Karácsony

Happy holidays, Seattle, Barcs, wherever you are. The day after Thanksgiving, stores and storage were opened to the Christmas season, and on this day in Barcs, lights suddenly draped the streets. Be prepared for a similarly lit blog entry, two-dimen-sate, with sight and sound.

Santa Claus does not come to Hungary the night before Christmas. Instead, he comes on his name day, December 6th, the name day for Mikulas. Instead of double-wide socks, Hungarian children shine and shine their boots the night before and leave them on the windowsill for Szent Mikulas, who travels around with two little devils or one big one named Krampusz, either with sweets and small gifts for the good children, or a bundle of small sticks and onions for the bad ones.

Many Hungarian children receive both sticks and candy, being neither all good nor all bad. You may notice that Sophie, with no boot to shine, was judged thusly. 


At my school later this day, a group of students travelled with St. Mikulas and visited classes, distributing candy and making students sing Christmas songs, sometimes swatting them with the bundle of sticks in flirtatious censure.

Meanwhile, on Christmas Eve, while Americans wait for their fat, red-felted Santa to squeeze through chimneys and eat their cookies to commemorate the birth of the Christ, Hungarian children will actually receive a visit from baby Jesus, which frankly seems like the better deal.

All over Hungary, cities, towns and villages decorate with lights and nativity scenes and hold Christmas fairs, selling ornaments and honey, gingerbread and ceramic, candles and hot wine. 

We went to the Christmas fair in Budapest after touring Parliament. On the left, a small band plays on a balcony on the third floor of the building you see in the background at right. Every night they emerge from a different numbered window, as in a giant advent calendar.

The Pécs Christmas fair, held in the shadow of the great synagogue, was far less crowded and we were less cold with better socks. 

The nativity scene from Barcs was not as sophisticated as the one from Pécs. Feel free to stake your guess which is which on the comment line at the end of the blog.

Brief tangent:


In addition to dressing up the towns, cities are also protecting their artwork and stone memorials from the sharp winter. The result can be a little macabre.


Tangent complete.


Christmas is a time of holiday and community, family and fellow-feeling, and this year, in spite of being far away from many we dearly love and missing a yearly gathering on Whidbey Island with fresh salmon and walks in the woods and puzzles and games in sunken couches, we have felt entirely embraced here; and in Hungary where jobs are so few and money so scarce, we have discovered riches every night in their community halls and schools, their auditoriums and dining tables.


Consider this, for example: My path to the door of the 11th grade gymnasium class was barred last Thursday, as one student gathered all of the class's language teachers. When finally we were permitted to enter, the room was darkly lit with tea lights on the table before us, chairs set forward as seats of honor. The students stood in the back of the class and they sang -- three Christmas songs, interstitially reading poems one by one, until the music was over and we were quietly and unashamedly thanked.


Songs and music are so important in this way, all-embracing, unifying, emotive and open, and every day songs were prepared and presented as gifts to be shared and had.


And we do have people to share with this Christmas. Last week, after spending a few days in Budapest, we met Dad and Wendy in Pécs. Pécs may be my favorite city in Hungary, but we were so excited to take them back to Barcs and show them our lives here. And truly, it has been so good to have family in winter, witnessing our lives and our community at its highest pitch.

We were also so fortunate to have Luke Greenway come and stay with us for much of the week. Luke was my student as a ninth grader, and then again in Shakespeare class in 11th grade and Philosophy in 12th, and now, two months from starting college at Middlebury, he is in his third month couch surfing through Europe. He came to four of my lessons on Thursday and scored a night out with the beautiful women of 12th grade Drama. He encountered three invaluable cultural points with them: One, a fishy pasta covered in a mound of pastry sugar. Two, discovery that hope and excitement for the future is the province of American teenagers, not Hungarian. Three, pity rather than envy that he might spend Christmas in Vienna, or New Year's beneath Prague's Old Town clock, alone.

He is pictured here with 9th grade Marketing, who spent most of the period gathering information about themselves to share with him. This is their happiest moment during the class period.

So, with Dad and Wendy and Luke joining us in the same week and the schools and town dressing themselves up with music and dancing and craft, we have had a very full and joyous week.

At Dráva Völgye Középiskola, almost all lessons were suspended for the week as Croatian, Hungarian, French, German, Russian and English songs and dances were assiduously prepared, repeated without pause until student pitch and rhythm matched that of the recorded artist. Below, English students sing to Train's "Shake Up Christmas" song, while seventh graders dance.

The evening Christmas concert featured several lovely performances, and also Botund, at left, demonstrating necklace and shadow. I am sorry to have captured only eight seconds of the haunting song below, but listen to what you can.

Students were not the only ones meeting for choir practice. Stephanie and I joined the teacher choir to sing a song called "Gyertyák." Barna, a wonderful colleague (Drama and Hungarian) and our Hungarian teacher also, went through the lines with Stephanie and me, and we were moved by the meaning of the words: Light a candle for each and each person, those who you've forgotten, for those you've lost, for family moving beyond you, for those full of anger, and those shackled by war, for those on the street, for those looking towards home, light a candle for each and each person; and the light of every candle will shine throughout heaven. Barna told us the song was one of deep feeling for Hungarians, and in our first rehearsal this came to be so as three teachers openly wept and as I myself, during the performance below, felt in our unadorned singing together.

Our girls performed in far more venues than this. During the week, Dad and Wendy were able to see them perform in the Music School, in the front stage of the Barcs Culture House, in the big auditorium of the Culture House, and in the Szulok Culture House, during which the children joined others in choir, dance, violin and piano recitals. They missed Sophie playing in the Catholic Church, which I restore below for 19 seconds.





Here is the girl's szolfézs choir singing, "Itt van a szép vigy karácsony" at the Barcs kultúrház. Below that, Sophie plays "Mennybol az angel" at the same venue.

Below, the szolfézs class dances to "Santa Claus is coming to town." Note that Sophie, not pictured in the video, objects to the flirtatious flip of the hair required in the dance.

At the Szulok kultúrház, meanwhile, the girls were absolute stars. It was standing room only in the village theater, which again made me re-assess material priorities and use of time in my American life.

In the video of the girls dancing to "Jingle Bell Rock" below, you might recognize Wendy's laughter against the backdrop of what seems to be the Hungarian demonstration of respect: total silence and placidity.

Here, all girls play "Mennybol az angel" together. The final video is the entire student body of the girls' school, and all their teachers, singing "Nox: Eskü." Maisie and Amelia are hidden behind the boy next to Sophie.

We also went to a concert by the girls' music teachers, pictured at right.


And we went to the Barcs Dráva museum and were given a great tour of Barcs history, which includes a Turkish castle beneath one of the Chinese department stores (seen in the background with Maisie, in the second to last picture).


The historian, Marton, is pictured below, explaining the elements of the Barcs crest.





Merry Christmas, everyone. Boldog Karácsonyi Ünnepeket.

Dear Roosevelt,

How are you doing? How are the kids? The bears? The Source? The Honor Code? Have you missed me?

It’s now a third of a year that I’ve been gone, but I haven’t forgotten about you. I think of you fondly, sometimes with wistfulness, sometimes with all-American irony.

Many things are different here. Barcs is very small, with 12,000 people and two miles of narrow streets shared by cars, bikes, tractors and horse-driven wagons. But many students are from villages far smaller, and I was confused in early classroom conversations when students referred to a crowded, well-provisioned city: while imagining the clamor and bustle of Budapest, where a fifth of all Hungary lives, students meant Barcs, with its many grocery stores, smoke shops and bars.

School is different for me too. The daily schedule changes every day of the week, and it’s shared by every student within a grade level and program, which, at Dráva Völgye Középiskola, includes an academic program, Drama, Marketing, Forestry, and Water Management. Groups stay together with three dozen classmates every day, every hour, for four years (and six in the Academy, which starts at 7th grade). Having the same daily schedule also means that students do not choose their courses, except for their first and second foreign languages, usually German or English, but also Russian, Croatian and French.

A typical day has seven to nine 45 minute classes, some double-blocked for greater depth. The school rooms, unadorned but for desks, chairs and a blackboard and pictures, belong to student groups, while teachers travel every period. Meanwhile, breaks between classes are ten to fifteen minutes -- and effectively longer, because teachers don’t head for classes until breaks are over. And I can tell you, this is not a hurried rush through the halls. When teachers do arrive, however, students are expected to be in the classroom, by their seats, standing, attentive, and courteously waiting for the teacher to give permission to sit. And once class begins, no one leaves until dismissed at the bell. A downside of the longer afternoon breaks is that lunch -- which includes a walk to the cafeteria, a wait in line, mastication, ingestion, and the walk back -- is expected to occur all in this 15 minutes, and lunch is the big meal of the day, including a big bowl of soup, bread, and a heaping pile of noodles or meat or stuffed vegetables.

There are assessment differences as well. While you put students through credit paces and hundreds of little assignments and projects and the HSPE and Senior Project, students here must pass five major exams in Literature, History, Maths, Foreign Language, and a fifth chosen subject, each exam containing a written test lasting between two and three hours and an oral examination occurring a few months later. Meanwhile, teachers cannot, by law, grade homework because of plagiarism concerns. Take these together, and it means the burden of learning falls directly on the student.

Scores and tests also account for who goes to what schools. Barcs has three high schools. To choose between DVK and the bilingual high, students need good marks in elementary school; otherwise, they go to the trade school. But school choice extends far beyond regional borders. Many schools have dorms, enabling access to villagers and choice of schools all over the country. DVK, a magnet with one of only three forestry programs in the nation, has two dorms, and one third of the 600 students live here on the weekdays.

People live here, which is how we can call an assembly that lasts two and half hours ending at 5:30, or decide that next week students will attend for six days rather than five.

I’m not ready to say what’s better, Roosevelt, but I can tell you that some of the most fundamental relationships are the same. Teaching is still a delight one day and the next a chore; teenagers still laugh at peculiar times; and, as always, students can be energetically curious or stubbornly bored.

I think of you, dear Roosevelt -- your crowded halls, your exuberance, your pizza and chocolate milk. I hope you think of me sometimes.

I miss you! Don’t forget to write.

Affectionately yours,
David Grosskopf

Thanksgiving

Today the sun is shining over frosted grass. The air is warm enough to float broken panes of ice on the roadside. Back in the U.S., friends and family sleep; and in Seattle, a cold front foiled travelers and Christmas markets but completed for others a week of togetherness and celebration.

Today is Thanksgiving.

I have spent several weeks helping prepare for a Thanksgiving party here at Dráva Völgye Középiskola, and so, for the first time since elementary school, I had to learn what Thanksgiving is (more than turkeys and pilgrims?).

Thanksgiving is the only holiday besides July Fourth which is totally American in origin. This certainly heightens its profile. But I can tell a better story about Independence Day than I can about Thanksgiving, in which pilgrims wearing black flee England and start a colony, meet a friendly Indian, give Hester Prynne a scarlet letter and burn some witches and then create the Motion Picture Association of America.

Researching the holiday, I learned facts as well:

First, it was King James’s England they were rebelling against -- Shakespeare’s England. King James demanded attendance at Church of England services, charging fees and penalties for those who missed the approved Sunday mass. The Puritans felt strangled by such rules. (Meanwhile, it was Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans who strangled and then demolished Shakespeare’s Globe theatre 20 years later.) From England, the pilgrims first tried Holland, abandoning it when their kids became a little too Dutch. When they finally set out for the New World, this group represented only 44 people on the Mayflower. They called themselves Saints.

More than half did not survive the first winter. Many of us know about the alliance pilgrims made with friendly natives who helped them survive and prosper. I learned additionally that Squanto, the one who taught them to tap trees and use decayed fish to enrich soil for corn and other crops, the one who showed them which plants were poisonous and which medicinal, who, in short, was responsible for a turnaround in fate, Squanto knew his English because he had been kidnapped and brought to Spain by an Englishman who intended to sell him for £20, and after a few years in England, Squanto found his way home. He spoke English, which was a gift to the settlers. He was available, because his tribe had been wiped out in an epidemic. In short, English kidnappers and English disease put Squanto in position to be the English friend.

An op-ed piece in the New York Times by David Hall provides another reading of Thanksgiving history, one especially useful for Tea Party historians who look back fondly on the Christian roots of America. Hall points to colonists fiercely protective of religious freedoms, purposefully keeping ministers from civil authority and preventing churches from imposing civil law, so that anyone could worship his own way. Hall also writes that “the colonists hungered to recreate the ethics of love and mutual obligation spelled out in the New Testament. Church members pledged to respect the common good and to care for one another.” His last paragraph is potent:

Why does it matter whether we get the Puritans right or not? The simple answer is that it matters because our civil society depends, as theirs did, on linking an ethics of the common good with the uses of power. In our society, liberty has become deeply problematic: more a matter of entitlement than of obligation to the whole. Everywhere, we see power abused, the common good scanted. Getting the Puritans right won’t change what we eat on Thanksgiving, but it might change what we can be thankful for and how we imagine a better America.

I did try to communicate some of this, and some of the larger context of European settlers and conquistadors; but mostly I talked about the piece that we know best about Thanksgiving, and the thing that remains most true for me: Thanksgiving is a time when everyone has a home, when everyone has enough to eat, and when those we love sit with us in a warm room. It is a time to feel safe and to know the bounty of our lives.

Therefore, the traditional story, however distorted, still has resonance for me: the pilgrims barely survived their winter and struggled to make a home; Squanto and others emerged from a brutalized and decimated people. But on this day, according to Edward Winslow’s 1621 journal, they gathered together; and “although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”

Below are pictures from DVK’s Thanksgiving Pageant, in which we sang “Amazing Grace” and “Simple Gifts,” put on a fifteen minute play, gave thanks to our neighbors, and played games of find the turkey, push the pumpkin, and pass the popcorn. And apple-bobbing, of course.


 
 
 
 
 

Sophie’s Blog: The Big Clock in Prague

On Autumn break, we visited four different places, Salzburg, Schwangau, Prague, and Vienna.

In Prague, near our apartment, we saw an old clock tower with clocks that has been working for centuries. The clock tower not only had clocks that showed time, but a clock that showed the stages of the moon. We saw a blue shade open and statues of people move in a circle from the inside. We could see the people’s faces through the little windows. After that, a trumpet player played a short tune. The many crowds of people clapped and cheered after that was over.

Amelia's blog: On the way to Salzburg

Friday October 29^th

We were in the car for about five hours on our way to Salzburg, Austria. We went from Barcs to  Slovenia. In Slovenia we bought a vignette and started going. We got to the mountains very quickly and we constantly went inside long boring tunnels under the mountains. Finally the mountains parted revealing a big grassy plain with trees spotted here and there. Then we got to the border crossing and we got a matrica vignette. We drove through the hills and the plains, and slowly, gradually we entered Salzburg.

Maisie’s Blog: Prague Was Pretty (Prag Szep Volt)

We went to salzburg hohenschwangau prague vienna. In prague there was a very beautiful clock! It seemed to glow gold in the night. There were always people waiting to see the clock go off. Little people walked around in the window when the clock went off. One man in the tower always played his trumpet when the clock went off. Also in prague we stayed in an apartment! It had three little beds, so Amelia and Sophie and I each had our own, but we weren’t all in the same room. 

Vienna

In Vienna we stayed in a wonderful pension in the heart of the old part of the city, a block away from St. Stephen's Cathedral.

Highlights of the trip include a horse and carriage ride into the city, a visit to the Belverdere Palace Klimt collection, riding the Riesenrad -- the Vienna wheel first built in 1897 (5 years after George Ferris's Chicago wheel), and a tour of the Hofburg Palace, 

As for the last, we had been seeing posters, boxes, calendars, coffee table books, and all sorts of other memorabilia devoted to a beautiful woman named, in italics and with a whisper, Sissi. Brief forays into these materials told me she was an empress of Austria, Elisabeth of Bavaria. The Hofburg Palace was the winter home she shared with her husband, Franz Joseph, who reigned as emperor for 67 years until World War I. Even so, even as the last empress: why so many pictures? She's certainly pleasant to look at, but what makes her otherwise so iconographic? 

The Hofburg Palace hosted a detailed museum to Elisabeth's life -- including public perception and private despair. I learned that it was she who brought Austria and Hungary together; the picture above, in fact, is her coronation portrait as the Queen of Hungary. But Elisabeth married early to the claustrophobic life of the imperial court, and the exhibit is haunted by her lonely poetry, made no less bitter when her son, Rudolph, at age 31, shot his 16 year old girl friend before turning the gun on himself.

Hungary's relationship to Elisabeth, as I discovered the next week when I asked in school, is as complicated as Hungary's relationship to the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself, but it seems mostly positive. I went with the drama students to the Csiky Gergyely Színház in Kaposvár, where we were treated, through a one-day open-house, to roam the building, and where the theater was preparing for their production of Erzsébet.

At right you can see a prop of an all-important accessory -- her ghostly dress.

Back in Vienna, one of the things we learned was how much Elisabeth worked on her hair (2-3 hours a day) and her body (and its 20 inch waist). At one point in the tour, in 40 rooms devoted not to Sissi but to the imperial cutlery, I stopped at a beautifully crafted but mysterious-looking press that turned out to the one piece in the museum to squeeze everything together: silver, power, claustrophobia, cult of beauty. The object at left is a duck squeezer, and this is the answer. How did the empress stay so thin? Kacsalé, as I reported to students the next week. She didn't eat the ducks served to her: she drank them.

If you are like Stephanie and don't believe me, please click on the placard at right, which I photographed just for such disbelievers.

Our stay produced more traditional experiences and observations as well. Therefore, no more words, except for the part where I talk about the woman who gave us the horse and carriage ride.

 

Above, our 20 year old driver. Below, what came out of her mouth during the rise, from a combination of German and English: 

You, you don't belong there. Get on the sidewalk. Get on the sidewalk. Get off the road. Get on the sidewalk. Get your dog off the road! Get him off! And keep him on a leash. You want horses to stomp your dog? This is not a place to have a dog unleashed. There is the hunting lodge. Look at this. Look what he's doing, trotting his horse! How would you like it if you had to trot all the way through the park? Would you like that? Would you like that? How would you like that? Huh? Girls? What would that be like for you? Would you like it? No, you wouldn't.