Monthly Archives: October 2008

Budapest Underground

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In the Metro station, the underground, you know when a train is not coming.  Even without the rush hour crowd, the air is still, a bit humid, even somehow hot in the middle of October.  It is just under the Lehel market, where a few meters above a woman has been frying Lángos for hours, a butcher cutting the cheeks from pigs.  Men, no matter the age, are gathering around the café stands for espresso, perhaps a shot of Pálinka for the construction workers who have just finished a worker’s breakfast of eggs and cheese, bread and sausage, noodles, cabbage.  Some of the political banter streams down to the trains where everyone now is waiting.

The clock on the wall counts down between trains. Never more than four minutes.  3:30.  3:00.  Just enough to listen to a good song on your ipod.  Your Metro mix.  Just enough time for the ticket agents to sweep through and check your public transportation pass, hoping to find an uncertain tourist who doesn’t speak the language, who didn’t punch the ticket correctly, from whom they will steal six thousand forints.  But hey, you’ve been here long enough to know not to look them in the eye, to have your papers ready.

You’ve been here long enough to have an hour’s worth of songs on your ipod.  Tom Waits for early and crowded Tuesdays.  Townes Van Zandt for the rest of the morning ride.

When the train comes, it’s not the train that announces itself.  It’s the breeze, first, and then the sweeping, steady air that blows even the shortest of stubborn, brown Hungarian hairs from their styled dos.  The train arrives with the wind first.  And then you can see the lights cresting through the tunnel.

It’s not a lovely train.  It’s an old, blue, Eastern European train with ties to a Soviet past, with ties to an above ground factory somewhere now rusting in a vacant town.  It’s the beauty of it really.  The simple pace of the life here.  Doors open.  A bell rings.  Doors close.  A little blue paint chips from the door, kicks up to the market street, up through the steam vents and staircases, past flower vendors and bakers.  Someone is going somewhere.

The Hungarian Revolution

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On this day in 1956, tens of thousands of Hungarians in central Budapest took to the streets (in what started as a peaceful rally) to demand the end of Soviet rule.

Emboldened by the recent success of the Poles in returning their Soviet-ousted liberal Prime Minster to power (more popularly referred to as Polish October), the Hungarians were demanding Imre Nagy, former Prime Minster, to be reinstated (he was removed for his liberal policies and sent to be “rehabilitated”).  They were also demanding free elections and freedom of the press.

Through hours upon hours the demonstrators remained resolute in their protests, even when the Soviet troops started to open fire.  Two days later, Soviet tanks started shooting, killing hundreds of demonstrators.  But undeterred, the protesters stayed and succeeded in overthrowing the Soviets (for ten days).  Imre Nagy was briefly reinstated and pledged to free the country from the strongholds of communism.  But on November 10th, Nikita Khrushchev sent the soviet army to quell the rebellion.  Thousands died and over 200,000 people fled Hungary.  Two years later, Soviet agents abducted Imre Nagy from the Yugoslavian embassy where he was taking refuge, tried in secret for treason, and then executed.

This is the stalwart, though violent truth about revolutions.  When the powers stop paying attention to the will of the people, the people rise up.  Risk their own lives to save their own lives and the lives of their family.  I have spoken many times in my life about how I am proud to be Scottish, proud of their long, determined history of rebellion against English rule and their own demand for independence.  And in this exact way, I am very proud to be Hungarian as well.  It is all too much a silent part of many Americans, children of children of immigrants, of people who risked everything to survive in their own country and then perhaps then to make their way to America.  And maybe the fighting spirit in a lot of Americans, the kind that stems right from the bloodlines, has just gotten distilled over time.  But on days like this, I am humbled, and reminded that change–real change–comes from the sacrifice of the people.

I’ve written more about the Hungarian revolution here.  Everyone has the day off today, and many of the streets near Parliament are closed (even to pedestrian traffic).  Like in America, there is an extremely unpopular Prime Minster currently in power here (Ferenc Gyurcsány of the Hungarian Socialist Party), and there are many schedule demonstrations planned by anti-government protesters.  I probably won’t venture out to get pictures because there is pretty real danger of violence (as was the case two years ago, and honestly I would like to enjoy a leisurely weekend free of tear-gas), but I’ll try to write an update on how things go.  And hopefully the day will remain mostly a commemoration of the people in 1956, whose oblation played a crucial role in the eventual collapse of Soviet communism.  Or according to the statue in Mindszenty Plaza in Cleveland no other day has shown, the eternal unquenchability of man’s desire to be free, whatever the odds against success, whatever the sacrafice required.


On the Teaching Front

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The bus is usually on time here in the morning.  For some reason I didn’t expect it, though my only other bus riding experience was as a undergraduate at Indiana, and that was when Bloomington almost seemed like a big place because you needed a bus to get to and from campus.  Though at 175,000 people, it was almost exactly 10% the population of Budapest, which itself is only about 20% the population of New York City.  But for a good part of my life, I grew up in a town of 13,000 people.  On an icy day in the middle of winter in the middle of morning rush hour in the middle of the week, it still only took me fifteen minutes to drive to school.

Now I walk five minutes (relatively short mind you) to the Gogol utca stop.  On the weekdays, bus 15 stops there almost every ten minutes.  5.8 Kilometers (3.6 miles) and between twenty and forty-five minutes later, I arrive at work:  Nokia.  I’m calling it work because it’s the place where I teach five business English classes and is where I spend most of my teach-work time.

A lot of people have been asking me how it compares to teaching University classes in America or in an American High School.  Though I’ve never taught in an American High School, my mom is a nearly retired High School business teacher and my brother has been teaching 7th and 8th grade History for over a year now.  And with my experiences, and their stories, I’m pretty sure that there are far more classroom differences than similarities.

I teach five intermediate to upper intermediate classes.  In only the first few weeks, I’m pretty sure that I can say that by comparison, American schools are in a bit of trouble, or rather that the education mess that’s been piling up for the last eight years has really done some actual damage to American students.

It’s true that my Hungarian students are relatively young businessmen and women (mid to late 20s), and are success oriented and motivated to learn English for corporate adaptability and career viability.  So in many ways, it’s not fair to compare them to, let’s say, one of my mom’s 16-year-old business students.  But the students here are very active learners.  They are respectful, participate, ask questions, and take notes.  It was really shocking actually to see that everyone was doing exactly what I asked them to do during the first lesson.  Talk to your partner.  Tell me what words are unfamiliar.  Write a short paragraph.  No request was met with a growl or an eye roll.  Even in the 7am class, with the prospect of an entire day of accounting work still ahead of them, everyone was there to learn something and even smiled from time to time.

I’m not sure if it has anything to do with or say about cultural differences.  And countless people espouse the superiority of European teaching systems compared to American, and I certainly can’t speak to that.  But American students can’t afford to be lazy learners, nor accept an isolated one-language existence.  Here, young professionals learn because they have to learn to communicate cross-culturally.  They have to be on conference calls with suppliers in Finland or Tokyo or America, and English is still the language of business.  So even though Americans are still native-English speakers and are still learning English in schools, the aspect of learning to communicate better with someone else is almost altogether deemphasized in favor of darkening the test circles:  which sentences uses the present perfect continuous tense?  It’s no wonder freshman composition instructors in American universities get students who can’t write in complete sentences, or make subjects and verbs agree, nor a wonder that many intermediate to upper intermediate non-native speakers have a better vocabulary than some of those freshman.

I’m a big believer that students want to be listened to, not lectured at.  They want to participate if only what they have to say is valued.  I feel really lucky that I’m classrooms with students who want to be part of a larger conversation.  Who want to learn vocabulary words so that they can say it more clearly for the sake of someone listening.  I think this a core value that has been lost in language arts education in America, and I really hope that in the next few years, teachers will once again be allowed to actively educate, read books, have conversations, so that students will get back to learning—not for taking a test, but for participating more fully in the world.

The Gogol Utca Stop

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Life is more like life in Pest.  In my district there are butchers.  Actual butchers.  Like the kind of butchers there used to be in old Akron who would sell Hungarian sausage at Christmas and Easter.  They have the meats for the day–from boneless skinless chicken breast to cow’s brains, and a very small refrigerated section, mostly with selections of cabbages and pickled cucumbers.  There are countless fruit and vegetable shops, which are about as big as an early 20 hipster’s NYC apartment.  And the Lehel market.  Fruits, meats, farm chicken, fish.  And on the upper level, just about everything you can imagine.  A specialist who can sharpen your knife.  A button guy.  A store devoted entirely for that hard-to-find-shoelace you simply can’t match since losing it in the laundry last month.  It’s just the way things go.

Workers, students, young professionals.  Cafes, antique bookstores, government workers.  People are riding the metro here, getting tickets, buying a new suit.  Someone is buying geraniums.  Life is more like life here.

And because I started five new classes at Nokia this week, and have been under the weather, and have still been moving things in, I haven’t had time for words of any kind, let alone strung together in some little honey-special way.  No poems either.  So instead I’m going to just post some pictures.  Some life is more like life here pictures, so you can see it too.

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Dispatch from District XIII

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Dear Internet,

I’m sorry I haven’t returned any of your calls, but this week I moved flats (from the castle to Pest) and then taught five English classes at Nokia.  Right now I’m borrowing internet so I can’t write much, but as I type this, the sun is setting over the old world brick chimneys across the street, and from my balcony I can see a little evening dazzle on the strip of the Danube right at the curtain of Margit Island and the shadow of the old church there.  I promise to write during the weekend and include a few photos.  Thanks for understanding.

Love,

Jessica

ps:  If you see my mom, please tell her to send my winter coat asap.  I’m freezing.

Budapest Welcomes October

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In any city, it can be easy to get wrapped up in the constant movement, the fast jolts from one place to another, one meeting to the next, etc., until pretty soon your days and weeks look like little dots on the metro line maps.  There’s no perfect cure for it, to slow down I mean.  You just have to try it a little bit at a time.

And it occurred to me today, while reviewing the pictures in my camera for some shots around town—or more specifically the castle district—that a lot of people seem to know how to take it easy.

I think there is a culture here of talking to one another, of slow walks with old friends, of strolling.  And a big part of my Americanness has been both a little in envy and a little resistant of it.  But I’ve found there’s not much pleasure in the no-time-to-stroll attitude.  And in an effort to be less mechanical, I’ve really started enjoying moving in this way.  These pictures were taking in an early Sunday evening.  But it could have been any day and most times here.  Life seems pretty good going at this pace.