Here she is happily devouring her chicken taco

Later we headed for Vaci Utca (Utca, pronounced OOTsa is a word for street) which is supposed to be a nice area with nice shops, but somehow we ended up in (drawn to?) a mall with a silly American name (the West End). Mostly we just stopped in a cafe there. Devin wanted some hot chocolate, which turned out to be almost chocolate pudding -- though with extraordinary chocolate.

We headed home then -- Maragaret was coming down with a bit of a cold. While she napped, I asked Hadley (neighbor and the person we're renting from) where she orders pizza from. I heard her ordering it the other night when Devin was playing with her son, Cash. She said we could order it online but would need a dictionary to translate the site. When I took a look I saw what she meant (we probably didn't already state that Hungarian is really unlike any other language anywhere in Europe). So, I tried one of those translation sites where you can insert the URL and it will translate the whole site. Well, that helped a little bit, but yielded some awkward results -- sunflower paste instead of sunflower dough (this place has all kinds of pizza doughs). But Margaret gave it a whirl when she woke up and 45 minutes later a dude in a motorcycle helmet showed up at our door with a delicious broccoli pizza. Victory! Margaret and I high-fived.
The sauce we chose (lots of choice there, too) was a little too spicy for Devin, so hopefully the dictionary I bought today will help us perfect the results next time.

A Building in Pest

I took this shot on one of Pest's main boulevards because I liked the look of this building. It's typical of many, many buildings in Pest in that a grand look, and interesting architectural details were achieved with plaster rather than brick or stone, though this one in particular has suffered less than others from that cost-cutting measure.

To Vote or not to Vote

Tomorrow, Sunday, Hungarians have the chance to vote in a referendum. On the ballot are three questions, each of which, if passed, would reverse a money-raising policy put in place by the current government. Basically, the current Socialist-led government, in an effort to fix a big budget deficit, instituted a fee for going to the doctor, being admitted to the hospital, and a tuition charge for going to university.

None of these fees are popular, some argue that they are nonetheless necessary and not very big anyway. Polls show they are likely to get a majority of the vote. Referendum rules require that at least a certain number of people vote in order for the referendum to pass -- so the best strategy for people who oppose the referendum is not to vote at all.

We see posters around town for the referendum that prominently feature the word "Igen" (yes). I don't think I've yet seen a poster for the opposition, although the Prime Minister and others have spoken out against it. Here's a photo of a poster I took off a wall for my collection, and you can see and learn more at pestiside.hu and politics.hu. If you can trust me and my new dictionary, it says: This Sunday, YES. Repeal them (the checkmarks: doctor's visit fees, tuition fees, hospital stay fees). The responsible choice, FIDESZ (the party that called for the referendum).

Kids' Day

Today was Kids' Day at the Millinaris Art Festival in the heart of Buda (other side of Danube from us). We had no idea what to really expect -- the English translation of the festival schedule was lacking.

So we made our way there slowly but surely, stopping nearby to look at our map and get our bearings when a Hungarian man who had been a waiter on 75th Street in Manhattan not long ago showed up to guide us in English (the second guardian angel we have encountered at just the right time).

When we entered the building (one of several in the art center's lovely large plaza) we saw kids and adults at tables doing arts and crafts. We paid the admission fee and plowed right in. No one spoke much English, but we communicated well enough with some English and hand gestures that Devin got to paint two porcelain tiles and make a windmill.
There was a dance performance at 4. But it was like 2:30 or so and so we set out for lunch. Earlier in the day I took this photo in Moskva Ter (a major metro and trolley station near the art center) pleased with the irony.

Our eight words of Hungarian have been helpful, but not enough to open the doors of culinary opportunity, so this combined with just a lack of options in the immediate vicinity of the art center led us to, yes, the Home of the Whopper. In Hungary it is also home to the 'Angry Burger' -- with its jalapenos, fried onions, and cheese (Margaret's choice -- I had the fish filet).

Sated (oh, please Norwood Food Co-op, do not excommunicate us!) we headed back to Kids' Day at 4 and found the dance event was actually at 5. So, we hung around, and Devin kicked around this giant die with some other kids, we had some tea and coffee, ran around a lot playing hide and seek (we pretty much had the place to ourselves) and then it was showtime. In English an Hungarian, the announcer told us that this was not a performance, that we were going to be doing the dancing ourselves. A couple of dancers demonstrated the moves to a catchy groove and it became clear this was a couples' activity. Devin wasn't up for it, and I sat with her cheering Margaret on from the sidelines. One of the professional (well, at least semi-professional) dancers invited her to dance and about 40 minutes of fun dance instruction followed (I'm having trouble posting the one decent photo I have of Margaret dancing -- hope to figure it out later).

It was a good day. Having plunked ourselves down in this city with little knowledge of it -- not to mention the language barriers -- I had been feeling (and still feel) like I'm under water in a muddy lake, and can only open my eyes a little and see a couple of inches in front of me. Each day we learn a little more about Budapest and broaden our understanding of it bit by bit.

Packing Light

And these aren't even all of the adapters and chargers for the gizmos we brought along ...

They'll Let Anybody In

When we arrived in Budapest, we barely waited on line for someone to stamp our passports. And that she did but she didn't ask a single question. I figured there would be someone else down the line asking what we were doing in Budapest, how long we were staying, what we brought with us (which included a Hebrew National salami in a paper bag that my dad gave to us at the airport). But nothing. No long lines to put Devin, who had only gotten about 3 hours sleep at most on our overnight flight and brief stopover in Dublin, over the edge -- hooray from Hungary! Instead, Devin found a kindred spirit in 3-year-old Emma, a Romanian with a Dora rolling suitcase to match Devin's Dora backpack, whom she played with by the luggage carousel. Ahh, the universality of Dora!
And did I mention the Welcome sign in the airport? Blue and white with a touch of red, brought us by Citibank.

All the livelong day . . .

Here's a photo of Devin and one of the young people who operate the Children's Railway.
(I think most people find it fascinating that such young people operate a railway. I think Devin would only have been fascinated to find 5 year olds running a railway).

... Working on the Railroad

Writing from our lovely flat in Budapest -- pictures soon.
It's Devin's birthday today and we celebrated by taking her on a children-run railroad (seriously) through the hills of Buda (in Budapest, one side of the Danube River is called Buda, the other side Pest. We live in Pest).
The railroad was a project for Communist youth -- no more party affiliation by there's still a whiff of loyalty to something as the kids (around 12 to 14), in blue uniforms (not unlike what you might see a conductor on a commuter train in the U.S. wearing) salute the passengers from the station as the train leaves.
We had trouble making our destination known to the kid taking the money in the station, not just because he didn't speak English but because I could barely hear him or his co-workers through the glass (incidentally, I walked into a bank today to break a large bill for the metro, and was disoriented because there was no glass at all -- can't remember when I was last in a bank without those bullet-proof barriers). But another customer helped us out.
On the train ,we were sitting with a bunch of teenagers (17 or so) speaking excellent, though accented, English to each other. Margaret asked them how they learned to speak it so well, and we learned that they were a group of Hungarian and Estonian teenagers. The Estonian kids were here on an exchange program and English was the language they could all communicate in. One of the Estonian girls said they were required to learn English beginning in the third grade.
They all were really nice kids, and were good enough at English that they bantered and joked with each other, and could expertly communicate sarcasm. When they left at the stop before ours, Margaret took their picture through the window. They lined up quickly to pose for our portrait, and one guy playfully saluted.
In the evening our neighbor, who rented us the apartment, came by with her adorable 3-year-old, Cash (short for Cassius) for birthday cake with Devin. They played like old friends, racing a toy NYC taxi cab that Devin gave Cash across the coffee table. Devin may begin going to Cash's school next week.
Tomorrow, we explore the local playground ...