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.

Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my birthday, and what I wanted most was to explore. 

At six o'clock, I set out on a bicycle in search of the River Drava. I was told yesterday that I was very close when I biked to the bus station, and that people illegally cross tracks behind the depot to get to a very scenic area. This was my intent.

As with my first two mornings, I woke at four due to jetlag and to roosters and horses and what I think was a squealing pig, and I awaited the sun.

Before taking out the bicycle, the sun and light green of an early morning misted over everything, and I tried to photograph the experience of the dawn as seen from the back yard.

Fence to Tibor's walnut grove.

View from the fence to our house

Water tower in the distance

Dawn

There are many bicyclists riding through town, even at this time of the morning. There are no shoulders on the streets, and the bikers themselves cruise very leisurely on the sides of the narrow roads on mountain bikes with dynamo lights, something that's disappeared from the United States but not in Hungary, where it was invented. Cars swing to the middle and no one seems to dial up the road rage the way they do in Seattle or any other city. Also, no one wears a helmet, or owns one. 

I reached the bus depot, cross the train tracks, and was deeply rewarded. The early morning stills the water and the low sun brushes the trees in a soft glow. In the pictures below, you see the River Drava, and on the other side, Croatia.

A path running along the banks of the river leads to the bridge over which are Route Six and a border crossing to Croatia. Near the bus depot end is this beautiful building, as well as a legitimate road over the rails.

Near the bridge, meanwhile, sits a footbridge, remarkable because it is a landmark of beauty overwhelmed on one side by an industrial pit covered in a plastered white dust and small cranes extending nearly to its roof.

Nearby is a campground, occupied today by a dozen tents, and near this too is a path down which I took the bicycle until the groove in the earth was crowded with weeds. But the sunlight still turned everything yellow, and the lines of sticky web now draping across me and the bike began to appear over leaves in larger canvases. I braved ten mosquito-bitten minutes trying to force my camera to focus on the walnut-sized spider in the last picture here.

Visual rhyming time! This tunnel led under the border crossing and pointed me back towards town.

Four hours later, we were on our way to Pécs. Once we found a legitimate place to park and found our way into the old center, Stephanie and I were stunned by what we found. We really are in Europe. The kids, meanwhile, especially Maisie and Amelia, wanted to return home immediately, or at least find an air-conditioned corner out of the heat. They spent most of the time asking to leave, or to drink something cold, or to eat something, or to stop walking already.


The proof is in Maisie's punim.




But once we ate, put some cold drink into them, and wandered back out into the world...

...we were able to explore.

 Then we left, stopping off at the mall and Interspar for cold water.

Ten minutes from home, I pulled over to a playground at a neighboring village and slept. There, apparently, Sophie had her first encounter with Roma society, where she was surrounded by gypsy children practicing their English and stroking her long hair. Sophie said they were very friendly.

Now we are home. Sophie, unscathed, is playing the violin; Maisie and Amelia are playing with legos. We came closer to finishing the meal prepared three days ago for our arrival. Though I am exhausted and ready to pull over and sleep once more, I find that, on my birthday, perhaps I should spend less time trying to put the spider into focus and more on its intricate home among the leaves.