Fulbright farewell

Last Friday, Fulbright Hungary gathered its guests for one last meeting. Students and professors are returning to the States in less than a week or two, and new, outgoing scholars and had this one opportunity to join us for mingling and questions. There was a clear difference in mood between the Americans saying goodbye and the Hungarians saying hello, however, and in the urgency to get what we could of each other after sharing such adventure, perhaps the mingling wasn't what it could be, as evidenced by the polite but escalating requests to vacate at the end, and we Americans stolidly ignoring this call long after the new scholars had left.

The last meeting was a cruise on the Duna river (the Danube), sailing up towards the lush green trees about a dozen kilometers north and back in time for the sun to set over the most beautiful buildings in Europe -- the Fisherman's Bastion and Hungarian Parliament. 

We were wined and fed, giving our love and praises to Annamária and Huba of the Hungarian Fulbright Commission, and talking, talking, talking. Maisie and Amelia had made friends over the course of the year with so many, with Emily, with Franky, with Kent, with the violinist Daniel and his pianist wife Shelby, with Blase (pictured top right), and now the girls merrily pranced on everyone's feet and wiggled everywhere while Kent declared he was given permission to toss them over the side. I finally had some stuffed cabbage and found it crammed with smoked sausage, which is not the flavor I was expecting or wanting, hoping instead for further evidence that this was my father's parents' cultural world: a milder taste and cabbage more pronounced.

We turned around at the Megyeri Bridge, pictured below. 

This bridge is better known by many of us as the Stephen Colbert Bridge, the name it was awarded by virtue of an Internet poll after Colbert heard Chuck Norris was leading numbers in a naively inclusive process. I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce three Hungary-is-in-pop-culture! videos by way of The Colbert Report. The first is taped while he is urging people to send votes, and in this video, he salutes Hungarian history; the second is Colbert's meeting with the Hungarian ambassador to the United States, in which the winning name for the bridge is formally announced; and in the third, the ambassador plays guitar.

The return delivered on its promises, the golden sun reflecting off the stunning riverside landmarks.

The night was over. We were preparing to take our kids back to the hotel. But suddenly I was told to go, follow the thirty year olds and the twenty year olds. Stephanie would return with the kids alone while I would have more time for goodbyes. I kissed some more people, shook more hands, said good night to the kids, and then bolted for the night out, memorialized by the victory tunnel you see below. That's for me.

This entire experience, this year far away from certain responsibilities and routines, has been a reclamation for me: that my life still has adventure in it, there's still youth and play, still exploration. Part of this was rewarded early on, or maybe corroborated, when I flew alone to Washington, DC for the Fulbright orientation and went out with young, beautiful people and danced and drank and sloughed off creepy barflies and danced some more, energy fed to others and back to me again in a delirious return to the dance floor, which once was a place I'd go four or five times a week. When Emily and Franky brought me to Dublin in the Fall, I learned something else about this: it wasn't the drinking, which more often than not made words difficult to hear and dulled my body towards sleep: it was the electricity of the world at night, it was dancing itself. So, after the cruise, I went out once more.


We walked to the Jewish Quarter where there are marvelous cafes and pubs. Only the day before, Rick Steves had written about the "ruin pubs," which he describes as "are smoke-filled, ramshackle bars crammed with 20-somethings." We ended up in something that was instead more like a beer garden, beer courtyard rather, and our group happily settled down on benches beneath an enormous wall.

I'll say this about my night out, my night off: 


It was okay.

I was sick the next day when our family spent a morning in a public market and later when Stephanie and I visited the Terror Museum, though it was hard to say at first if this was because of a) a hangover after four drinks in the farewell with Fulbrighters, or b) the children's toothpaste I was forced to buy at the corner market flavored like bubble-gum and returning me to a traumatizing memory of cotton-candy flouride foam I was forced to bite at Dr. Frost's office, or c) the steady crowds in narrow aisles at the market with rows upon rows of the same touristy goods, or d) the video of Nazis marching or Soviets destroying Budapest and rows of Arrowcross suits and concrete chambers that once held political prisoners. It turned out I was just sick. 

The Museum of Terror mixed chirpy postcards with the small room where prisoners were hanged on a stubby post.

Two other notable images: The first, a woman and her dog, seated below a sign that says, "Bringing dogs into the park is strictly forbidden." The second, a wedding on wheels.

The other images include what it looks like heading down to the subway, including jet fans and people holding rails because you feel yourself tilting into space; cotton from cottonwood tree flying everywhere and sticking to everything, including my throat; and these cute mosquito sculptures by standing water in a fenced playground.

On our way from the Barcs train station, we ate Chinese food, something that choked us the first time, tasting similar to the Safeway deli counter. We love it now.

Goodbye, Blase, goodbye Daniel and Shelby, goodbye Eszter and Ellie! Maybe we'll see you in the States one day! Goodbye Huba, goodbye Annamária! Maybe we'll see you still.

What I've reclaimed from my life wasn't ever some kind of youth I once had. It's nice to go out; but it's also nice to see I wouldn't mind being home with Stephanie swapping stories of the evening, kissing the girls goodnight. It may be in the end that what I've reclaimed is what I've already had, and that it's good. Goodbye, goodbye!

Horse riding

One of the things we are sure to miss about leaving small town Hungary is all the horses. It's not uncommon to pass horse-drawn wagons or bike through horse poo on the street, and all of us at some point or another have had an opportunity to ride.

One day, I took a bus with some DVK students to a place in Kaposvár where they come to practice riding on Wednesday afternoons, and I was unprepared for what I found: an enormous complex with 100 horses and numerous stables and outbuildings and vast fields, as well as two voluminous indoor arenas.

 

My own experience at the Horse Academy included riding the horse below at a trot, after which my legs -- thighs and calves -- burned for three days from lifting and lowering myself in the saddle, trying to catch the rhythm and succeeding for maybe a total of two minutes of the twenty.

The girls have also attended horse riding lessons every Wednesday. While two girls lounge, the third takes her turn on the horse, practicing balance and coordination exercises, and for the older girls, getting the feel of the trot.



Maisie is offering to give her perspective. I'll give her the last word:

It is very hard to do the trot, but not doing that is easy. ( Pluss riding a horse is very fun!)

Mother's Day

In Hungary, Mother's Day is celebrated on the first Sunday of May, whereas in the United States, it is the second Sunday. What this meant for our family is that we effectively did nothing on either day. I can share two Mother's Day concerts in which the kids performed, however, and maybe it's not too late to honor the mother I'm thinking about most this year, here in this entry.

First, in Szulok a couple of weeks ago, all the children at the girls' school gathered with dancing and poetry and a surprise gift of flowers and cloth eggs. The building you see below houses the two classrooms (first and third grade in one room, second and fourth in the other), a library, a kitchen, a computer lab, an art room, and the gym in which the children performed. I hope that some time soon our girls take a camera to school and capture their experiences more specifically, and maybe even write about it as well.

The performances were very sweet. I was interested to see two of the little ones flub or forget lines, because it seems the Hungarian kids are so self-possessed, fluid and clear in the many times they recite memorized verse or speech publically, that I was happy to spot the progression. Our girls have kept up, too, and I always like to see them in that formal stance with hands at sides or crossed at wrists, faithfully pronounce the words I so little understand. In this case, Viktor wrote to Tibor to find a poem in English for the girls to recite for Stephanie, and it was a fun surprise. Interestingly, Maisie and Amelia were a little harder to hear than usual. Sophie was resonant and clear.

One of the skits looked like it was about boys in the family taking their mother's hard work for granted. You can see a cross-section below. The girl had almost no lines, but she did walk around with that enormous bag, looking very forlorn.

Finally the children sang together, as presented in the video below, and then delivered flowers and gifts to their waiting mothers.

Last weekend, Barcs had a much bigger Mother's Day concert in its Culture House. Children played instruments, sang, danced and recited poetry to a packed room. I've included some photographs of kids I thought were cute, like this little boy with the big guitar, and some footage of the girls in their orchestra, Sophie playing the violin, and finally kids from a folk dance group hollaring some steps I'd like to remember. Again, the children flooded the room at the end with gifts. In Sophie's lovely video, you might also note the rhythmic clapping that grows out of the applause. This is something Hungarian audiences do to show appreciation for a performance: clapping is desultory and then narrows in on itself as everyone claps together in a steady pulse. She deserved it too.

The video below includes two of the dances with our girls. The first dance includes some very awkward partnering that my filming does its best to emphasize, because everyone looks so unhappy, and no one more unhappy than Sophie, who had hurt her foot earlier in the day and wasn't hiding it. Stephanie said that it looked like a middle school dance where the teachers force boys and girls to hold each other and move. You also don't have to look hard to observe another detail: boys gripping the hell out of girls' arms. I didn't catch this with the camera, but after the dance, many of the young ladies were rubbing their arms as the curtains closed around them. The other thing I thought was fun about the dance is that it is set to a Hungarian translation of "Cat's in the Cradle," a song about a son neglecting the attentions of his father and then paying for it when he grows up -- an odd but adorable choice for a Mother's Day performance.

The second dance in the video is performed by girls only, and each carries and cuddles a doll. The girls were instructed to gaze into its eyes as if it were the most important thing in their lives. They end up looking morose instead. My favorite part of this dance was the preparation for it, in which, for rehearsals and then the dance itself, the kids carried their dolls in a bag, because I love to say, "Bag of Babies."

The video below is the folk dancing group.

And now, the mother I am thinking of most this year. We didn't send her flowers, as intended, or letters, or chocolate or any such thing, and yet we can't think of a Mother's Day more precious. But we thought of you, I promise.

Lauren, we love you, and we are so happy for you and Maude and Jeff, and we are proud to be a part of your family. What a change in your life, and how full our hearts! Happy Mother's Day.

Plitvice, Croatia