Szalagavató (ribbon pinning prom ball)

Last week, Dráva Völgye Középiskola held their Szalagavató, something I had previewed when I first went to the school's website and found pictures of what looked like an actual Jane Austen Beauty and the Beast get down with the big-ball-gown ball. And now I've seen it firsthand. Students prepare with a choreographer dance teacher for over a month, rent hooped dresses in rich, solid colors, and dance, in circles and pairs, before an audience of teachers, friends and above all family.

It is a completion ritual, and it turns out to involve a pre-graduation ceremony. Before the ball, students and families stood for a ribbon-pinning ceremony, in which the name of every graduating final year student is read, and during which dance, song, and poetry recitals occur. This took about an hour and a half. A long hour and a half, if you want to know the truth. When Roosevelt students graduate, each name is rhythmically pronounced, with a one second pause before the next name is read. Here, each name was read and thirty seconds pass before the next name. Two things slowed this down for me still further:

One. Hungarian audiences are so respectful and quiet! When Roosevelt students graduate, families and friends compete to make noise, often with an air-horn assist. At this event, there were maybe four times when sections of the audience broke out in polite clapping, and the rest of us would swivel in our seats to see what was going on. The rest of the time, silence, stillness, pride and honor only.

Two. The music. I have never heard such morose sounds at a celebration. Each class chose its own music, and each selected something with a grave, melancholy purr. Each of these chosen songs was also in English, which allowed me the further emotional register of despair. While watching one group solemnly, slowly, one by one, receive their class ribbons in the utter stillness of the gym, I listened to the lyrics of "Mad World," repeated over and over until everyone had been pinned:

All around me are familiar faces Worn out places Worn out faces

Bright and early for the daily races Going nowhere Going nowhere

And the tears are filling up their glasses No expression No expression
And in my head I want to drown my sorrow No tomorrow No tomorrow
And I find it kind of funny I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying Are the best I've ever had
           Satöbbí, satöbbí.

It's a beautiful song in its way, but why choose this way as a testament to your passing towards adulthood? I asked a similar question to one of the students, and he pointed out that this part of the Szalagavató was sad for students, because they would be soon be leaving friends for whom they feel deeply.

It makes emotional sense. Nevertheless, I am going to allow the possibility that this is one of the many things I haven't cognitively put together yet.


When the ribbon pinning was concluded, the young women changed into their gowns and returned for a beautiful dance with their partners. What I saw I wanted for our own students in Seattle: careful attention to the elegance of dance, an event moving teenagers towards a unified harmony, disciplined training in dance and movement, the pride of such an enduring event before loved ones. In Seattle we'd likely bend the gender lines that here enforce strict male-female pairings, but I think they're worth bending.

I have provided one two minute clip of the ball below (far below). Please notice the music as well, which I think is gorgeous.

So, while American teens might be pinning corsages and dining and attending a school-sanctioned free-for-all in outfits too fancy and fluffy to wear even to a wedding, then renting rooms for illicit behavior in the company of friends, Hungarian teens...

Things are maybe not so different. After the ball, the young women changed their clothes for a third time. The remaining students moved into the school atrium where they then could dance at will to a band installed for the evening. This looked much more like dances I remembered. It started off slowly, with no one but an occasional pair of teachers taking to the dance floor. But eventually, the floor filled. I will note that far more paired dancing occurred, boy-girl or girl-girl, than would happen in America, and dance training was proudly manifest. (And thank you to Virgi and Gréti, Otí and Szandi for pulling me in, too!) But there were also congo lines and circles of kids, much as I've seen elsewhere (on cruise ships maybe?). Students danced until eleven.

Thereafter, it was to the pubs, for who knows how many hours. In Hungary, the drinking age is 18 years old, but teenagers buy a buzz far earlier. From what students report, the worst that happens to underage teens trying to buy alcohol is that someone will say, Sorry, I can't sell it to you. But I don't think even this mild rebuke happens often. So students went to the pubs, surprisingly numerous in this town of 12,000, and danced, got wasted, and did whatever Hungarian teenagers do when they're away from their guardians. So while American teenagers attend a school dance and then corouse elsewhere, here too.

But wouldn't it be cool if our American kids at least knew how to dance first?

Below are pictures and videos of the nights events.

Máté bears a pillow of ribbons.

In the gym, students stand for over an hour to either pin ribbons or be pinned.

Anna and Kitti dance between class pinnings.

Below is a video of the ceremony. You will hear one name read in the full half minute.

Jane Eyre Weekend

The day before we left for Hungary, I panicked and found someone to sell me a used electronic book reader. With space limited, my original plan was to bring only two anthologies I would use to prepare for an Advanced Placement American Literature and Rhetoric course, because I knew I would hardly read non-fiction if given the choice. But in the last hours, I realized I couldn't face the desolation of this mercenary trick: I couldn't live on College Board-approved non-fictive demonstrations of rhetorical strategies, not for a year, not for a life, not for a week. So, after half a year, is the fact that I have not once opened these anthologies an indication that I was right in my first instinct, or my second? I bought a Kindle off a college student near Ravenna Park, and it came loaded with titles suggestive of his personality, indicating namely that he is a Kingdom-Come, Armageddonist sex-addict with low self-esteem.

I was counting on the fact that I could use the Kindle to read free books through such sites as Project Gutenberg. Because I was on a Charles Dickens tear last year, the idea that I'd be limited to books in the public domain seemed like no kind of limitation at all. Victorian Literature -- with its cruel, sensually gluttonous villains and compassionating, big-hearted heroes and lavishly arrogant caricatures and intricate, suspenseful plots where fate punishes the corrupted and deliriously satisfies the vulnerable -- is all, all, absolutely free! So when we ran out of books provided by a good friend here, I have happily turned to the public domain and read more Dickens, Stevensen, Dumas, Moliere.

On Friday I gave Stephanie a list of books I might read next, and she suggested Jane Eyre, a book she'd read in middle school and again when she was pregnant with Sophie. The pregnancy embittered her feelings for Jane, perhaps in the same way that it for years poisoned her taste for spinach and Thai cuisine: she remembered Jane as an enduring do-nothing. But the first pages put me in a different mind straight way.

Jane's cousin pummels her immediately; and she bloodies his nose. Soon, the director of a charity school comes to collect her at the request of Jane's aunt, who tells him "to guard against her worst fault, a tendency to deceit." The director, Mr. Brocklehurst, then says, "Deceit is, indeed, a sad fault in a child; it is akin to falsehood, and all liars will have their portion in the lake burning with fire and brimstone." Jane turns to her aunt and says, "I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world except John Reed." She remains a spirited character, and one who is so far from deceitful that the plot's greatest conflict emerges from her fidelity to truth.

I read the first third of the book on Friday, enjoying the book and her pluck (however slow burning), and learning some new old words. On Saturday morning, I invited the kids to watch a segment of the film, the kind of opportunity always welcomed. First we watched a piece of Franco Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre. But I was grateful when the images became too spastic to watch further because William Hurt as the Byronic love interest made me itchy inside my thigh flesh and ribs. I told Stephanie I wouldn't mind seeing John Malkovich and William Hurt go voice to precious voice in a sumptuous inflection contest. We then started over again with BBC's version, and when I arbitrarily and tyrannically turned off the film after reaching the point to which I'd read, Amelia was furious.

Amelia is our deepest TV watcher, by which I mean, she gets absorbed in a program, far, far in there, and will ignore and fight anyone who tries to pull her out. The Dévais have satellite television, and Tibor used programming to educational effect, watching shows and movies in other languages as a way of developing language skills. But we find ourselves at sea. The Hungarian stations dub everything. We yearn for subtitles, by which we might understand more of the Hungarian we'd hear and compare more of the Hungarian we wouldn't. But subtitles are rare and language choices usually only Magyar and Czech. Our children gravitate towards two stations which can reliably be switched to English, though -- the Discovery Channel and the Disney Channel, with programs about solitary men surviving on rotting fish or teenage girls on colorful sets overcoming urges to destroy their well-dressed enemies on Facebook.

This is the point at which I began reading Jane Eyre aloud to Stephanie. I think she asked me to: I don't remember how it started because once it started we didn't stop. We took turns. We read the last 400 pages out loud, reading while the other cooked, reading while cleaning, reading while folding laundry, reading while watching our girls at the playground, and reading while folded up on the couch.

How does this sound to you, readers? Does it sound like pleasure? Or does it sound intellectually ambitious and nerdy? 

Towards the close of evening on Sunday, we watched a little more with the kids, who were of course exasperated when we shut it down after episode two. But this is how use our great stores of technology: narrative anticipation within which desire we give a happy family sigh.

Trieste

Our arrival in Trieste marked a low point in our Christmas travels. The GPS betrayed us, first sending us on a shockingly sharp right onto a vertiginous and narrow slope, so angled I had to back up twice to complete the turn. Thereafter, the road curved and narrowed further and ejected us onto a city grid whose one-ways had a year ago become other-ways -- baffling the GPS and throwing us into paralysis. We were too ignorant and too unskilled to negotiate the Trieste streets in so wide a van, and Dad and Wendy, after we finally found our hotel on the curve of a disappearing sidewalk off a speeding descent, graciously took the vehicle from me but then spent more than an hour failing to park it.

Below you see a moment in which Dad surveyed the street, including the fallen motorbike in the foreground, to determine whether or not I had clearance to proceed, which captures our anxiety and intestinal pace.

When Dad and Wendy took too long, I went out in search of them; and while I encountered much of the beauty of Trieste, the anxiety of our first contact narrowed my focus to the presence of graffiti and vandalism. 

But then we were reunited, and the van was parked. The children loved their hours in a loft above our kitchen in an apartment it was easy to love, and everything fell into place. In the end, we had one of our best nights here in this humble port city far from the famed canals and dazzling windows of Venice.




Trieste, humble as it may be in comparison to other tourist destinations, had a lovely walking street leading to an inviting and generous central plaza that opened onto the Adriatic Sea.








Perhaps it was wandering around in the dark, perhaps it was the finality of our journey, perhaps it was the security of a late evening meal reservation, or a simple contrast to the minute terrors of parking the van, but we relaxed and enjoyed the sea air and quirky, lived-in city.

The final meal of our traveling vacation was a warm and festive affair. We were put off by the pig leg in iron vice at the doorway and the framed sketches of fleshy bottoms in flossy bloomers above the girls' heads (which you may see by clicking on the second picture below), but here was a family restaurant, the ease and warmth of which settled us completely.




Besides Amelia, who fell asleep in her chair in the late hour, we had a wonderful time, in varied and satisfying dishes and in our own company. Maisie loved a dish of thinly sliced cow tongue in a spiced pear chutney. My sauerkraut stew put all the world right. Eight Euros bought a liter of wine. And after a journey across continents and canals and down corkscrew streets, after months apart and then two weeks in a frenzy of life, it was good to have this last breaking of Italian bread.

Back at the hotel, Maisie climbed in to a crib at the foot of our bed. She made herself cozy, and fell asleep.

The next morning, we hiked up the hill to the castle, from which the view of the city and sea was utterly and finally clear. Amidst churches and Roman ruins and mighty statues (which inspired Dad to return to a gym), said our last to Italy.










The way back through Slovenia in the clean dry air was a far different thing than the sleet and hash of rain we encountered on the way in.



The Alps. The Alps! My God, what does one say. For the record, one thing I would like to say is that Austria and Switzerland monopolize far too much of the Alpine consciousness for Americans. On a related note, the eldest Von Trapp daughter died a few days ago, at the age of 97.

Returning to Barcs, after six days of musical beds and restaurant hunts and force-marched girl legs over miles of cobblestone in unrelenting rain in spongey parkas, was a happy thing. We were home. But it was also Dad and Wendy's last night with us, and I think none of us wanted to look at that too squarely.

I had one last thing I wanted to try before they left, and that was to dine out in Barcs the same way we had been dining the past week. We went to Csillag Étterem, a place Stephanie and I had been once before. The Hungarian language had somewhat deserted us over the past week, and the menu was more refined than we could translate and our German and English were of little use; but the waiter was a gentleman and Stephanie carried the language burden for us all. But when we threw a few darts at fate, we won: it was a great, great meal. Dad and Wendy ate a wrapped turkey dish with dumplings, Sophie and Amelia ate stew, and Maisie had a savoury pancake and slaw; our desserts were delectable and utterly Hungarian. From the other room, a group of women were blowing a hole off the roof with their smoke and laughter. The welcome of a nation and the rightness of our journey -- in bright lights on the occasion of this visit about to end -- was abundant and good.

Grandma Wendy and Grandpa Barry, we miss you!