Monthly Archives: January 2009

City of Steel, City of Sun

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In a few hours I’m leaving to go to Szeged for a long weekend.  The weather has been kind of crummy here.  Four or five degrees Celsius, which granted is about 40F and a lot better than the freezing mountains of snow in NE Ohio, but it’s been raining here, and the cloudy and gray skies always bring up the old February demons no matter where you are in the world.

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So it’s no better time than now to pack up the Hungarian Monopoly Board and a bottle or three of Balaton white and head to Szeged, the city of sunshine, for the weekend.  Györgyi played her first game of monopoly with me last week and  lost all of her forints when I quickly bought up the railroads and then proceeded to put hotels on the rest of my properties.  Though I did go to jail an astonishing nine times.

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I hope that the weather will break just a little this weekend so that I can sit on the bank of the Tisza and enjoy a good start to February, the second cruelest month.  And of course, like any good daughter who was dressed head to two in yellow and black when I was a baby, meditate with visions of the terrible towel and a historic victory for steel city.

Bécs. Wein. Vienna.

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Yesterday I went to Vienna, Austria for the day.  It was beautiful outside, warm and sunny, and so we decided to make the quick, two-hour drive.  Wien or Bécs, as it’s called in Hungary, has almost exactly the same population as Budapest, though when I was there, it really seemed bigger.  Budapest is the 9th most populous city in the EU and Vienna is the 10th.  First being London, of course, and for reference, fifth being Paris.   Though it was ranked as having the 2nd highest quality of life, compared to Budapest which was ranked 74th, just under Rome.  And Cleveland.  But I’ll get back to that.

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It was a beautiful city.  Anyone that visits Vienna will tell you the same thing, and it’s obvious from almost every turn that it was a center of culture, arts, and politics.  Our first stop was at the Hundertwasserhaus designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

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I’m not sure exactly how to describe it, from an architectural standpoint, which I guess is the point.  I’ve never been good with architectural critique-as-art, though I found the place to be very charming.

The sun was so pleasant that even though we weren’t in the center of town, we walked around, dim-eyelids and all, just enjoying the weather.  We got a real kick out of the very severe and specific German-spirited street signs.

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And thoroughly enjoyed the sun on the path along the river.

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We finally made our way to the city center, or rather the main shopping district.  Though the other districts were quiet, the shopping district, like all European cities of this size and stature, was buzzing with people.

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Granted it was one of the warmer days of the winter, and the sun was all blush, I was still a little surprised by how many people were walking around.

We stopped in a few stores to look for trinkets.  Like in Budapest, there is a real market for Sisi items.  Sissy or Elisabeth, Queen of Hungary and Empress of Austria, is an absolute icon.  Though she had a minimal impact on political life, there are more books, plays, films, and musicals about Sisi than probably any other ruler of the region.  Though she is said to have adored Hungary more, requiring her staff to speak only Hungarian and escaping to her Hungarian palaces whenever she had the chance, she is obviously well adored in Austria as well despite the fact that her strong personality didn’t mesh well with the strict Habsburgs.

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After doing some gift shopping and buying some Austrian chocolates, we toured around the magnificent St. Stephen’s Cathedral.  The light was very thin there, and as the afternoon was setting, it was almost hard to see inside the church.  I didn’t want to take too many pictures because despite the hoards of people looking around, there were quite a few people sitting in the pews, kneeling in prayer to various saints.

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Outside of the church, horse carriages lined up to take people around the city.  The sun was setting and we were getting hungry so we swung by one of the street vendors and had a bratwurst with mustard and, of course, a fine Austrian beer.

All in all, it was a beautiful trip.  My final impressions, though by no means objective or well informed since I was only there for a day, are that the city is really a beautiful city.  But more than that, it’s opulent, almost overly opulent.  It looks like it has been the seat of an empire, that there has been culture, arts, and of course money, for centuries.

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I was constantly trying to compare it to Budapest, but in many ways it’s an unfair comparison.  One of the main reason is because the Russians didn’t roll in and destroy much of what makes Vienna opulent, as they did in Budapest.  But in many ways this is a digression too.  Compared to Vienna, Budapest, and a city like Prague, look more Eastern European, more severe, that’s for sure.  And I had this fact in my mind just before we pulled back into Budapest, and were driving along the river, with Parliament to my right.  While Vienna’s opulence and extravagance and beauty give it its character, I think that Budapest’s severity gives it its character.  Budapest’s orate Parliament and magnificent bridges are not found in Vienna, though Vienna has extravagantly beautiful museums and palaces.  With these differences, you can see how both cities could be part of one remarkable empire, both complement to each other.  And since the cities are only two hours apart, you can, like Sisi, let your preferences write what feels more like home to you.  It’s another charm of Europe, getting the chance to be a traveler in this way, and as usual, I count myself lucky.  And as for quality of life, well the companies who do the studies certainly believe them to be objective, but I don’t feel comfortable with the word quality.  We all love what we love.

A változás napja. A remény napja.

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Like just about everyone else in the world, I’ve been watching the inauguration all day.  Here in Europe, millions of people tuned in during the workday, and just after, for the oath and beyond.  And now, at midnight here in Budapest, I am feeling encouraged, inspired, and more proud than ever before to be an American.

photo courtesy of Huffington Post slideshow

El Greco in Heros’ Square

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On Sunday we decided to pop into the Museum of Fine Arts Szépművészeti Múzeum, which is located in Heroes’ Square.  It’s a beautiful, neoclassical building, built between 1900 and 1906.  We were there to see In the Wake of Jesus, which featured works of El Greco and other Spanish and Italian masters such as Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Bossano, who influenced El Greco during his study in Italy.  The exhibition’s centerpiece was El Greco’s Saint John the Evangelist, which was borrowed from the Prado in Madrid.

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The tickets for the museum were 1,600 HUF, which is about $7.50, though it’s half that if you’re under 26 years old.  The price is worth it.  Before heading into the El Greco exhibit, we poked around the Egyptian collection and the museum’s permanent collection.

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In the Wake of Jesus was very well put together.  The lighting, which is so crucial and oftentimes overlooked in featured exhibits, was perfectly cast to emphasize El Greco’s magnificent colors and composition.   I had to say that I really enjoyed the museum and the rest of the leisurely afternoon.

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On our way out of the museum, we stopped across the street to look at the ducks swimming in the thermal waters. It’s easy when you live in city with so much history and culture that you can fall so far outside of the tourist mindset that you sometimes forget how many amazing things are around you.  I’m always reminded each time I cross the Lánchíd or pass Heros’ Square on the way out of town, but it’s not bad to be a visitor in your own city once in awhile.

This last picture is for my brother, who has a kind of Hitchcockian fear of birds.  We have a room with a view booked for you Brian—whenever you come to visit:

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Winter in the Great Plain

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On Saturday we went to Szeged to collect rent from tenants and meet a few people.  Since I spent the whole week working on the non-fiction manuscript, I was more than happy to enjoy the wintry car ride there and a leisurely day.  The weather was perplexing and inspiring.  Enough fog rested above the fields to cover up the sun, though when the sun dig pierce through, the trees and wheat looked almost dreamlike.

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From my general research from the book, here are a few interesting tidbits about Szeged, which I haven’t really gone into depth about, but which I feel like is my second home here in Hungary, and an absolutely necessary daytrip to any visitors to Budapest.

Szeged is located in the Great Plains, which is in the southeastern region of Hungary and makes up almost half of the country.  Though the winters are dominated by frigidity, the summers are gloriously warm and dry with a seemingly unending supply of sunshine.  It’s because of its landscape and beautiful summers that the region has been the countries’ main source of grains, vegetables and fruits for centuries.  Though like most regions in Hungary, it’s not without it’s battle wounds.

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The earliest Magyar’s set up farmsteads along the Tisza River during a time when the land was still heavily forested.  In the early sixteenth-century, the Turks began their invasion, occupation and destruction of many of Hungary’s resources.  Unfortunately, the Great Plains region of the country suffered greatly.  In a little over 150 years, the Turks razed much of the forested land and destroyed a majority of the farmsteads.  All but a few inhabitants fled for outlying cities, including Szeged and Budapest for refuge. One group that resisted the Turks quite successfully was the Csikós horsemen, whose lineage dates back centuries and is military in nature.  They are known for their great horsemanship.  For example, one such skill is the ability to ride five horses simultaneously, perhaps deriving from the necessity to bring back the horses of the dead after battle.  The Csikós still exist today, though mostly for the benefit of tourists.  The word puszta in the Puszta Hortobágy National Park literally means barren, and though it’s now a reference to the flat or empty landscape of the Great Plains, it’s poetic connotation is with the barren emptiness that remained after the land was razed by the Turkish invaders.

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Though a habitual cause of devastation, the region’s rivers, especially the Tisza, have flooded throughout the centuries.  In the nineteen century, however, the monumental floods were actually a turn of good fortune, for lack of better term, as the plains were able to replenish, grasses rise again, followed by the return of farmers, herdsman, and the long culinary Magyar tradition associated with the region.

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One of the unluckiest places to weather the nineteenth-century floods, however, specifically the great flood of 1879, was Szeged.  The flood in the spring of that year was an utter catastrophe, nearly destroying the entire city of Szeged, killing around 160 people and washing away six thousand homes.  But the city was used to pulling itself back from devastation.  Having been sacked by both the Tartars and the Turks and having been under the thumb of Austria in the seventeenth century, the city and its inhabitants knew how to turn the tides around, especially when the opportunity presented itself.  After the waters receded, dikes were built along the river and the city was re-planned with revitalist ideals.  Beautiful squares and boulevards flanked by an array of architectural styles, churches, universities, and cafes where young poets and students sowed the seeds of revolution during the communist era can still be visited today.

Morning

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Even though it is bitterly cold here (hopefully Russia will let us have some more gas for heating soon), the early morning is absolutely my favorite time of the day.  I wake up when it is still dark, though by the time I walk or run around the first few blocks, a little light is sneaking through the sidestreets.  Not the sun, yet, but definitely day.

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A few minutes later, the sunlight announces itself in the windowsills.  In the 13th district, people hurry their kids to school, are walking to work, waiting for the tram, buying bread, sweeping front stoops.  Though within the beginning work of the day, it is still very peaceful, the color calming.

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By the time I arrive home, and step out on the balcony for a cup of coffee and a quick glance at the Danube, the morning has fully arrived on the old apartment building across the street. These are thing things that make winter worth waking up for.  It’s that little something that walking you through the cold.

Györgyi thinks these buildings are ugly and is worried about what people will think about Hungary because of them.  And I understand because most people I run into in America conjure up images of Hungary as a place where people wear folk outfits to work and ride donkeys on the weekends for fun, where old alcoholic communists live in big blocks of flats and smoke cartons of cigarettes a day in the freezing, rainy, gloomy, streets.  But ugly is definitely a relative term, though I never really thought about this blog as a reperesentation of Hungary as a whole, but rather moments of a day.  And from only my experience.  I don’t really have an opinion about what’s certifiably beautiful or certifiably ugly here.  True, in some of the old buildings, the outer layer has chipped away.  In the Castle District they glue a plaque next to it, write a date on it, to show just how many layers/years have passed as a kind of proof of the lovliness of history.  In parts of the city, like in Pest, or in our 13th District, a plaque would be a little condescending, I suppose, especially for the non-tourists that live in the houses, perhaps have, for generations.  Our building was once a cotton factory, afterall, and I like to imagine what the walls looked like before they rebuilt them, put in gallery windows and a pool.

Maybe writers have an annoying quality to romanticize things that can’t or shouldn’t be made better with words, or maybe because of my experience as a kid growing up in a decidedly unattractive but likewise charming industrial city like Akron, Ohio, I have a different perspective now.  But I would be remiss not to acknowledge that the perspective is mine alone, and this city is certainly not mine to make claims on.  But I find the clean, cool, albeit old pathways charming.  The light soothing.  And I’m glad to hang my hat here awhile.

It Came Through Shops, Rooms, Temples,

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We spent the New Year in Dublin with my mom, dad and brother.  I’ve never been to Ireland, though I imagined it to be a place of sweeping green.  And it was.  Even in the overcast (though not unbearably cold) afternoons, the green at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Trinity College were even more pronounced.

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We stayed in the absolutely beautiful Shelbourne Hotel and in four days, squeezed in the tourist musts:  City bus tour, the Guinness Storehouse and a delicious pint at the gravity bar.  We skipped the tour at the Jameson distillery but didn’t skip the bar.  We had an amazing traditional Irish meal in Temple Bar, strolled through the rooms at the National Gallery, shopped along Grafton St., took a fabulous literary pub crawl along the Duke, O’Neil’s, the Stand, and Davy Byrnes and we felt in the company of the great bards and in the shadow of Mr. Bloom as the actors recited Joyce, Yeats, Beckett and Behan.  We drank fantastic beer and whiskey, enjoyed traditional pub food, toasted in the New Year at the Shelbourne, and on the last night, stuffed my brother with enough food from the carvery to keep him satisfied until he returns.

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Overall, it was a really beautiful trip.  I hope that I can visit Ireland again in the summer when everything is in bloom.  But it was great to see my family again and stockpile enough literary inspiration to come back to the buda and the pen & page.  Happy New Year, Internet!

THE GIFT

It came slowly

Afraid of insufficient self-content,

Or some inherent weakness in itself,

Small and hesitant,

Like children at the top of stairs,

It came through shops, rooms, temples

Streets, places that were badly-lit,

It was a gift that took me unawares

And I accepted it.

– Brendan Kennelly