The Fishing Lake

This afternoon, Gabor and Zoe took us to a beautiful fishing lake four kilometers east of Barcs.

Our girls were very happy to go on a hike. Too often, as I was telling Gabor, Stephanie and I have told kids we were going on a hike when we were really going on a long walk. Sophie might say, "Is this a city hike?" And if the answer is yes, watch out. But they have terrific stamina and joy amidst the roots, rocks, streams and trees.

The fishing lake, which we thing is called Lake Bok, is about three or four kilometers long and studded with private fishing docks like the ones below.

Gabor says there is a fishing office in Barcs through which someone can get a fishing permit; and such people use the fishing docks owned by the town.

The children clambored over every dock and into everyone's dinghy.

Once again, Zoe was the perfect Hungarian ambassador for the children. She was fearless and forward, and she spoke non-stop, introducing words to the kids (or the adults) while poking and prodding the world around her, and filling the woods with her happy energy.

Eventually this led to the first time out we'd seen issued in Hungarian. But it was unmistakably familiar.

We were just in time to see the Hungarian twilight over the fields before we left.

First foray into Croatia

Eastern bloc art at the crossing

This morning I grabbed my passport and headed to the end of highway 6: the border crossing with Croatia. I knew traffic would be light on a Sunday morning, so this would be a good time to try out our passports; more importantly, I seem to have a desire to explore that my children are not at all eager to encourage, and I can get to the village on the other side of the border without even waking them up.


The crossing was fine, although I had to speak a little more Hungarian than I knew how to provide; interestingly, in the non-town on the other side of the border, the lone Croat there spoke a very comfortable English.

Tiny church

On the Croat side is the merest hint of a village. There were farms and crops, and only one place of business I could find anywhere; and most people seemed to be inside, hopefully enjoying their Sunday morning.

In this picture at left, notice two things: One, that houses are very pleasant in this village, and two, that there is a platform atop the street light, upon which rests a heavy-duty nest.

The highlight of my trip, quite literally, was the abandoned military watch tower that rose from a mound of trees and brush off a dirt road. On a sign off the highway, I read -- in English! -- that this tower had "served for the control of the strictly protected boundary with the former Eastern block."

While I am sure somewhere thousands of miles away, my father is cringing as he's looking at the picture, and though I had hesitations of my own, I saw no lock, no sign, no chain, no impediment save the tangle of nettles at the base and the sting of certainly warranted fear.

But I began to climb, however slowly, over rusted rungs and tired looking bolts. 

At the top, I felt the entire structure sway with my weight. I climbed enough to carefully take a picture of the observation deck and then descended, with great relief. 

But here is what I saw while I was up there, in all four directions:

My last stop was to take a look back at Barcs over the river. I saw the Szabadstrand, the walkway, and the beauty of the river that was ours from both ends.

And then I returned to the European Union once more.

Video reminder.

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Holiday at Lake Balaton

On August 17, Lacko (Katalin's brother) and his parents met us at their summer home in Balatonfenyves, which they had spent the day preparing for our arrival, waiting even through the long delay caused by trials with the immigration office. They showed us around, bought us drinks and cotton candy, and then left us to a wonderful vacation in which each day was better than the last.

Lake Balaton is an absolute playground for kids and adults alike. The water is warm and, on the south side of the lake (our side), shallow for a very long time. The kids loved it. Even Maisie, who, some of you know, has demonstrated a great terror of shorelines for some reason, was soon flapping and playing quite far from the shore.

Amelia

Every day we ate pastries and ice cream. As Maisie would say, the ice cream was just a snack. Pastries are for dessert.

Back in the house, we read to each other, played cards, drank wine, and prepared for our next adventure. The one place we ate vegetables was at the house too; and in one of the pictures below, you see Stephanie making us a salad. The mischievous look is probably something I earned.

We often found ourselves in a town to the east, Fonyód. While its waterfront was not as spectacular as in Balatonfenyves, it had a welcoming shopping plaza, playground, and several rides, including bumper cars -- a portion of which you can see by way of Paris Hilton, her starry eyes and arched brow.

Behold: Paris Hilton.

From Fonyód, we caught a ferry to Badacsony on the north end, a place the guide books say is far more mature than the partying towns to the south; but there was plenty of noise and driving beats when we arrived. Still, the quieter walks into the hills amidst the grape vineyards definitely changed the pace, and we had a hint of what the books described.

The picture below, taken from the ferry on the way to Badacsony, really captures the color of the lake. Plus boat.

 

August 20th is a national holiday in Hungary, celebrating the canonization of St. Istvan occurring the same day in 1083. Even more importantly, this day celebrates the birth of Hungary, because it was through Istvan, Hungary's first king, that the Magyars were unified through his alliance with the Pope.

We memorialized this day with thousands of other people at Balatonboglár, who toasted their great land with fried breads, gyros, kolbasz, and stomachs twisted and churned either via jugs of wine or through Screamin' Swings and other rides. 

Below are several pictures and one video taken from the wine festival.

We left Balatonboglár by train. In Fonyód, our train stopped and took on extra passenger cars, preparing to reverse and head to Kaposvar. Stephanie had some sense of this and pulled us off the train; but by the time this occurred, our own train had departed, and though we were told another would come by at 7:30, none came in the next two hours.

Amelia and Maisie waiting by the train tracks.

Fortunately, we didn't try to wait. In Fonyód, August 20th festivities included singing and dancing, and the kids were quickly ensconsed and enthralled.

When no train came at 7:30, I emptied my pockets of change, took of my watch, and ran back to Balatonfenyves, where our car was waiting at the train station. It was six or seven miles of beautiful lakeside scenery, the sunset turning the entire world orange.

And here is my favorite punchline of all: Because I was running at this particular time at this particular place, I ran into Franky Scaglione, one of the other six teacher Fulbrighters in Hungary. He was on his way to Balatonboglár with two friends to catch the nighttime events of the festival. And while it was incredible to run into each other, on a side street between towns, it was somehow too surreal to be surprising. But I loved it. I didn't tell you this, Franky, but you're the first native English speaker I've met in Hungary so far; and it wasn't bad to see my soul brother, either. Catch his blog here.

This morning, we went to the shoreline for one last look at the phenomenal pastels of the lake.

Culture Shock Dream

When I woke up, my first thought was to think, What pill? We just want to pay for this pasta salad. My second thought was, What an aggravating dream! What’s up, brain, that you can linger so long on something so stupid? But my third thought was to see the accuracy of the dream; so I replayed it a few times to remember it in the morning.

We were on our way to someone’s house and dropped into to a supermarket to pick up a dish to take with us. Stephanie was famished too, and had an eye to pick up something she could eat in any case. We quickly grabbed a pasta salad and bread and were directed to the other side of the store to pay. But the cashiers were gone, and in their place was the manager, alone at a large desk filled with papers.

Oh, hang on a minute, she said. To complete the transaction, she had to hook up a machine. Pretty stupid, I thought; but they must be understaffed because of the recession. The manager pointed to a nest of wires and bags on the floor by the window and told me to find the plug marked MULV ONE and connect it to the red socket. I kneeled by the mess of wires for a long time, not finding the plug, while she insisted, MULV ONE! MULV ONE! It took a long time but I finally found it, only to have trouble locating the correct red socket, because there were a dozen red sockets with varying degrees of redness. Eventually I closed the circuit. The manager, still seated, now told me to find the green plug and a socket marked TI. When I paused for a moment, considering the friends waiting for us nearby, she tersely explained why we had to do all this: Triage, she said, which I assumed was a reference to desperation measures resulting from the recession. So I went back to work, sorting through many bags and buckets of plastic links, looking for a green plug and socket marked TI. After I succeeded, there remained one final task, which was to find the component labeled FAMILY MEDICINE. As it turned out, the letters were hidden behind its toy shutters, so this took some time. Ultimately though, all the circuits were closed, everything was in place, and the machine produced a piece of paper which the manager tore off in one hand while she held a pill in the other. Then she pronounced, You are not entitled to this pill at this time.

What pill? I thought, waking up in total exasperation. We just want to pay for the damn pasta salad!

But, of course, this is what culture shock feels like.

Sophie apparently had the same dream, except in hers, Tinkerbell came to life and set off bombs all over the place. I think France was involved.

The Immigration Office

On Tuesday, we went to the Immigration Office in Kaposvar for our residence permits. When we applied for visas through the Hungarian Consulate in Los Angeles, one of the required documents was a form proving we’d be staying in a home truly owned by the owner; in July, a man showed up at the Dévais’ house and executed a walk-through to make certain that the house itself was acceptable as well. This form then ended up in Kaposvar, which is why we headed there rather than to the larger office in Pécs, where we might have had a better chance of speaking to someone who knew English.

The visa application itself was nerve racking, though every assurance made by the man in Los Angeles turned out to be true (if I spoke only to the woman in this office, she provided instead impatience and logistically disturbing questions, and I needed a run and a day more to calm the fears she would unsettle). Even the titles of our visas were made of bureaucratic ambiguity: I needed a visa called “For a Visit of More than 90 days for Other Reasons,” but nowhere does it list the other reasons; everyone else needed a visa called “For a Visit of More than 90 Days for the Purposes of Family Reunification,” a title which seems to promise fragmentation and loss. We’d sent birth certificates, marriage certificates, passports, extra passport photos, proof of medical insurance and financial security and income, as well copies of the Fulbright grant and the signed housing agreement, and all of these sensitive documents went back and forth through the mail twice. See the website for a hint of what we experienced.

Because we actually had our visas when we applied for the residence permits, our last official steps towards entry were to be small ones. But the feeling of helpless terror in the face of unknown bureaucracy, cultivated over a month through the mail and experienced so sharply in Frankfurt, returned in an office with no windows and no English. When we arrived, there were three desks and three clerks and five groups ahead of us. We all stood to the left of a pillar in the middle of the room. After twenty minutes and no movement in lines and the distressing disappearance of clerks for increasing lengths of time, three others showed up and moved to the right of the pillar, creating an alarming Y shape in the line. Ten minutes later, someone else showed up and blithely took a number from one of the desks, causing the rest of us to gasp in bile and surprise and reshuffle our queue once again. By this time, only one clerk was disappearing and returning. The clerk called out number four in Hungarian: we were number seven. I left the office for a bathroom and the men in the office upstairs gesticulated to the floor below and laughed as soon as I was out of the room. Once outside the bathroom, I tried to get the key from the toothless man who emerged from it but he didn’t want to give it up. Stephanie was reading to the kids back in the Immigration Office, and number four was still at the table. When they left, finally a new number was to be served; but suddenly newcomers swooped in without a number and were comfortably served, destroying my sense of order. Further disturbing this were the groups who, after twenty minutes at the desk and leaving to fill out forms, cut back in for another twenty minutes. Still, none of the other clerks returned. Finally, number six took his place at the table. There was tension between number six and me: he was one of the Y overflows arriving after us; we had played dominance games with our eyes and then he got to the queue numbers before me. Number six spent less than a minute exchanging angry words in Hungarian before grabbing his passport and storming out, which finally cleared our path to the table: number seven.

What was distressing about all this was partly concern about being served at all, but the biggest portion was anticipation for what might happen once we had the papers in front of us. Annamaria, our Fulbright liaison in the Budapest Office, had told me they’d be waiting for us in Kaposvar and knew our case and had our papers. But how could she be so sure that any of these random clerks would know who we were and what we needed? In fact, when the lone clerk in the room finally shrugged to indicate “Whoever’s next” and I rushed over, he spoke no English and seemed at an absolute loss. All my fears were confirmed. But suddenly, there was another man in front of us, a man we had not yet seen, a man with solidity and weight. And like magic, he said, in a kind of English, “You are Grosskopf?” And we sat down.

Finally! We were now the people at the table at which everyone stared. And forty minutes later, we were told to come back two hours later when our permits would be ready.

We were nervous about the time, because Katalin’s brother and parents were waiting for us at their house on Lake Balaton, and we were approaching the conservative hour I’d set to meet them. We’d brought two phones, but Stephanie and I don’t use cell phones in Seattle and we couldn’t get them to work. And we also didn’t know at that point that we wouldn’t just be picking up the permits once they were ready. We would be signing multiple other forms, each of which was painstakingly prepared and then maddeningly, walked back to the photocopier and copied individually, such that, with three papers for each of us to sign, our officer took fifteen additional trips to the photocopier. Five of these provided identical warnings, photocopied five times, and then signed five times, and then photocopied five more times—a page and a half written in Hungarian about our status as foreign nationals, which we were told to read when we returned home. At least this was a promise that, at some point, we could leave the room.

Sophie in Kaposvar

Annamaria told us the office was open from one to three in the afternoon. We arrived at one. It was now 4:40. The cotton candy Lacko senior bought the girls an hour and a half later on the shores of Lake Balaton was welcome color and delight.

Family meets the Drava River (pictures only)

Today we went to the Szabadstrand on the River Drava and took a walk. 

          

Meeting Zoe, continued

As Maisie said, we met Zoe and she was very nice. The whole family -- Zoe, Kata and Gabor -- was vibrant and welcoming, and I think it speaks well for both the Dévais and the Göcseis that they are such good friends. Kata Horvath came with them (we're all neighbors by two or three streets!), and at first did a great deal of translating for us all -- do we want swimming lessons for the girls, canoeing, horseback riding. The Göcseis claimed not to speak English, at least not well; but Kata and Zoe were by no means shy -- Zoe marched in and introduced herself to the girls in English; Kata made many jokes -- and soon they were speaking very directly. English did the heavy lifting because Stephanie and I put our miserable Hungarian away.

While our children were very shy (Kata H. observed that in our entire walk into town the other day, she didn't hear the girls at all), Zoe was very much at home, and, because she is going to the same school as our kids, and especially because she is so energetic and embracing and fun, I watched her with relief and joy.

They all took us on a beautiful walk to the water tower (seen in the background of the yard scenes of my birthday blog); and though its entrance is only half a block away, it might have taken me many runs and bicycle rides to discover it. Down a road I might have taken as a driveway or an alley, there is a sudden incline on the left, studded with tall, white gravestones, and at their crest, a noble crucifix; and then a path through a tall bush suddenly opens to an open expanse and the behomoth of the dead tower.

Above: Kata Horvath, Amelia, Maisie, Stephanie, part of Sophie, Kata Göcsei, and Zoe.

I'm not sure what Stephanie is doing above. She's either a) describing the aesthetics from the view above the stones, or b) gathering energy from the hillside, or c) saying fat Americans could never fit down this hill on their sleds.  

At the tower, the children placed flowers in various cracks while the adults came to know each other better, telling stories about upbringings and family and how everyone arrived in Barcs.

Rather than the red tiles and spires of Barcs, the other side of the tower provided a vista of farm houses, trees and vineyards and other crops. Walking down the dirt roads that cut straight lines through land, we were very happy to be in Barcs, finding things to laugh at in our interwoven languages.

Maisie's blog: Meeting Zoe

We met a girl named Zoe. She was  very nice.  we went on a walk with her.there were a lot of dogs .But it was fun anyway.And it got so hot that I  was sweating like crazy.But when we got back ,and when Zoe went home , I got into different clothes ,and it got better . 

Amelia's blog: Swimming!

There were four swimming pools.There was a kitty pool, a radiated pool, a deeper pool, and a lap pool.  The pools that Sophie, Maisie, and I could reach were: the three feet deep pool ,(the radiated pool) and the two feet deep pool.(the kitty pool) There was a water slide in the kitty pool .

Website for the pools.