Right wing politics

I mentioned the red and white striped flag here recently, and just thought I'd point you to this story about one of the many right-wing demonstrations that have made the news here recently.

http://www.politics.hu/20080414/schroder-at-antifascist-rally-in-budapest

Actually, this is about a counterprotest to the 1000-strong fascist rally over (get this) the alleged failure of a ticket broker to sell tickets to a Hungarica concert to a young woman (Hungarica is a rock group with strong ties to right-wing politics here).

There was another protest at the Budapest City Council over the planned removal of a statue of a bird. http://www.budapesttimes.hu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7203&Itemid=205

The Tural bird, which is a symbol dating back to Medieval times, has been associated with the Arrow Cross party (Hungary's allies to the Nazis) and is currently promoted by the far right wing here.

International Day at Superkids

Today was Devin’s first day back at Superkids after our trip, and it was INTERNATIONAL DAY (We’d made sure to be back for this). Parents and children are encouraged to come in their national dress (what would national dress be for Americans?), and everyone was asked to bring some typical food from their home country. Since there are kids from 24 nations at Superkids, we were really looking forward to this.

We were a little uncertain as to what WE should bring though. Most of the best things we cook are, well, originally from other countries, not the US. And we really haven’t been at our finest in terms of cooking since we got here (out of our own kitchen, without all our tools, missing some ingredients). And then there’s the issue of cooking something kids will like. We thought about brownies, but ended up making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

The other parents were more clued in to the fact that the buffet was for parents primarily. The kids would have lunch right afterwards, so whether they ate or not was not important. There was sushi, samosa, butter chicken, pogatch (a hungarian biscuit with cheese baked on top), chocolate chip cookies and about a hundred other things, sweet and savory.

All the children had made flags from their home countries in class this week, and they paraded out into the garden waving them. Hungary and Germany seemed to be the largest national groups, with kids from Malaysia, India, Israel, Palestine, Ireland, South Africa, Canada . . . . Devin’s class sang a song about knowing the names of all the continents, and then their favorite song about a froggie.

Mindennap 56!

OK, here's your first lesson in Hungarian -- Mindennap means Every Day (As in, our store is open every day!)

This graffiti means, Every Day is 1956 -- the year of the bloody revolution against Soviet rule in the streets of Budapest. Hungarians were demanding socialism with a more human face and the right to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact -- and the Soviets came in with tanks and crushed them. Although the Hungarians "lost", they made it plain that the Soviets ruled only by brute force and not by consent. You might say it took a bit of a shine off socialism as it actually existed in Europe. So a call for revolution every day!

It's interesting how much use is made, in contemporary Hungarian politics, of historical events. (It's hard to imagine NY anarchists referring in their graffiti to an event in the 50s). We observed a right-wing rally in Budapest, and people were carrying one or more of three flags -- a red and white striped flag known as the Arpad. Arpad, who one could call the founder of the Kingdom of Hungary, lived in from about 895 – c. 907. They carried the current Hungarian flag, and what I THINK was a pre-communist one that includes a royal crest.

(I'm not currently in Hungary, but in Berlin, but I finally finished this short post).

A quick note from the road . . .

I'm writing from Dresden, where Jordan has somehow managed to find us a hostel room in the hip part of town. We had lunch in a restaurant with ayurveda in its name.

Our four days in Prague were fun. It was great to hang out with Nancy Kates. We especially enjoyed seeing the Jewish cemetery, the Infant of Prague, the many beautiful Art Nouveau buildings, and the one really warm spring day when we could sit on the grass. It was odd to see large groups of young tourists marching through the streets singing what I think were Italian soccer songs -- something we do not see in budapest! We went on possibly the worst walking tour ever, allegedly about communism and its fall in Czechoslovakia. The guide was clearly old enough to remember communism (and probably its introduction), but otherwise ill-suited to his task. More on this some other time.

Dresden has some incredible buildings, and of course one is always aware here of the many beautiful buildings that did not survive the Allied bombing in February of 1945. A large church here, which was badly damaged in the bombing, has just three years ago been restored.

For those of you starving for Devin news: Devin has learned to snap her fingers, a major accomplishment of which she is quite proud. She has apparently been working on this for quite some time, as she recalls being in the Ducks, her previous class, when she started to try. She saw a manual typewriter for the first time in a restaurant in Prague, and wants me to get her one "when I'm bigger". I guess I better locate it before they all fall apart!

Off to Prague, Dresden, Berlin ...

So, tomorrow morning early we head off for a flight to Prague, where we're meeting Margaret's college friend, Nancy Kates, who has been touring Europe with her synagogue. We'll be spending four days there with Nancy and then we'll be taking a train to Dresden, spending that day and some of the next exploring there, and then we'll hop back on the train and head to Berlin where we're staying with my cousins for about 6 days. Then we fly back to Budapest, where we'll be for a little over two weeks before we head to Ireland for the final 2-week leg of the trip.

We'll probably not be able to blog much while we're on the road, but we'll leave you with a few very recent pictorial highlights.

This is Devin with her new best friend from school, Mallika. They are about a week a part in age.


Yesterday, Margaret and I went out for lunch with Fr. Terrence Curry, a Jesuit who runs a fascinating nonprofit architectural design center here (more on this later), and he adopted us for the rest of the day, showing us local architecture, a traditional wine bar, and bringing us to his friends' house (they work for the American Embassy here) for a lovely dinner, high up in the hills of Buda. A truly memorable day. Fr. Terry, who was introduced to us by our good friend Mary Dailey, bought Devin some flowers before we crossed the appropriately named Margaret hid (bridge). Here's Margaret, Terry and Devin at a lookout point in the middle of the bridge over the Danube.


OK, Vizonlatasra! (See you soon!)

Spring Has Sprung

The weather.com reports keep predicting rain for Budapest, but the past three days have been gloriously warm and sunny. The rainy, cold days were getting us a bit down, so it's been wonderful to quickly transition from hats, coasts, gloves and scarves to short sleeves and light jackets. Flowers and trees are blooming everywhere. The photos above and below are from Karolyi Kert, a lovely central square park in the heart of old Pest.


I think Wednesday (when the above photos were taken) may have been our most perfect day here so far. We took Devin to her Superkids pre-school in the Buda hills (Margaret and I switch off picking her up and dropping her off), where she is very happily settled (her newest best friend there is Malika, who is from India), so much so that she gets a little weepy at the idea of us taking off on our journey to Prague on Sunday. Luckily school will be closed all next week, so Dev will just miss a few days the following week and we'll be back in time for International Day at the school, where parents bring in a dish from their native countries. I asked Devin what we should bring and she said, "Maybe broccoli raab?" Ah yes, that traditional American dish -- well, I guess it's as traditionally American as anything else we make at home. (If you folks have any ideas of what would be sufficiently representative of the good, old U. S. of A, let us know!)

After dropping Devin off, we took the second part of a self-guided walking tour with the help of a terrific book called "Visible Cities: Budapest." Our neighbor and landlady, Hadley, is the photo editor at the company that produces these books (she hooked us up with Berlin and Prague guides, too). First we went to the Hungarian National Museum -- about five blocks from where we live -- which is devoted to the country's very complicated, and often tortured history (between the Ottomans, the Habsburg', the Nazi's and the Russians, they've served many masters) back to the 1300s.

And after that we finished one walking tour on Raday Utca, a lovely, mostly pedestrianized street of restaurants and cafes, where we had some stupendous french fries. The self-guided tour led us through old Pest (old meaning the 13th Century!) where the book led us into alleyways and courtyards we otherwise would never know existed. Here's a photo of a preserved old Pest Wall (city walls were big back then -- though they didn't always protect against marauding Mongols and Ottomans) in the courtyard.


On our walk the day before (the last cold, rainy day), we were led inside some gorgeous buildings around the museum, including this beautiful library with an enclosed courtyard cafe. This seems to be common in many buildings, turing the ubiquitous building courtyards in public buildings into some kind of cafe or public space.

As we were nearing the time to pick up Devin, we got a phone call from a friend of a Peace Studies colleague of Margaret's. Margaret had e-mailed him -- he's an organizer here and he invited us to come to a short movie that evening at Central European University (this has become a little bit of a home base for us -- it was founded by billionaire George Soros, who is Hungarian by the way, and it's an English-speaking institution) about the plight of the Roma (gypsy) population in Mitrovica, Serbia. We decided we'd give it a try, even though it probably wasn't our first choice of a first film to take Devin to. So, I picked up Devin and met Margaret and a playground near the university.

Here's a couple of pics from the playground ...

Devin was a real sport through the 30 minute film, "taking notes," and only getting a little fidgety towards the end. It was nice to see an interesting film and talk to interesting people who spoke our language.

After that, we went to a restaurant that a Manhattan College alum (she's Hungarian) took us to a couple of weeks ago. The food there is delicious and inexpensive and there was just a good vibe there night -- the four women next to us were visiting from Frankfurt and were in a festive mood. Here's a pic Devin took of me (she's getting really good at this!) at the restaurant ...


The highlight for me of the day was the walk after dinner to the trolley along Andrassy Ut, Pest's loveliest boulevard -- it's where the famed opera house is. They have ballet class at Devin's school on Wednesdays. Devin didn't want to go the first couple of times (it's optional) but she really wanted to go that day (a sign that she's very happy there now it seems). So, all along Andrassy, Devin showed us her ballet moves, and here's a little video sampling of that ...



After this, we ran into the Manhattan College alum in front of the opera house just as we were remembering meeting her there a couple of weeks ago. And then we had an nice conversation with some Australian tourists in front of Burger King (yes, they're everywhere!). A pleasant end to a wonderful day.

Another beautiful day today -- someone is practicing the sax across the street as I write this -- and we're meeting another friend of a friend for lunch, a Jesuit priest who teaches architecture here.

House of Terror

This building was the HQ of the Arrow Cross Party (Hungary's Nazi Party). When they came to power in 1944 they used the basement for interrogations and executions.

When the Communists took power, 60 Andrassy became the HQ of the AVH, the secret police. It continued to be used as a place for interrogations and executions until 1956, when it became some sort of club for Young Communists.

It is now The House of Terror, a museum that explores the ways in which dictatorial governments use terror as a means of control, and commemorates the victims of that terror.

It is a very contemporary museum, in that it uses the design of the building, the atmosphere, the music, historical artifacts, documentary films and more to tell its stories. There's an interesting film (not documentary) in which individuals, one after another, walk into a room, hurriedly change their clothes for other clothes on a nearby coatrack, and leave, watching to see if they've been seen. This was part of small exhibit about people who quickly switched loyalties from the Arrow Cross and the Nazis to the Communists when it was clear that was where the power now lay.

One entire room dealt with the Soviet gulags, work camps where a large number of Hungarians were sent for long periods of time to do hard labor under harsh conditions with little food, as part of the Soviet push to industrialize the nation. Some died, and others were under strict orders not to talk about their experiences when they returned.

It's a disturbing but fascinating museum.

More Food ...

This photo from a few days ago is of two 'szendvics' (sandwiches), standard Hungarian fare at a chain here that, in its color scheme, looks like Subway, but serves these tiny artistic creations of meat, fish (even caviar), egg and cheese spreads of various that are like a buck apiece.

Devin's Music Video Debut!

Here's Devin performing two versions (one a little crazy, apparently inspired by some of her new, silly friends at school) of 'You Are My Sunshine,' performed on the rubber, roll-up keyboard her Uncle Lloyd gave her just before her birthday before we left for Budapest.
(Just click on the triangular play button at left.)

Trans-Atlantic Park Alienation

For our Bronx friends, here's something I posted to the Norwood News blog about the park around the block from our flat here in Budapest. (For those of you new to blogs and Web sites, everything underlined on this blog is a link to another Web site. Just click on it.)