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Published: April 19th 2015
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Our house from the outside. Ours is the top floor!Writing this blog has been on my 'to-do' list since week one in Hungary. Writing it has become somewhat of a joke even in my own mind, seeing that I made no progress on it at all. But now that about half of the time here is gone, I realize I better start putting some thoughts down.
We arrived on December 27 after a long but uneventful trip. The most exciting thing that happened was that Tyler got hassled a bit when entering Switzerland (which is where we entered the EU/Schengen region). His return ticket is for July 30 but US citizens can only stay for 3 months. So, he had to explain that he'd be applying for a visa once in Hungary. The kids and I traveled with Hungarian/EU passports, so we had no similar troubles. My younger brother, Marci, waited for us at the airport and took us to the apartment we had rented. I had found the place on the internet and had arranged the rental online. It was already furnished and my Mom gave us some bedding and towels and filled our fridge. All in all, it was a very smooth arrival. We spent the first
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Excited about going out with Iza! (Picture taken in our kitchen.) week or so familiarizing ourselves with the layout or our neighborhood,the transportation and getting a lot of errands done. We saw quite a bit of my family too (Mom and Marci who lives in Switzerland but was home for the holidays).
Our apartment is the third floor of a nice building with a yard. (According to Hungarian customs it's actually counted as the second floor as the first floor is called “ground floor”.) There are two smaller apartments in the basement and the ground and first floors house some sort of small companies. The apartment looked just as nice in real life as it had on the pictures. It has three bedrooms, a living room, kitchen/dining area, two bathrooms (well, one a half) and a small laundry room with a washing machine (with the world's longest cycles!) and an ingenious pulley-system for a hanging clothes dryer that you can hoist to the ceiling. There are also two balconies – one off the master bedroom and the other, larger one is off the kitchen. It is large enough that we can put a table and chairs out there and now that the weather has been nicer, we've had some meals
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Iza is preparing for the occasion much calmer. out there. But I'm getting ahead of myself... The décor of the apartment is very Austro-Hungarian empire. There are two very ornate chandeliers, one in the living room and one in the master bedroom. The one in the bedroom has five female centaurs with fish tails (apparently these creatures of the Greek mythology are called ichthyocentaurs) supporting candles on their heads, arranged in a circle. There are sculptures, porcelains and lace doilies all over. The entry way and dining room/kitchen area is separated by two arches, supported with white columns. It's all quite fancy!
The most unpleasant shock of our arrival was the cold. Objectively speaking, it really wasn't that bad (hovering around freezing for the first couple of months) but I am really not used to extreme temperatures any more! It didn't snow a lot (maybe three times altogether in January/February and it never stuck longer than a day or two) and the coldest it got down to was around 20 F. But I had a very hard time with the temperature, especially going running. I bundled up to a ridiculous extent, wearing two tights, many-many layers on my torso, with my down jacket on top. Most likely
related to cold, and the general stresses of an unfamiliar environment, we have been sick A LOT. It's only now (middle of April!) that all of us have been healthy for about a week. It has been an on-going battle against coughs, colds, mysterious skin ailments (probably related to the cold, dry air), stuffy noses and fevers.
Our apartment is on a large street with several bus lines and a tram that connects us to a couple of really big transportation hubs and metro lines. So, getting downtown and getting around is really easy. We all bought monthly passes (which are not cheap for adults but only cost about $12 for kids with EU student IDs) and we use the public transportation system extensively. Living in a city again is pretty amazing. There are cafes, bookstores, ice cream shops, small clothing stores, butches, bakeries... Definitely a big change from Arcata! It took a while to get into the different rhythm of things. For example, we don't have a car, so grocery shopping is a bit trickier because everything we buy has to be carried home. I am also more inclined to hit several stores these days – there is
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Bedroom, Austro-Hungarian style. an indoor market with really good produce near the kids' school, many-many bakeries and “milk bars” - I have no idea how to translate these but they're shops that sell dairy products and also sell food to eat there (yep, diary products, coffee and sandwiches). I have to say, some of the basics (like bread, baked goods, yoghurt and milk) have been amazing. Hungary also has what are called "cukraszda" that are cafes/cake shops (equivalent of "conditorei" in Austria for those of you who've been there). I have to write about this separately, though because these places deserve a special entry (or at least a part of an entry) on their own.
There are two really big shopping malls nearby too, with glitzy stores, multiplex cinemas and restaurants. We actually spent a lot of time initially at the closer one to our house, in a Starbucks that had a wireless connection. This place was like an umbilical cord to home until we got internet at our house too. These malls don't really deserve that much attention other than how surprised I am still that places like this exist in Hungary. They're like similar malls in the US or Western
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Kitchen - afternoon snack. Europe - but the amazing thing to me about them is that they seem to be from a different universe than the stores of my childhood. Having stores like this would have been unimaginable. There is definitely the appearance of a lot of wealth that is different than when I was growing up. I don't know if it's a sign of progress... because as I'm learning a lot of the glitzy surfaces do remain to be an appearance here that often hide a lot of poverty.
One general observation we made right off the bet (at the malls and otherwise) that people - men and women alike - dress really well. Especially when it was very cold (at least to me!) all I wanted to do was bundle in as many layers as it was humanly possible. But you could see women in high heels, skirts and tights (granted, complete with stylish winter jackets and hats). Women seem very accessorized - hats, scarves, handbags, jewelry. As a rule, I don't like feeling pressured to dress up but it has been a nice change from Arcata. I'm having some fun with it and now that it's warmer I've been wearing
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Living room. skirts and heels too sometimes... I guess I'm adapting! The other big mall is close to the kids' school and as Miska and Iza's days don't end at the same time on several days a week, we'd usually duck in there to escape the cold and kill the hour between picking Iza and Miska up. It is fortunately getting so nice now that it's easy to spend the time outside instead.
I was mainly in charge of running the various errands in the first weeks given my handy language skills. I opened a bank account, got internet, signed the kids up for school, failed (to this day) to get a mailbox key and got Tyler's papers rolling. I'll write a bit more about some of this, but one observation I've had is that by and large, things run a lot smoother here than when I last lived here (in '96). In fact, a lot of times it almost seems like the US or a Western European country – efficient and functional. For example, all through downtown there are electronic signs at the stops showing how many minutes until the next bus, tram, etc arrives. This sign are accurate and
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... and how it normally looks. helpful. But there are definitely some big differences that make things colorfully weird sometimes. One of the big differences is the directness with which people talk to each other. In the US, especial in a customer service situation, you usually don't encounter anything, except excessive politeness. Not so here! My most recent experience with this was yesterday. In many of the grocery stores (although not all... just to keep it interesting) you have to weigh your produce and get a little sticker printed on it with the weight and the price. But there are some items of produce that you buy by the piece (eg a head of lettuce). The place was a zoo and there were a lot of people crowding at the scale, so I hurried with the stickers. The cashier chewed me out because I got the sticker for the wrong sort of peppers and then was going to send me back to produce section (with everyone behind me standing in line) because I thought the cucumber I bought was priced by the piece but, as it turns out, it should have been weighed. I ended up leaving the cucumber behind (with some sadness, I admit) because
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Iza's purple room. I had already been sent back to the store for a teapot (the one I had picked up turned out to be cracked) and felt too rude to keep people behind me waiting.
Another main feature of of dealings in Hungary is that there are no clear rules most of the time. Sure, you are informed about very elaborate, official sounding rules but it often turns out that (1) if you're nice, you can get it done simpler; (2) the rules contain some inherent self-contradiction, so you can't follow them even if you wanted; (3) different people working for the same organization tell you very different, equally plausible and official sounding rules. A nice variation on this theme is that you are given no instructions and fumble around, until somebody informs you that you already should have known that xyz gets done in some certain way (where the way is usually something very complicated that you could have no way anticipated without some instruction that is just woefully missing).
There are a gazillion examples of this. At the pool where I swim (which will be a topic of another blog), you buy different tickets, depending on whether you're
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Laundry room with elaborate clothes dryer system. staying for two hours, half a day or a day. I have a pass that allows me to come for two hours at a time. To go in and to lock a locker, you get a wrist-watch looking thing that probably works magnetically. (As a side note, all pools have a different system of entering and choosing lockers; they usually don't tell you what the local custom is but people working there act like you are an idiot when you wonder around unable to enter/open or lock your locker.) I have now several times exceeded the 2-hr limit (not by a lot – at most by 10 minutes, I think). Nothing has happened, so the 2-hr limit seems flexible although I don't yet just how much... Another example. At the kids school, the entry into the building is locked and there are big signs posted that in order to allow the teachers and children to work, parents should not enter. There is a person working at the door, buzzing kids in and out. But the first week we wanted to accompany the kids to their classrooms and talk to the teachers. We were told that to go in, we needed
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Balcony! a written permission from the principle but, by the end of the sentence, the permission had to come from the head teacher. After a quick explanation that it was the kids' first day, etc, we got buzzed in. (Meanwhile, as we had this conversation, a whole stream of parents was flashing smiles and entering with their kids.) Now, we don't even ask but flash big smiles and enter. (I do this with all, except the over 60 Dragon Lady who seems generally mean and intimidates the hell out of me. With her, I politely wait outside and stare at my shoes.)
I was planning to write more about the kids' school and the saga of the residency papers for Tyler but I think these will have to be topics for another blog.
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