Testépítő

19 11 2008

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Jayne Mansfield couldn’t resist the type.  Afterall she married the Budapest born Clevelander (post WWII flee) and future Mr. Universe, Miklós “Mickey” Hargitay.  And they didn’t do so bad with their youngest kid (Hungarian favorite) Detective Olivia Benson, Mariska Hargitay.  But I just don’t get it.  The beef sticks.  The bodybuilders.  And they are everywhere here.

Okay I’ll won’t try not to generalize, but younger men here definitely seem to fall into three categories.  1:  Yuppie hipster (yupster).  2:  water polo hooligan  3:  beef stick (izompacsirta–muscle lark).   Alright, I know.  Add a few older guys, a few business gentlemen and swimmers and scholars and musicians and cyclists and shop owners and drunks and you have any city in the world.  But the first three categories are quite strong in Budapest.  Or, I should say, more specifically, at my gym.

Unlike some people, I don’t like to run in the snow.  And even though it’s not snowing yet, if you’ve ever run on the bank of Lake Erie just before the snow, you can imagine how cold it gets next to almost freezing water (in this case, the Danube), especially at 6 am.  So we’ve taken to doing a quick run on the treadmill and have found that we are the only women in the joint.  In fact, we’re lucky if we don’t get hit in the head by a meaty shoulder on our way to the treadmills, which are always empty, by the way.

Of course, there are few older ladies with red caps and a few lean swimmers in the lap pool, but in the actual gym, there is no escaping it, wall to wall solarium-colored muscles.  At first I was a little annoyed/intimidated by the whole thing, and visions of opening Hungary’s first Curves was swimming through my head.  But now it’s kind of entertaining.  It’s something kind of fun to watch instead of the six screens of German MTV.  Here’s a clip of what you might see:

So, if none of my other posts have convinced you to come to Budapest for a visit, then you might be like the Jayne Mansfields of the world, envisioning yourself in a leopard bikini on the shoulder of your very own Hungarian Mr. Universe.  If so, you won’t be sad you decided to visit the land of the Magyars.

Budapest Board of Tourism, you’re welcome.


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Walk Budapest Mornings

18 11 2008

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The first surprise is the pine.  You expect the river and the way the sun climbs up Parliament, moving across the chilled water to Buda, to the hills, the gallery, the castle.  But if you take the ninety minute morning walk like I do, and on the round trip cross Parliament from the front, you will be surprised by the amount of pine along the edges where the tourists line up for tours and how now, in mid-November, the berries are bloomed red.

The following pictures show the whole trip as I see it, as it happens.  I didn’t edit out bad from good, but tried to capture what morning looks like in Budapest (at least the 9kms from district XIII across the Lánchid and back home).  The cold blue of the Danube, traffic along the waterway, hurried pedestrians and cyclists, crowded streetcars, small trucks unloading food at small stores, someone watering flowers or sweeping the stairs, statues, dog parks, graffiti, cafés, scattered leaves and trash.

Recently I’ve been afraid that I have been presenting too many rosies and not enough average everyday stuff.  So here it is.  This way, you don’t have to imagine it.

From District XIII across the Lánchid Bridge to Clark Adam ter:

Back home around Parliament through small neighborhood streets:


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Night Train from Szeged

17 11 2008

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Györgyi and I took the night train home from Szeged on Saturday.  Being a suburban American gal, train travel has always held a certain romance for me.  As I recall, the only experience I have had on a train is in the Cuyahoga Valley and then only for a short amount of time.  I may have traveled by train as a child with my family but I can’t recall it.  So for me, trains are in the same fibers of my brain as Agatha Christie murders, old Russian novels, Robert Louis Stevenson poems, and of course, Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children:

They were not railway children to begin with.  I don’t suppose they had ever thought about railways except as means of getting to Maskelyne and Cooke’s, the pantomime, Zoological Gardens, and Madame Tussaud’s.  They were just ordinary suburban children, and they lived with their father and mother in an ordinary red-brick-fronted villa, with coloured glass in the front door, a tiled passage that was called a hall, a bathroom with hot and cold water, electric bells, French windows, and a good deal of white paint, and ‘every modern convenience’, as the house-agents say.

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Szeged to Budapest isn’t exactly trans-Siberia.  The trip only takes about 2.5 hours and the trains leave every hour on the 42.  We were the only two people in first class for almost the entire trip until a mother and her three small children got on in Kecskemét.  The second-class intercity compartments had more travelers, but still, the train was pretty empty.

Even though we were almost alone in first-class, the ticket-guy still walked trough every 30 minutes to announce our next stop.  He was very official and took to walking the aisle and announcing the city as if there were a hundred people in the seats.  I’ve heard that tradition is a point of pride among railmen and I suppose it’s true in this case as well.

The compartment was lit on the inside so it wasn’t possible to see out of the windows.  It was a little haunting, actually, because there was the gentle rumble of the train as it went along the tracks, the passing fields that were half caught in moonlight, almost enough to lull you, and then wooosh another train would careen past the left or right windows without warning—all thunder and iron and lights.

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The end of the line in Budapest is the western line, the nyugati pályaudvar.  Even though the station is 130 years old (build by the Eiffel company), it is still clear the difference between the cities.  When you step off the train in Budapest, there are hundreds of people, sellers hawking goods outside, young hipsters on their way to clubs, the underground jammed with everyone from cinema goers at the Westend City Center to a man with a guitar playing almost passable old Cat Stevens songs.

I was trying to figure out if Budapest was a place that one  would either love or hate, but it’s impossible to be so dichotomous.  The country changes with each kilometer, the city with each block.  As does the weather and the people and each activity and outlook.  And in a country that has been occupied, invaded and divided up since the 9th century, I’ve just now realized that change is the constant here.  And if you’re up for it, there’s something really wonderful in it.  I won’t call it an adventure, because it’s a real, honest life.  But there is a nice spirit to the not knowing.  It can be a comfort.


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McMagyar

12 11 2008

So while most companies around the world have stepped on the economic landmine, it seems like McDonalds is still going strong.   What does this have to do with Hungary, you may ask?  Well, I think I know why the sales rose 10% in October:

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Yes.  McMagyar.  The newest kitsch to come to the city on the Duna.  One of the promotions to celebrate the 20th anniversary of meki coming to Hungary was to create this little McMagyar menu, which included a small lángos and a paprikás chicken sandwich.

We tried the kislángos, which I described here as a favorite of market shoppers.  It’s a piece of fried dough which is usually topped with a creamed garlic sauce and white cheese.  As much as I wanted McDonalds to screw it up and therefore hate it, I have to admit it was actually pretty good.  Though part of the excuse of ordering a lángos at all is that it’s a piece of the ambiance of the central market, a once-in-a-while-I-swear kind of foods.  I suppose if they become usual drive through fare at the Hungarian McDonalds, it will just seem, sadly, American.


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Kerepesi Úti Temető

11 11 2008

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I have been a terrible blogger as of late, but have a good excuse of being quite ill and just now ready to get back to thinking and clearing and typing and posting.  So, I have a substantial back pile of pictures and trips and stories to post here.

The first takes a few steps back to All Saints Day.  ASD is a much more celebrated holiday here in Hungary than in the US where it seems to be designated to small pockets of practicing Catholics and those Saint cards propped up on the lace tablecloths of grandma living rooms all over the country.  But here they take it quite seriously.  Most of the shops were closed all day, including many of the stalls in the market.  In fact, there was only one bread baker opened in the morning and it cause quite a panic in the line of about a hundred people hoping for one of the last fresh loaves.  As I’ve mentioned many times, people take their bread very seriously here.

As is the custom, people make the pilgrimage to cemeteries to lay flowers, wreathes, and light candles.  The following pictures are from the Kerepesi úti temető (Kerepesi Cemetary).  Opened in 1847, it is the national cemetery and houses some of the most beautiful and ornate mausoleums in the country (and in Europe, actually).  Even though it’s quite famous, it’s not as loud and crowded as some of the other notable European cemeteries, such as in Paris, for example.

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As with all national cemeteries, notable, famous and infamous people are buried there:  artists, statesmen, actors, composers, writers, etc.  Poets such as Attila József, János Arany, and Mihály Babits.  The great physicist Loránd Eötvös, who discovered the gravitational gradient of Earth’s surface, and other scientists like George de Hevesy (who won the Nobel prize in Chemistry) are also buried among the groves.  As is Imre Nagy, and Ferenc Erkel, the father of the Hungarian grand opera.  I could get into the Communist political stuff associated with the cemetery, but for some reason it feels distasteful to me right now.  Maybe another time.

The only woman I found on the list of the “famous” dead is Lujza Blaha, an actress and “the nightingale of the nation.”

This is a trend.  And please note that if you are a translator or writer with a knack for languages and are interested in Hungarian (and a PhD or book), there is an absolute vacancy of recognized and translated Hungarian women writers.  Even in the standby collections of national Hungarian poets, there are only a handful of women writers included.  And while I can think of a lot of significant, important, central and eastern European women writers (my favorite of course being Wisława Szymborska), there really isn’t any visibility of Hungarian women writers, even among Hungarian nationals.  So Hungarian feminist literary movement—here we come.

Now, back to the bone yard:


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in the spirit of change

2 11 2008

I’ve been working on some corporate policy contracts and have been utterly devestated by how America just kicks and kicks hard working people down.  But this isn’t supposed to be a bad-news post.  Instead, it can perhaps bring some hope for the turning tide on Tuesday and beyond.  And in the spirit of liberal, Democratic women getting the vote out and in for Obama, here is a little snipit of the Hungarian labor law regarding maternity leave:

Section 138

(1) Women in the pregnancy period or giving birth shall be entitled to twenty-four weeks of paid maternity leave.

(5) The employee shall be entitled to a leave of absence
a) in order to care for the child until the child reaches the age of three;
b) in order to care for the child until the child reaches the age of fourteen, if the employee receives a child-care allowance;
c) in order – in the event of the child’s illness – to provide home care until the child reaches the age of twelve.

(6) During the first six months of nursing, a woman shall be entitled to two hours of worktime allowance each day, and one hour daily thereafter up to the end of the ninth month. In respect of multiple births, the worktime allowance for nursing shall be commensurate with the number of children.

I mean seriously, can you imagine your average American factory worker or Wal-Mart cashier going to the line boss and saying, excuse me, but I need my two hours to nurse and care for my child?  Yeah right.  And it’s a shame.

So here’s to hope.  And the next 36 hours that could save America.


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