Pestilog

And Everything After...

2007-07-18T18:32:00.000+02:00

Hello blog.
I am finally back in Chicago. I am living in the Urkainian Village in an apartment with Sean, ever my house-mate-soul-mate of extreme hyphenation. Its good. Its a great place, a great neighborhood. It's kind of nice to be back.

But more about the now, later.

I spent the last month in Belarus, as the previous post implies, as well as road-tripping through the West Balkans, from the northern part of Croatia, down into Montenegro, and through Bosnia and Hercegovina. There are almost too many stories to tell, but many of them are being put together in film, so I will be posting those bit by bit. For the mean time, you can look at some photosets that highlight Belarus here:

and from the West Balkans trip here:

Just click on the photos and it will take you to the flickr pages for them.

More coming on grand adventures later...

Belarus

2007-06-22T19:15:00.000+02:00

So, we've made it to Belarus. We saw mummified saints in Kiev, and ate borshch made by Sasha's babushka, and have nearly been arrested like 5 times for taking pictures of Lenin. I dont even know.

But its been a good, weird adventure, full of the unexpected.

part of the unexpected is the internet here. Allow me to explain:

How to control information 101:
--deny home internet access to average citizens who can not justify the expense as related to non-state-threatening business.
--avoid scandal by providing high-speed internet access in local communities at state-run internet barns, where citizens can pay a pitance for hours of online time.
--Provide no more than 6 computers for every 10,000 citizens, so that people have to wait in line for hours to check e mail.

and the rest is cake.

So, anyway, we are taking lots of pictures, and lots more video. We've had (deliberate) photo opportunities with the local police cadets, seen Lee Harvey Oswald's old house in Minsk, and are gettign ready to go out to the country for a solstice celebration that apparently involves getting naked, jumping through hoops of fire, and searching for a secret, magic flower in the woods that binds you in a marriage pact with....someone. I'm not sure who, but it's all magical and stuff.

I get back to Budapest in about a week. I'll be able to post more when I get back to good old dysfyunctional attempts at democracy. So, till then. Па-па!

Graduation Photos

2007-06-16T19:32:00.000+02:00

Im too tired and lazy to be blogging for real these days, so this is what you get.

Robing up in the monument building. Stephen says our department's hoods made us look like nuns.

Ola (poland) and Florin (romania), sociology&anthropology.

Marko (croatia, political science). poli sci got cool blue hoods. I might be jealous.

Judit (hungary) and her daughter Sonja. Judit didnt come to the graduation with us, but i did learn that her daughter recently named her doll "Jennifer". Which is way awesome.

Stefan (bulgaria). Sociology&Anthropology. This guy definitely has the best laugh of the whole department.

Brigette (Texas) and Luci (Romania). Sociology&Anthropology

Drago (Croatia) does his best imitation of the Ghost of George Soros

Drago. Sociology&Anthropology

Stephen (Ohio, Political Science) looks way too sharp. I can't handle it.

Man. Those shades were awesome. And I still had the laurels.

Aungo (Kenya. Sociology&Anthropology). He hates these pictures that I take of him, but I love them.

Agi (hungary), Brigette, and Ola. And Artyom (Russia) off in the background.

Aungo, Colin (who is NOT british) and Brigette.

Cera (Romania), Ola, and Brigette. Sociology and anthropology.

Ballav (Pakistan) and Aungo. Sociology and anthropology.

Aungo and me.

Ola and Asa (Israel). Sociology and anthropology.

This is ALMOST all of us. We were missing Gergő and Judit (hungary), Mariya (Bulgaria), Damir (Croatia), Austin (Nigeria), and a handful of professors. Everyone had a rough morning because defenses ended just the day before. I had never seen some of us so hung over. goodness.

And so we stagger into the future!

Group Pics from Rackeve

2007-06-08T18:41:00.000+02:00

These are some of the shots that colin took on the dock, mere moments before that storm swirling behind us sent us sprinting for cover and took out a few nearby trees!

Rackeve=A Day in the Sociological Life

2007-06-07T13:47:00.000+02:00

oh man, half of the department went to rackeve today, a village on the south island and hour outside of budapest, and swam in the danube, diving off of docks in the water, in between cat tails, then saw a thunderstorm start on the other side of the river, and watched lightning from the grass, then took a bunch of group pictures in front of the crazy sky, then ran for it as the temperature dropped like 5 deg celcius in an instant and the rain and wind started, and as we were dashing out of the way, the wind blew down one of the 30' tall trees that we had just been sitting under! and we hauled ass through the rain and took cover in the hotel that was immediately across the street that used to be a castle! and we had beer and hot chocolate in the cellar of the giant castle and had free coffee from a physics conference that was 5n the castle, and the walked all around this city and saw a serbian orthodox church compound that was breathtaking with golden steeples and wells and dogs and tombstones, and we ate cherries off of the trees in the street and then bought bags of them off of two kids who were picking them out of their yard who had this hilarious dog named cameron. thats not even the half if it, and it was awesome and we slept the whole way home. oh man. today was good.

well, friday was yesterday....

2007-06-03T03:01:00.000+02:00

or given that its now 3am, maybe friday was 2 days ago.
i have just had the most hellish 36 hours with my lit review. I had to add no less than 5 (5!) new major theoretical threads to it. apparently i was spending no where near enough time problematizing human agency nor situating the subject within the post-socialist historicity of individualized risk.

and all this time, i thought i was writing a paper on junkies.

the deadline is, now, in 34 hours. Tomorrow will suck, but on monday, i get to hand that shit in, go eat cake with brigette, and spend the evening dancing underground to gypsy punk with my whole department to celebrate brigettes birthday. whoo. i am looking forward to that more than i am finishing this thesis, and i think thats a good sign.

oh, and here's a good illustration of how things are run at my school: during the 3 days in which the sociology students are defending, the building that houses my department is going to have the electricity shut off. we are going to have our orals in the dark. wtf?
and there it is...

The Goings On

2007-05-28T13:14:00.000+02:00

So, I have not been blogging because I have been, instead of living life and seeing the sun, writing my thesis and developing the most incredible ass-groove in a chair at Siraly, where Brigette, Stephen, Luc and I have permanently set up residence to kick this pig.

But here are a few small points of note to tide you over until I get my wee little life back

*Artyom used the word "harlot" in his thesis. There is no end to the hilarity that I find in this
*We bought our visas for Belarus. $125. wtf? We should be able to pick them up from the embassy tomorrow. Lord. I'm excited, but I plan on coming back friggin fluent. I won't have just gone to Belarus, I will have DONE Belarus.
*My camera got jacked by some sketchy Hungarian-Transylvanian dude who ended up at my house and made out with some chick on my couch after smoking in Monica's bedroom. Screw that guy. Screw that guy right in the ear. But, this means that I am on the market for a new one. I think I'm going to go for digital video
*Barring any impediments to the previous goal, Stephen, Brigette, Sasha, Marko and I are going to collaborate on "Belarus: The Movie"
*After Belarus, we are going to Croatia to mooch off of Marko's family and sleep in forests. While we are there, it will be Croatian Independance Day (Hooray! We're all still catholic! woo!). On independence day, it is meet for one to eat bear. With berries. Berry bear. Again, wtf?
*My thesis deadline is Monday, but I'm hoping to have it in by Friday. We'll see how it goes.

Two of My Favoritest Smart People

2007-05-07T20:28:00.000+02:00

First of all, Kasia is totally hilarious. Check this out.

Second, I had a very interesting afternoon today. It was the first day back to reality for my department. The rest of the school has been suffering through their own assortment s of deadlines and draft submissions and what not. The Soc/Anth kids, on the other hand, were released like the hounds to scramble all over the globe for our field work during the month of April, and had our first departmental meeting for thesis writing today, and all 21 of us were crammed back in that corner room on the 4th floor of the Zrinyi building again for the first time since March. After being away in Ukraine for nearly a month, the discomfort of it all felt reassuringly familiar.

Today was also a special day, because Bruno Latour was a guest of the sociology department this weekend, and he presented a lecture on truth and objectivity in politics in the Monument Building this evening. I have been looking forward to his visit for months, since I have always admired his theoretical works, I have read and been totally confused by his writings since I began studying anthropology in college, and he's a crazy famous big shot.

He talked for a long time about creating sociology as an objective science, on that is bound by the thing that it studies. He said, that even if you are a shitty chemist, it is hard to write poor quality work, because you are so bound by your materials. If you mess up, your lab could explode. Whereas, you could talk circles of crap around cultural ideas. You could BS your way through entire books, and there may be few people to actually call you on it. Thought provoking sentiment--and terribly interesting considering that a large portion of this guys theoretical work has concerned the scientific production of knowledge. People cant BS about laboratory conditions? Its been a few years since I had my safety goggles on and my pipet in hand, but goodness, if there's anything that the natural sciences AREN'T, its exact and natural.

New Toy

2007-05-02T11:10:00.000+02:00

I got myself a new cellphone for my birthday. Its great. Its quad band, unlocked, and works everywhere, even here in Ukraine. (my old phone was a locked t-mobile phone - i never was able to get the code they gave me to unlock it to work right, and so once i left the t-mobile network in Hungary, i wasnt able to roam. at all.)

I got a red Motorola PEBL, and its a really sexy phone. I am already in love with it.

I bought it while I was here in Odessa because, just like the phones that you buy in Hungary have Hungarian programmed onto them (omg, have you ever tried to text with T9 in a language that has 4 different variations on the letter O? sweet mother of god...), the phones here operate in Russian and Ukrainian. And the other standards, like English, French, Spanish, and German. But the cool thing is that it supports these other alphabets, so I can send and receive text messages in which ever one I want. Plus the face plate looks like this, with both sets of characters on it, which makes me feel super cool:

Ok, actually, thats a picture of a Razr, but you get the point. My camera is all packed up and I'm not going to start digging for stuff now. I have a train to the Ukrainian border in about 4.5 hours. So long Odessa.

Beaches and Photosets

2007-04-29T18:52:00.000+02:00

I walked down to the Arkadia Beach today. Its about an 8km walk from my hostel, through Shevchenko Park and down the beach trails to get there. It was a really lovely day. It kept cycling through warm sunny moments, and cool, breezy, grey and overcast moments. The weather hasn't yet decided if its spring or summer.

I took a few pics today, and finally uploaded a choice few to a new photo set on Flickr for this trip. Click on the picture below to see it.

Odessa Cemetery

2007-04-29T01:33:00.000+02:00

I went to the central cemetery today, which was a trip to say the least. Since going to the Budapest cemetery with Luc and Kate on All Souls Day last October, hunting down the mammoth memorials of Budapest's famous faces, I have been fascinated by them. In Europe, cemeteries are generally buzzing places full of people, green with ivy and thick with flowers. The headstones are often huge sculptures and gothic arches that add to the eerie beauty of the whole place.

This cemetery was the craziest I have ever been too. Giant packs of dogs live there, and were running around in packs all over the place. And the stones are practically on top of each other. The place is thick and green and overgrown. Its startling.

They also play orthodox hymns on loudspeakers outside this massive church in the center. Ultra-spooky.

Folks also deck out all the graves in bright bundles of flowers, real and otherwise. Like on these niches.

And check out these guys:

Stephen linked me an article on EnglishRussia.com of Russian Mafia headstones that was really fascinating. Life-sized portraits of people holding cigarettes next to cadillacs. It was great. So, I took some of these pictures for Stephen, cause I know he needs something to do at 3 in the morning...

Ok, that last one is particularly creepy. If I had a child die, I dont know that I would want his or her larger than life mug staring at me like the Gerber baby for the rest of my life. Call me heartless, but I'm just not ok with it.

And I think this guy might have been married to a boat, or maybe his martini:

Do I Have "Sexpot" Written Across My Forehead, Or What?

2007-04-26T22:10:00.000+02:00

Today was the weirdest day ever. Honestly. It's only 11pm here and I'm ready to just go to bed and be done with it.

For starters, I slept in. I slept in a lot. Till like 11:30. And then I had a really slow morning, which was nice, cause I was exhausted from this whole trip (still kinda am) and I went out last night AND there was a 7pm women's meeting at the community center that I wanted to attend. So, no waking up early for me. This was kind of exciting for me also because the last few days in the center have been BORING. I usually get there at about 9 or 930 and stay till 230 or 3. At that point, most of the action is over. The action doesnt actually start till about 12 either, so the first few hours that I am there are good for the occasional interview if a staff member happens to be passing through, but are often really slow. I have started bringing articles with me to read during the long down times. Well, apparently this morning, the morning that I was delighted to sleep through, was a doozie. The first busy day at the clinic, and I slept through it. Apparently, people were even running out of materials charts and intake forms. THAT'S how busy it was. And then after I got there, total jack went down for hours. I even started screwing around on the computer because there was nothing to do and no one to talk to. And then this blasted women's meeting, which I recently heard someone describe to the rep of a very prominent US benefactor of this organization as "pratically a movement," never happened, cause no one showed up. I asked Marina about the meeting yesterday, and she said that it's popular, but the attendance fluxuates a lot. "Like a storm," she said, laughing. Funny. Really.

Ok, then the weirder stuff. Near the end of the day, Elena, a staff member who has hardly said a word to me since I got here, came up to me and handed me an e mail address that she had written on a scrap of paper. "Here" she said, "This is from Dima, he wanted me to give it to you." I said thanks, then looked closer at the address and realized that I had no idea who she was talking about. I went back over to her office and said, "I'm sorry, who is this?" She looked at me as though I had just asked where the front door was. "Dima!" she said, "You were talking to him the other day and he asked me to give you his address!" Like...Duh!

I have no idea who Dima is.

After I gave up on the women's group, I went out for a beer with Andrei. Andrei is interesting. Allegedly, he works for this organization. In reality, he spends a significant portion of the day on translate.ru looking for the words to describe to me his particular affinity to philosophies of black magic and voodoo studies and his current course of training, or playing roll-playing games on the computer that involve fantasy lands with dwarves wielding large axes. You'd never guess, looking at the guy. He looks like a totally normal, boring 40-something dude with cable sweaters and a degree in engineering. Anyway, he had been inviting me for a beer for a few days, so I finally took him up on it this evening. His son was there too. He was excited or me to meet his son because he traveled a lot with his dad when he was young, and speaks many languages, and he wants his son to meet worldly people and learn new languages too--like english for example.

His son is 6. When we met, the kid pulled a lighter out of his pocket and starts playing with it. I immediately have flash backs to when I was 4 and found a lighter and was very clearly instructed by my mother that these were not for people under the age of 30 to touch or play with. I recall even thinking that people who carried them were somehow bad people until I was about ten. Andrei is not ruffled by this at all, and, in fact, pays no attention as his son starts pulling cigarette butts out of the coffee can used as an ashtray by the front stairs of the center and lights the little paper bits left at the end of the filter on fire. Then goes over to the telephone pole, rips down some ads, comes back, and lights those on fire, then steals his dad's empty cigarette pack, pulls out all the foil paper, and tries repeatedly to light that on fire. Oh my lord. My sensibilities were so offended. But, the kid was also filthy--brown sticky hands, dirty clothes, brown face--which told me that his dad lets him play and lets him play hard, which I have to admit I have a lot of respect for. I don't know what I did, but I was somehow deemed acceptable by the kid, because as soon as the three of us walked out towards a cafe to get a drink, his grubby little mitt shot into mine and clung on for the rest of the trip. With his other free, smelly, soot covered little hand, he kept feeding me cola jellies out of his jacket pocket. It was cool. We were pals.

Then, at the bar, we order a couple of beers, and the kid is totally swigging his dad's beer. He apparently drinks vodka too. I can't imagine a kid that young even tolerating the taste of beer, but this one is way ahead of the curve apparently. But then it gets even weirder, because we start talking about languages and school and travel (frequent topics of conversation when the only common vocabulary you have with someone in any of the languages you share are of the second year "Hola, me llamo Paco. Voy a la biblioteca. Me gusta mucho comer manzanas," variety). But then after a bit, the conversation veers towards how awful Andrei's wife is, how she lives with her brother and doesn't care for the kid, and how Andrei has been telling his kid about me at home, and how the boy allegedly goes "Oh papa! An American girl? A wife for you and a mom for me!"

Holy Jebus. I'm, like, so gone. Now.

So, I tell him I need to split and head home. We pay the tab, walk out, and it turns out that he and his kid live like 3 blocks away from me, so they walk the whole 20 min back with me. Awkward. But, on the way home, Andrei tells me another funny story. It appears that a SECOND person made an attempt to show up on my doorstep professing love. The first is not Andrei. The first, if you havn't heard the story, was this dude who's name I don't even remember, from our tour group to the catacombs last week. We had a nice conversation (first pleasant, easy conversation I have had in Ukrainian since I got here, actually) all the way back from the village that we drove to that day, and then the guides and the group parted ways at the hostel and he lingered all awkwardly by the door and then finally left. Monday night, he shows up at the hostel, totally unannounced, dressed up, hair slicked back, trying to talk me into going out to dinner with him. And he's so nervous that he's talking fast and I can't understand a word he's saying. Too bad. He was kind of cute. But I had been wandering the streets of the city with the mobile exchange all day so I was tired and filthy, had already eaten, needed a shower badly, and didn't have the energy to deal with any more foreign languages at the moment, so that whole well intentioned endeavor failed (women, you know? sheesh). Well, apparently this ALMOST happened again, because on tuesday, I met a client named Vova. Vova asked me where I was staying in Odessa. I said that I was staying at the Black Sea Hostel, which is true. Now, not only is this a very very new place, so few people, except maybe the really really active local hospitality club members, will have heard of it, but hostels are sort of a new phenomenon in Ukraine as well. The word "hostel" doesn't really translate. I have to explain to most people here what it is, and they are often still confused afterwards. There is a huge three-star hotel in the city center called the Black Sea Hotel, so when I tell people where I am living, they usually hear me say 'hotel' instead of 'hostel' and think I am staying there. Well, the next night, Vova apparently got good and liquored up, and trucked his way down to the Black Sea Hotel and tried to find me. I have this incredible image in my head of this dude stumbling up to the counter and being like "where do you keep your Americans!?"

So, yea, its been an interesting week to say the least, and today totally topped it. I mean, Ukrainian women are hot. Hot. And I have been the awkward girl, who dresses like a slob and spends her time misunderstanding everyone, generally being in the way and making all those clumsy mistakes that crack people up like trying to pay for my own drinks and waiting to be seated at restaurants and assuming that there is any philosophy here of 'standing in line.' Oh, and speaking Ukrainian but not Russian. That also makes me a weirdo. Several people have actually burst out laughing when they hear that. Yet, somehow, I have managed to procure that 'exotic appeal.' Only in Ukraine, I think, and in working-class post-industrial Ukraine at that, do I get to be the intriguing foreign girl that everyone wants a piece of. And its totally not any fun, which is a damned shame. It's mostly just nerve wracking because, while I can generally get by just fine, I don't have the language skills to handle these situations adeptly, or with any grace at all for that matter, so I generally end up either exhausting myself trying desperately to assess whatever situation I find myself in, or just standing around with my finger up my nose, while some dude next to me thinks he's working it and it totally golden.

I never thought I'd say this, but this actually makes me miss dating in highschool. At least then you didn't have all these stupid adult sensibilities, so when people showed up unexpectedly, drunk off their asses, at your hotel, it was funny.

And speaking of whom, I have joined forces with Duncan to start a new blog...its like an ugly child. No one but us will love it, but we will love it so hard.

Budapest Critical Mass

2007-04-24T18:13:00.000+02:00

It was glorious, and I am totally heartbroken that I missed it. It was on my birthday no less. There is no end to my frustration over this. I was planning on coming back into town for it, but Odessa is too far away for the weekend trip. But the pictures speak volumes. Some 50,000 people came out for the semi-annual BP event.
These pics were forwarded to me by the lovely Alexis, who cleaned them from the Chi-town CM listserv

Here's the story from Caboodle.hu

Budapest sees record long bicycle procession
By: All Hungary News
2007-04-23 15:26:00
The "Critical Mass" (CM) bicycle procession held in Budapest during yesterday's Earth Day celebrations drew upwards of 50,000 participants, which organizers say made it the largest such event in the world, writes origo.hu.

When those at the front of the procession had already crossed the Petőfi Bridge to Buda and the Lánchíd (Chain Bridge) back to Pest, those at the end were cycling - or rollerblading, driving wheelchairs - under the Lánchíd on Pest's lower embankment.

The traditional "lifting of the bicycles" was also a little behind schedule, because the end of the procession did not arrive in City Park by the appointed hour of 7:00 p.m.

The fastest cyclists completed the 14-kilometer route in roughly one hour, and spent the rest of the afternoon picnicking and watching jugglers.

The idea for the biannual event, which aims to promote the use of people-powered transportation, originated in San Fancisco in 1970. In the years since nearly 5,000 non-profit organizations in more than 180 countries have joined the initiative. The first CM in Budapest was held in 2004, but similar events were organized in 1999, 2000 and 2001 which each drew 500 to 600 cyclists.

Best Birthday Card Ever?

2007-04-22T14:10:00.001+02:00

Market Day

2007-04-21T21:18:00.000+02:00

I mentioned this huge market that is right by the train station in an earlier post. I went down there today to take some pictures. I would say that it was successful. I came home with a kilo of pickles, dried parsimmons, and a whole kilo of white figs. Plus a ton of pictures that I am really excited about. The produce at this market was so beautiful. It looked like God himself breathed on this food. But a lot I couldn't bear to buy because I know that I'm not in my own kitchen and I don't have all the staples that are needed to prepare them well.

Anyway, here are some of the shots that I took there on the digital camera, the last one taken by Joanna, my adventure partner for the day. She is from upstate NY, and staying in my hostel as well.

The woman in this last shot was so wonderful. She, like many other women at the market, was selling picked cabbage and cucumbers out of huge plastic 70 gallon barrels. I asked her if I could take her picture (I got it on the Canon), and she blushed and laughed and said, "You want to take a picture of an old babushka like me?"

I also met a vendor who was selling pomegranates. He pulled me over, and told me to take his picture, then posed nobly behind his piles of fruit. I snapped a few, and then he asked if he could give me his address, so that I could send him a copy, to put up by his stand. I told him that I wouldnt have pictures for probably two weeks, but he said that that was great, so, hey, I hope they turned out ok!

After the market, we wandered around to the sea and passed a spring carnival that was open in the park between the station and the northern beaches. They even had a full on Strongest Man contest in the middle of the thing. I really wanted to get some pictures of it, but the crowds were so big that we couldn't muscle our way to the front.

It was also funny to realize that all of the carnival attractions were from Mexico. And I mean REALLY from Mecixo--made to be marketed and used IN Mexico

Please note that one is called "Mexican Casino" and the other one, the rooster, is saying "Ki-ki-ri-ki"

Honestly. It kills me. And I thought Romania was bad for bottom feeding.

In the evening I met up with a local girl named Vera, who took me to the pier out past the Potemkin stairs, and then took me for a beer with some of her friends from the university. They were really nice girls, all about 20, studying English at the university here in Odessa. They looked so Ukrainian. Big frilly fancy shiny skirts and tops and earrings and shoes that lace up to the knee with rhinestones and tons of buckles and flare. We talked for an hour and a half about getting married while they smoked skinny cigarettes and drank champagne at the bar. It was so rad.

Oh, and I also found out that football season has started here. The local team Chornomorets (чорноморец--it means, like, Black-Sea-ites) has a home stadium just up the street from me. They had a home game today, and another one next saturday, against the Kiev Arsenal. I am going with colors flying.

Nate would be so proud of me....

Odessa Catacombs

2007-04-19T18:39:00.000+02:00

I played hookie today. I got to the center and had a headache and was sooo tired. I faked a migrane and went home after about an hour. And I came home to find that a group of kids from the hostel were planning a trip this afternoon to the catacombs. Which was awesome. But I'll get to that in a sec.

This is the van that I have spent a few days on this week:

It runs ten different routes, two a day monday through friday with an outreach worker and a doctor on every route.

Here are a few shots from the beautiful neighborhood around the community center:

So, onto the catacombs. There are catacombs under Odessa. They run in a tangled labyrinth under the whole city. They were dug out over 130 years ago when builders were quarrying limestone along the black sea, and are estimated to be a total of 3000 km of unmapped tunnels. One fact that people often give you is that these catacombs are the reason why Odessa has no subway system, because they really do span underneath the entire city and beyond.

A couple from Switzerland who is staying in my room organized this trip, and brought a long me, and several other guests from Finland, Japan, Argentina, and Hood River, Oregon of all places. We got ourselves a humble translator and a bus which took us from the train station to a village on the north outskirts of Odessa, where there is a manned opening to the tunnels.

The entrance was all dressed up, with giant stairs down from ground level and a wide open entrance, which soon dissolved into tiny narrow passageways and small yellow light bulbs every 50 ft or so lighting our way.

We also had Svetlana, our ancient, Russian tour guide who walked around with a flashlight, talking in Russian over a microphone that was so loud we couldnt hear, despite the fact that she had been told that none of us spoke Russian. It was hysterical.

These catacombs are particularly important to Odessa's history, because during World War 2, nearly 2000 Russian partisans lived in these tunnels to hide from the Nazis. That large group lived in these caverns underground in hiding, barricading the entrances and sneaking food from the surface while undercover, for over two and a half years.

We find an old gun, the 18 yr old from Oregon picks it up, and the camera phones fly out of pockets at lightning speed:

There is a small 'museum' at the exit, which we had to climb up 5 flights of stairs to get back out to. The most prized item in the museum's collection is a handwritten letter by Fidel Castro which he wrote for the catacombs during his visit here in 1986. It speaks of the noble Soviet city, which protected its people and its way of life from the aggression of the fascists.

Eternal Glory my Comrades!

A Few Field Diary Excerpts

2007-04-18T19:03:00.000+02:00

I met two women in the office, a young girl who answers the phones, and Oxsana, who I believe is a financial manager? Maybe? I cant be sure. They were terribly amused that I didn't speak Russian, but were very nice, and offered me tea as soon as I sat down.

After the meeting, Pavlo drove me and Marina and the older woman, who I thought was named Oleksandra, but I now think is Natalia to the Center Doviri. One funny thing happened before we got there. Pavlo came up to me with a box of papers, and said, "Jennifer, are you feminist?" and handed it to me to carry, with a huge smile on his face. The rest of the group laughed at his joke. Funny.

In the afternoon, I went back to the center, and hung out with the three blonde women who mother me. One is Ira from the other day, Plus another Olga and another Natalia. They speak only Russian, though Ira speaks enough Ukrainian for her and I to have a nice conversation on the steps about our college studies. The three of them seem to encourage each other in their mothering tendancies. They spent the majority of the afternoon haggling people over paperwork, answering phones, and feeding me and everyone else who waked by copious amounts of cake and teas with nearly a tablespoon of sugar in each small cup. I almost died from it.

This morning, I went on a wild goose chase with this guy named Sasha to the substitution therapy clinic. He invited me with him yesterday, and we left as soon as he arrived this morning. I didn't take any of my things with me, so he ended up paying for my bus fare, which I felt bad about. I need to remember to pay him back tomorrow, though he probably won't accept it.

A lot of the time, I felt like he forgot what language I understand and began speaking to me in Russian. Especially after his treatment I could barely understand a word. He was very loud with me too. He burst into the clinic and immediately introduced me loudly and repeatedly to everyone, before they could even see me, as someone from Chicago in America who was studying in Odessa for her dissertation. It was really disruptive and rather embarrassing for me. He kept insisting that I talk to people. Go ahead and talk to them, ask a questions and I will translate right now!

The smoke breaks out on the sidewalk are so good for getting to know the staff. We talk about school, about politics, about the music that the girls have on their phones. No one is on the job while they are out on the patio. Its fascinating.

This morning, I also went to the TB hospital with Max and Olena. It was interesting. The conditions were bad, of course. 5-6 beds in a small room. One man that we met was naked from the waste down and covered in bed sores and absesses. He had a catheder in that was running down into a plastic soda bottle under his bed. The rooms were cleaned regularly, but still fairly dirty, and most of the patients had food stashed around, so they could eat during the day. One man even had a carton of a half a dozen eggs under his bed.

After I tell him that there is a big problem with needle sharing in the US, Max asks, "but needles are very little money in the US, yes?" When I tell him yes, he says "So, why this problem?" I tell him that its because pharmacists wont sell to IDUs and the police harass them as well. He asks "Why do you not talk to the police? Here, our organization and police, we have cooperation." He shares this story with Olena, about police taking clean needles, and she looks shocked and horrified. She looks to me for confirmation, and says "Da?"

Mornings With (or Without) Methadone

2007-04-17T19:22:00.000+02:00

This morning, I went with Sasha to the substitution therapy clinic (where he gets his buprenorphine). He invited me with him yesterday, and we left as soon as he arrived this morning. I discovered that this clinic, the only one for substitute therapy in the city, is a matter of blocks away from where I am staying. I didn't realize that the large church I walked into with Max when Olena was going in for therapy the other day and the one that I took pictures in front of on my first day were the same. I met several people down there, and recognized at least half of the faces from DKD. Methadone isn't available here, but, according to a doctor I met the other day, can be purchased through pharmacies, but comes with a price tag of $100/gram. Despite the incredibly addictive nature of methadone, users here are asking for it from service agencies in droves. One man that I talked to during his dosing in the clinic said that this was a good program, and that maybe, if they are fortunate, they will get methadone there next year as well. It's interesting, considering that methadone is one of the most vicious, abusive treatment options that has been employed in the US. Its more addictive than heroin. Why, then, is it considered a solution to heroin addiction? It's ok to be addicted to a powerful drug that takes years off of your life as long as it leaves you capable of going to work everyday? And why are these opiate users so keen to get it?

Book vendors on the street corner.

There are young sailors walking all about the city. This one was a feisty one.

Playing chess in front of the artists' market.

My Day of Awesome

2007-04-16T17:18:00.000+02:00

Ok you guys. It's seriously official. I love Odessa.
I have been having a great time in this city, and today was an incredible day. This project is going really well, and the weather is great, and there was cake and icecream to boot.

But first, lets play a little game called "where the hell is Jen?"
Im right smack in the middle of this picture here, by the water:

Ok, moving on to today:
-I spent the morning with a mobile sharp exchange and HIV therapy unit in central Odessa, observing medical procedures and client staff ineteraction. Really, I get to hang out and take notes. It's way academic, really.
-Odessa has this great system of minibuses, which come like every 2 minutes, and drive at top speed down their route. I have no idea what the routes are, nor does anyone else seem to know. You just kind of have to pick one that is going vaguely south, or which ever way you need to go. And they dont make stops. To get on, you have to flag one down, and to get off, you have to tell the driver which street about 2 blocks ahead of time because they take about that long to slow down to a stop. These things are like astrovans and seat about 12 people. They normally have about 20. Its great.
-I have learned enough Russian to request a stop off the minibus route on my way in with out confusing the bloody hell out of the driver.
-There is this galleria near where I am living called Afina, and there is a massive cafeteria in the basement. I ate there today, and had a giant tub of borsht. You go in, say "ukrainskij borsht!" and the guys says something that you dont know that sounds different everytime which always in one way or another means 'sour cream?'. You always say "Da!" yum.
-I re-established that I dont like salmon today. I even realized that it wasn't a chunk of tomato in my creamy salad BEFORE I gave it a go, so it wasn't the surprise. I was curious about how the side salad was the most expensive thing I ordered though. Now I know.
-There is this huge central market near the trainstation (which is itself between the biggest craziest cemetary I have ever seen and the biggest, gnarliest prison I have ever seen) which has clothes and food and stuff and crap and junk and it looks awesome. And its open all hours of the day. Its crowdedall hours of the day. Blows the mind.
-I bought a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe in Ukrainian today. I am a giant nerd. But the Ukrainian books are like in a far corner of the bokstore, are only childrens books (as only school children would be learning Ukrainian at all) and are on a different till as well. It was weird. I got sent to a far cashier, who wrote up my bill by hand in a paper register and then would only take cash for them. Hooray for the marginalzation of western culture. It feels as refreshing as it does odd.
-I bought an icecream cone for 30 cents today. It was awesome.
-My hostel, which is way nicer than any place I have ever lived myself, has a frikin jacuzzi tub. Unbelievable. I am so headed there next. This is going to be great.
-Finally, the people at the agency I am working with are great. I have met dozens of people at this point, and have gotten really friendly with a few. One of them was making fun of me today. She asked how I liked Odessa, and I said that it was really great. She said "Great?! Haha. And all you have seen is this--working life. Get up at 8 go home at 6. I'll ask you again after the weekend."

Beginning Odessa

2007-04-15T11:16:00.000+02:00

Well, I had my first 2 days at the non-profit center. The first was at the resource office with the lead staff, then yesterday at the community center with some day staff. Except for needing to go home early with a righteous headache, things are starting pretty well. Here are some more pictures of this awesome, awesome city. I took these during a walk before my shift yesterday morning. I am so busy with this project, that I am actually beginning to wonder how much of Odessa I will actually get to see...

City of the Black Sea

2007-04-12T18:51:00.000+02:00

I arrived in Odessa today. I will be here for about three weeks observing where I can with a harm reduction agency that is in the center of town. It took 27 hours by train to get here. And its gorgeous. I'm exhausted at the moment, so I am going to p6st some pictures from the last two days, and let them speak for themselves. I'll post more later.

JBOP-BP

2007-04-10T14:16:00.000+02:00

Rowan and Mina came into Budapest this weekend. What a rad f-ing time that was. I adore both of these people, and it's been ages since I've seen them, because Mina moved to London a few years ago, and Rowan has been in Paris basically since college. We did quite a lot but also did very little. It was a great weekend, and having Reedies in as guests is always so easy, because they are always so danged rad, and, of course, get along with everyone here so well cause we're all liberal artsy, leftist, slightly jewish intellectual types who really love cartoons, so its a great scene from start to finish.

I managed to leave my camera at home for most of the weekend, so I don't have any footage of our time out in the city, at the park, at Szimpla or West Balkan, or of the countelss hours spent nesting with like 5 other people in the living room. But we did spend easter out on Margit Sziget with some fabulous people, picnicking in the sun, and I managed to get some photos of that event.

Alex and his mom and step dad spent the morning at a wine festival, and brought over the goods. Alex, by the way, just got an internship working in fiction for The New Yorker, this summer, so we are way pumped for him :).

Sasha had an aunt and uncle in town too, and was on 'gorging with the family' mode.

Mina and Monica.

Oh, and I am sitting in my living room right now because I missed my train to Zahony this morning. Bahn.de totally gave me the wrong times, and I got to the station just in time to see the train that I wanted to be on pulling away. Bastards. So I came home and mopped, and am about to go to sleep cause I only went to bed at like 5 am yesterday, and then run all the errands that I DIDN'T get to do before "train ride to Odessa: first attempt."

But I am taking the same route to Odessa tomorrow, and should be there by noon on thursday, instead of tomorrow. And then, I come that on step closer to having a clue from god as to what I am doing.

Crazy Peep on Peep Action

2007-04-05T12:07:00.000+02:00

So, Stephen got an easter package the other day from the states that had a package of marshmallow peeps in it. Marko had never seen marshmallow peeps. They are apparently soley an American atrocity. Marko is basically new to this whole 'marshmallows' thing anyway. He had his first s'mores the other day, which was eventful and exciting for all. Growing up in a dark corner under the stair case, licking clean nutella jars under the ominous eye of communism, Marko has never experienced many of the things that are staples of American childhood. Like the transformers. And cookie crisp. And freedom. Right?

So anyway, since Marko never grew up with marshmallows, he also has never heard of putting a marshmallow in the microwave. So we put the peeps in the microwave, to see which one would eat the other one first. It filled our kitchen with frikin glee.

I found a video of some other kids doing the same thing on youtube. It totally cracks me up because we sounded just as retarded in our own kitchen. We even compared it to Akira. Cause we rule.

Nem!

2007-04-04T05:11:00.000+02:00

This is me not wanting to face my day

2007-04-03T13:44:00.000+02:00

I have a lot of work to do. I have papers to write and languages to learn and e mails that I should have sent last week.

But I am not going to school.

Instead, I did my laundry. I folded it and put it away. I never put laundry away. I made a garlicky tomato sauce and poached eggs for the whole house. I fried mushrooms. I looked up train schedules for Mina. I am so useless.

I hear that they have no word for "Spring Break" in Hungarian. Just like the Russians have no word for "freedom" or "bathing" or "free refills".

My word.

I think today is the day to ride my bike to school. Indeed.

Family, Food, and Foraging for Shoes

2007-04-02T21:08:00.000+02:00

So, it's been a little while since I updated. Some big things have happened, but first, the short items-

*I finished up with coursework last week. I'm so excited to be done. Just a few final papers to write and then it is nothing but thesis from here till the end.
*The IHRD grant for Ukraine ended up going to the All Ukrainian Harm Reduction Association in Kiev and All Together in Lviv, jointly. Its kind of a releif to have that off my plate actually. In the mean time, I've made a new acquaintance with the director of the International Harm Reduction Development Program at OSI in New York. So that's definitely a plus.
* I finally got my hair cut. By Christina, who worked in a salon on 5th avenue for li2e 13 years. Really neat woman. Oh, and she's in IRES, not econ. I can't keep details like this straight. at all. Anyway, she's my new hero.
* I have re-evaluated the situation regarding fieldwork for my thesis, and am rethinking my decision to station myself in Lviv. Right now, I am seriously considering Odessa. Course, that is a lot more travel, and means that I will most likely not be able to come back to Budapest for Critical Mass on my birthday. The gods are so against me on this one.

And now onto the bigger stuff:

My mom and my cousin Abbey were here last week. It was Abbey's first trip out of the states, and I am so so proud of her for mustering up the time and the cash to do it. Though I am afraid that the rest of Europe will be totally ruined for her because nothing can top Hungary. Nothing.
They were in Budapest for about 5 days.

Here we are, cold, by the Danube in the fifth district.

We also took a day trip to Bratislava in Slovakia, which was gorgeous to finally see during the day (remember that i got stuck there in the middle of the night back in October)

Here is me and Abbey on the Danube, in Slovakia, about 200km away from where that first shot was taken....pretty neat.

I managed to talk the two of them into going to the TerrorHaz, which was a good move, I think, cause they seemed to enjoy it, or at least to have learned a lot even if their reactions were touch and go...its kind of an intense place. We never went to the baths, but we did go on Agi's fabulous wild goose chase to Erzsebet Kilato in Buda, which was a great way to spend their last day in BP, because it was a gorgeous day for training and hiking through the lush, green Buda hills.

We took the children's train, just like last time,

And enjoyed the view from the top of the look-out.
In case you havn't noticed, the camera was rarely out of my mom's hands the whole time. :)

Ok, second point of interest. My mom brought Mexican groceries. Lots of them. She brought masa and tortillas and nopales and corn husks and jalopenos and chipotles and adobo sauce and guajillos and hominy and a whole gallon bag of Pelon Pelo Rico. And I made a Mexican feast! Well, it was a kind of non-sensical Mexican feast. None of the food really went together. We ate soup and breakfast food at the same time, for dinner, but it was what we had, and it was so good. We had a bunch of people over to help eat it: Brigette, Alex, Stefan, and Sasha all helped out, as well as my mom and Abbey and the rest of the house. I made posole for everyone, which the kids from the Balkans made a good show of. It wasn't thst spicy, but there are some pasta sauces that marko can't eat cause they are too hot. And Brigette and I were in happy land, so they boys did good for themselves. I also made my favorite dish ever ever: huevos ahogados with nopales.

The look on Sasha's face when he found out he was eating cactus was priceless. He threw his arms up, in the "field goal" sign and was like, "You mean....cactus? Like this?" Ha. The pots were scraped clean. Just wait till I get around to making those tamales. Mwa ha ha ha.

Lastly, I finally went out to the Chinese Market to replace a ton of old clothes that are worn through and destroyed. I realized the other day that i have no socks, bras, or underwear that aren't frayed or full of holes. It was a bad deal. When you wear your laundry-day underwear everyday because that's all you have, its time to go get some more. So I dropped like 10.000HUF at the market and came home with a messenger bag full of new clothes. I also went to the mall and re-discovered the futility that is trying to buy pants in Europe. BUT, I did do a major thing. I bought new shoes.

Ok, so this is such a big deal for me because I came to Budapest with like 7 pairs of shoes. That is incredibly significant because that came only after I got rid of nearly 35 pairs before I left the US. I love shoes. I LOVE THEM! i love htem and my love is not to be fucked with. Seriously. And I have been on this serious minimalist kick ever since I left Portland, and I am really enjoying not having a lot of crap around, so making a major purchase on something like shoes, which is such a slippery slope for Ms. Jennifer "Impulse Purchase" Caroll, is a big fat hairy deal. But I thought about it, and realized that, hiking and running shoes aside, heels and nice slip ons aside, I have 2 pairs of shoes that I wear every day. One is my Campers. I love htem, but have had them for so long and worn them so hard that they actually kind of hurt to wear for too long. The other are the blue and green DKNY sneakers that I got at the Goodwill outlet in Portland like 2 years ago, and they have held up really really well, but are wearing out and super dingy. So, I bought them. I paid too much for them, at least 180% of the list price that I am now finding for them on the internet, but I got to try them on at the mall (I was at the mall! For serious!) and take em home with me that instant. And they're purdy

So, there you have it. Looks like all other luxuries got pushed back a few months cause I am waiting for the cost of these bad boys to settle out in my checking account. But oh well. My feet look awesome.

Sarajevo, Bosna i Hercegovina

2007-03-19T20:47:00.000+01:00

That's right. We forced a spring break on ourselves. And it was good.

Well, it was mostly good. We left Budapest with 7 people, made it to Sarajevo with 5, and came home with 6, so it was definitely eventful if nothing else.

(for the exceptionally curious, Monica got turned away at the Bosnian border cause Romanians still need a visa, and Tyler went home with her, and we found a Michigander who decided to come back to BP with us and is allegedly at my apartment right now fixing our shower...)

We trained in from Budapest, which took nearly 12 hours. The scenery was gorgeous. The route took us through Hungary by way of Pecs, then down through the northern end of Croatia, and then through central Bosnia to Sarajevo.

On the train, we slept on and off all day, and watched the towns go by. In Bosnia, we saw a couple of men chasing a giant pig around a yard that had escaped from its pen, and it made us all laugh out loud. We also met a few sketchy dudes who asked if Kendra would mind offering them an official invitation to the US and inquired as to her marital status once or twice.

But anyway. Once we got to Sarajevo, the hostel met us at the train station and taxied us to our room, which was right in the center of the old city. Right across the street from this actually:

Sarajevo is an unbelievably beautiful town, nestled in a valley between two mountain ridges.

We climbed the hills on the first day to get a view of the whole town. We ran across some beautiful old houses and the first Muslim cemetery that I have seen.

We also walked down what is called "Sniper Alley" on the way to Novo Sarajevo. In this area, the 6-700 year old cobblestone roads gave way to the stark efficiency of communist architecture, and the buildings and even the sidewalks still had huge chucks and pits missing from mortar shells and bullets that had been shot into the city from the surrounding hills. I am told that Sarajevo suffered the longest siege in known war history, lasting over 1060 days.

Some of the mortar blasts have been filled in with a bright red epoxy, to mark the remnants of the war. These are scattered throughout the city, and are what is referred to as "The Sarajevo Rose."

We also saw the bridge where Franz Ferdinand was shot by members of the Black Hand. Behold:

And I, being almost wholly ignorant of most of European history, did not realize that Sarajevo is a predominantly Muslim city. (makes sense, though, right? Duh, Jen). Sarajevo is interesting in that it has large populations of Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim persons. There were beautiful churches and temples and mosques everywhere. But the mosques were by far the most numerous.

We were totally unprepared for it when we woke up on our first morning there. We stepped out of the hostel into a brisk sunny day, with busy streets and birds flying in unbelievable numbers overhead, gorgeous mountains all around, hearing the call to prayer ring out from minerets all around us. Here's a brief snippit of some that came in through our window on Saturday:

It was an amazing trip. I can't tell you what a time we had. If you want to see the whole album from the trip, you can see it on flickr.com here. Lots more pics from the train and of peeps that went with us are there.

Now that I am back, though, I totally have my work cut out for me. I got invited to a student conference in L'viv, so now that paper that I told them that I had written about comparative drug policy and disease narrative in the EU and Ukraine...well, I have to write that now. In the next 48 hours. screw. Good thing I'm so capable at bullshitting right? But yea, papers papers papers then another 13 hour train to Lviv on Wednesday night. Who's excited? I think I am. I'm not sure. Its a little much.

Just thinking about it makes me want a nap. AND its going to suck to be buying things all weekend because my bank card fully SNAPPED IN HALF today. wtf, mate? and it will be May before I get a replacement. boo.

Oh, but I get de-mulleted tomorrow by Cristina in the Econ department. It will be glorious. Im so pumped. I'll let you know how it goes :)

Home Came Out To Me

2007-03-14T11:56:00.000+01:00

We are all each others two oldest friends.
Yesterday, we came out with sopapillas and Sauza to represent.
Today, we take Budapest a second time.
Tomorrow, we leave for Sarajevo.

[Insert Reference to White Elephants Here]

2007-03-06T18:40:00.000+01:00

I woke up sick again. My throat hurts and I have a cough and I feel generally terrible. I didnt go to class today. I decided ust to rest, especially since I have a huge pile of work that I want to do before folks get here next week. I know I dont work well at home, so I packed a bag and went down to Siraly, a cafe on Kiraly utca, down the street from my apartment. Siraly means 'seagull'. This bar has been host to countless gatherings, live bands, plays, study breaks, and even thesis meetings with my adviser in the last few months.

It looks just like this, except that the outside has had little blue waves painted on it, so imagine that under the graffiti. Here's a rad little video of the place on the inside and the usual crowd. You can follow the link above if the embedded video runs slowly:

Anyway, at this point I have been at Siraly for about an hour now, and I just had a startling realization.

Here I am, in Eastern Europe, Budapest no less (so romantic) midday in an artsy cafe (intellectual), where peole are downing beers at 2pm and posting listings for the jazz bands that will be playing here this weekend (hipster). I've been drinking long coffee and seltzer water (lavish) at a secluded table by the window (Hemmingway), reading Habermas (pretentions), while listening to Bach's cello suites (fartsy) on my mp3 player (bourgeois). Oh, I am also ill, tired, with rings under my eyes and a rattling cough (afflicted!).

I am a black turtleneck away from the TB stricken artist-intellectual types that Susan Sontag wrote 98-too-many pages about. Oh, how frail am I. My legs are also aching form sitting for so long because I havn't had a chance to take my bike out in months. What the hell has happened to me? I've gone totally soft.
Maybe I should take up boxing or something.

On the upside of things though, I found some of the pictures from the Hummus Bar on my computer, and I offer them here for your amusement. (and check me out in that link. I can leave restaurant reviews in Hungarian. I may not be able to ask for directions, but I can talk volumes about food, cause I have my priorities in line. I'm so cool.)

Entrance on Kertész Utca

The loft, where we gorge.

Alex, Dan, marionette, Marko, and Nancy

Stephen and Brigette peruse the Israeli Cosmo. Its in Hebrew, so they have to go backwards.

Stella, me

The carnage. As soon as we finished dinner, Alex screamed, "Oh my gosh! We forgot to take a picture of the food!" This is the best we could do.

Marko and Kendra

Nancy

Disappearances

2007-03-05T22:14:00.000+01:00

We had a lunar eclipse here on Saturday night. This is what it looked like from my front door at about 11:30

That same night, we also went to the Hummus Bar down the street from Kicsi Szimpla, and took a bunch of pics that my computer just ate. Like, seriously, they just disappeared. I have no idea what thats about. So, ah, I can't post those just yet, which is really tragic, because that is one of our favorite places to go in this city. The Bard kids have been going there so much that a couple of the guys who work there have started referring to them collectively as 'the falafel whores'. Ha. Anyway, more on that to come.

Also, my keyboard is wigging out again. And I just bought a new one a few months ago, which means that its not the keyboard. It is operating as though the FN key is depressed all the time, which is really infuriating. In fact, the only way i have found to fix it is to put pressure on the lower right half of the console, which is totally weird. And when 5 dont, 5t wr5tes 352e th5s, wh5ch 0akes me want to sho6t *e6*3e. GODAMMIT! what a g5ant *ain in 0y ass. gah!

OH, there was also a Purim Party on saturday. It went till 3am. it was at the mall. AT THE MALL! at 3am. crazy. Pictures coming soon...

Well, That Was Eventful...

2007-03-02T14:59:00.000+01:00

Its friday. Its 3pm, and I am still at home in my pajamas. In fact, I am considering putting htem back on after I get out of the shower in a sec, here. Its totally one of those kinda days. Cause last week destroyed me a little. Lemme just tell you about yesterday.

The weather has been crappy, and i have been tired and cranky. In fact, when I stepped out of hte house on tuesday, I was met with this sight:

wtf? first snow ever, and it melted and turned to slush in hours and made the whole city all gross. It upped my crank factor significantly, which had carried through to yesterday.

I finally got this grant proposal submitted. I have no idea when I am going to hear back, but I have gotten confirmation of intent to participate from 3 different organizations in Ukraine, and I have a partner on the project too--Iryna, who has also been my Ukrainian tutor all year. She's kind of a rock star. She's from Kiev, and has done a lot of work with womens groups in Ukraine already. We are so golden if we get this money, so, I guess whether we get it is all thats left to figure out. I only submitted the think 17 hours ago, but I'm still checking my e mail constantly.

Asa and Ola and I went back to our friendly facists yesterday, and we met this kid. whose name I don't remember, who, when asked to elaborate on his political views, took advantage of the opportunity to show off his english skills and gave us this nice little tirade: "Me? I hate jew. I hate niggar. I hate geepsee. I hate black. I hate homo-fucking-sexuals. I hate america. I am Hungarian! Fuck Gyurscany!...So, where are you from?"

Despite the overt racist tendancies, I have to say that tehre was something that I kinda liked about this kid. But, then again, I have spent years dealing with crazy young'uns, so I am used to picking out the parts of them that are loveable in spite of the parts of them that are willing to stab their 5 year old sister with a butter knife and make their own nose bleed out of spite when they get thrown into the calm room--if only for my ability to make it through a day with them.

But on a lighter note, we went to a new place yesterday nea Csengery and Podmaninczky called Potkulcs, which is Hungarian for The Spare Key. Its a great space with cozy yet cavernous innards, and a big patio with trelises outside. Here's some picks of my lovely company:

Brigette, and Alex's friend who I never remember meeting but still knows my name somehow (last saturday was bad)...

Me and Alex

Max and Kendra

Stevo

Stefan, and that guy...

Fishheads.

Oh, there are a few other things of note as well:
--Sasha is spending this weekend in Belarus, and we miss him.
--My hair is long enough to justify the use of rubber bands now. It was about an inch long in november. That was less than 4.5 months ago. That's f-ing crazy. Who did I inherit this hair from?
--Bill Slocumb is coming out to visit me. He's gonna be here in 9 days.
--Duncan is trying to come out too. If this works, he'll be getting here in 7 days. (cross ur fingers).
--I have been watching a lot of Twin Peaks. Alot.
--They showed An Inconvenient Truth in the auditorium at school, and it totally freaked people out here. Its strange.
--Stephen just bought one of those new dual core macs. It gets here in a few weeks. I can't wait to touch it.
--I have 2 french girls coming to live with us tomorrow. They dont speak any english, and this kinda weirded Marko out. I wasn't sure what to tell him....speak the language of love? French class?
--Brigette and I are going to a North American Ex-pat association gala for bored trophy wives at the Hilton next thursday. Its for research. Seriously. We had to pay 4000HUF to get in, but its 5 hours of hose, heels, highlights, and an open bar. Personally, I am really looking forward to getting toasted, and then going out to Szimpla to meet up with our friends, already drunk and still in our party dresses. It will be like the small town prom experience that I never had. AND I get to take field notes. (Did I mention that I am a research assistant on this little venture? We're, like, so official).

Grant Updates

2007-02-24T13:50:00.000+01:00

So, if you have had the misfortune of bumping into me online in the last week, then you might know that this OSI grant is EATING MY LIFE! It has fully consumed me for the last 7 days, not only because there is a huge time crunch and I have been essentially cold-calling non-profit organizations in Ukraine for participation and immediate commitment, but also because every inch of communication has been in Ukrainian. Its SUCH an emotional roller coaster.
--Hey! I heard back from the folks in ____!! ROCK!!
--Oh crap! I don't know that word. Where's the dictionary?!
--Oh, hey they like my idea! I'm golden!!
--But, shit, how do you say "First Draft" in Russian?! WAIT!! I dont speak Russian!
Oh my lord. Stephen has been coming up to me randomly in the hallway and just giving me random, unsolicited hugs on principle. I have let my stress level get so high. The one saving grace is that the deadline for this grant is this Thursday, so come hell or high water, its all over (at least in the immediate) in 5 days.

But here's how things are going, for the interested:
*I sent out a bunch of e mails baiting people into talking about this. I heard back from 4 organizations and one activist at the national All Ukraine HR office in Kiev.
*I sent out a second e mail of the "wanna write a grant?" variety and heard back from one group who said that they were planning on applying for the grant themselves, but are interested in submitting a proposal together, and could I send them what I have?
*I tell a dirty lie and say that I have drafted a proposal and will get it translated out of English for them pronto.
*I hit the library and then compose said grant proposal, sans hard dollar values for the budget (how am I supposed to know what a reasonable compensation is for being interviewed is in Ukraine?--see, this is why I need them.)
*I find Nina, who is a FREIKIN ROCK STAR, and who is also Russian, who is willing to translate this 4 pg single spaced document into Russian by the next morning.
*And I just mailed off what I have to them. Part of me is leary about this situation, because there is nothing stopping them from just ditching me at this point and taking my methods as their own. But honestly, I'm ok with that risk. Because, frankly, I really have no interest in doing this project alone. I can't do it alone. I think its almost inappropriate for me, a newbie to this, not even fluent in the language, to come in and to this national-survey--even if I was able to hire every Ukrainian social scientist at CEU with these grant dollars. Worse case scenario, I don't get the grant (for shame!) and another organization has a better idea of how to run respondent-driven sampling and maybe, just maybe, do a better job on this project. At the very least, squeeze some more dollars for their heinously underfunded programming...I think that, despite these possibility, I will be able to sleep at night.

HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY MOM! May God bless you with patience for your daughter's unreliability in the following year.

2007-02-22T11:21:00.000+01:00

Oh wow. Ok, so I am actually sitting in class right now, blogging out into my word processor, waiting for a movie that we are watching to recover from its DVD death so that we can finish it. Its called “The Cruise”, and is about this crazy guy who works as a tour guide on a double-decker tour bus in NYC. This is the most hilarious thing I have seen in ages.

“Looking at this building, I feel like I am running through a meadow. Naked. Chasing after a strange woman, who is also naked. Its like an evil, primordial chase of man…As you look up the building, can’t you feel the undulation of her curves?”

“Then men who designed Central Park were transcendentalists….No sweating allowed in Central Park. Those people you see playing baseball, roller blading, jogging—they are not historically accurate.”

“H.G. Wells said that to tell the history of New York City is to tell the history of the world. Fasten your seatbelts.”

Its brilliant.

I have had a crazy week so far, but last night was one of the most random and completely fun nights I have had in a long time. So, I am going to revert to one of my most tried and true formats and provide you the run down of my evening with lists of things that are awesome.

*There are two girls from Bavaria staying with us right now. They came in from Germany early yesterday morning after taking the night train. They are way cute hippie types, and they juggle. Excellent.

*We have another guy from Patagonia coming tomorrow. He lives in the place that the company that makes those backpacks is named after. I can't seem to get off of that fact. Yay cultural sensitivity! Gold star, Jen.

*I have heard back from 5 different groups in Ukraine now, all of whom seem interested in writing this grant. I am sending out another e mail today. We'll see what happens. This is all happening really fast, but money talks. So, I hope we can get something pulled together in the next week. I may have to call the woman at the OSI office in NY to see if we can't get an extra few days for this proposal. Do people do that? Blah. We'll see.

*I finally made it to the post office in Joszefvaros to pick up my Mp3 player. Its a little Creative Zen V. Its rad. Its my new favorite thing ever ever. I have been listening to the Murder City Devils all morning in the library. I am so in love with myself this morning.

*Both Tyler and Brigette came over last night (again). We went out to Szimpla to meet up with Sasha and a friend of his from Belarus who is visiting for the week. What a blastie.

*Budaman made us wait, but he came through, as usual.

*We actually managed to find a table that would sit all 8 of us. In the back too. We rule.

*Tyler, it turns out, is a sucker for Rock Paper Scissors for Pain. Do you know how long it has been since I have played an honest game of RPS4P? Since I last saw Kasia or Ligaya. It was so much fun. We started playing double throws, two on two, and then at one point, we had an 8 person 1-on-1 table wide game going, with 16 hands throwing at once. There was spitting. There was slapping. It was mayhem.

*Tyler and I have also started on a new social experiment. Sometime around 1am yesterday, we decided that it would be a good idea to sign up for a Hungarian online-dating service, and see who we get matched with. We will be keeping detailed records of all ensuing events. Tyler insists that he can get a diary of random Budapestian dating published in a poli sci journal. Whatever. Its still brilliant.

*Despite being out at the bar till super late and blowing off all my homework yesterday, I actually got to bed about 2 hours earlier than I have any night in the last 3 or 4 weeks. Even though I had class at 9 this morning, I am so super energetic from sleeping more than 4 hours. Holy crap last night was so much fun. I have been wigging out over this grant. I really needed it. But now I dont want to start working again. Its a vicious cycle.

*I have finally FINALLY found a way into iWiW.hu, the invitation-only Hungarian myspace-like online thingy. Did that sentance make any sense? I dunno. But check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iwiw

*Bill is coming out in like 3 weeks. I am so F'ing excited. I can't even tell you.

*I just found out about a student conference in L'viv at the end of March. It is actually taking place over 3 days in which I do NOT have friends or family coming into BP, which is nothing short of a miracle. The cost is only 5 euro for participating (did I say student conference?) which includes accomodation and food. The only thing I would have to cover is travel, which by train to L'viv is about $25. Sweet. I am trying to talk everyone I know into applying. It sounds super rad.

*I totally failed to call my mom on her birthday. It was yesterday. I suck. I made 20 different plans to set aside a time to do it, and something just came up. By the time I got home at lke 10, it was all I could do to figure out where the couch was in my house. Major boo on me. HAPPY LATE BIRTHDAY MOM! xoxo

Дженіфер! Доброго дняu

2007-02-20T16:55:00.000+01:00

Had my first response from the AIDSalliance in Ukraine today. It is sucking all of my brain power (and my social resources) to read and write these e mails. Why am I not totally 100% fluent in all languages after studying them for 9 months? blah. But its going well so far.

Bring on the grant!

Glorious Day of "American Food"-like Food

2007-02-19T15:45:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, I woke up on the couch in Stephen's room next to Brigette, wondering if Tyler was still asleep with his shoes on in the living room. This has all been known to happen before, and is always a sign that last night was a good night and today will be a phenomenal day. Seriously.

So, I may not have mentioned this earlier, but Brigette brought back a bunch of goodies from Texas after Christmas break. Its fabulous. I love the fact that she is from Texas and knows all the right things to buy. When Stephen is on the phone with parents and friends in Ohio who are sending care packages, he always asks what I want. Brigette and I scream out a slurry of "Oh! Oh! Masa! and corn husks! chipotles! and nopalitos!" Stephen usually tells us to go stick it and to order something that is American and that the average suburban can find in Canton OH. So so sad.

But Briga brought back a few excellent things, not the least of which is a prayer candle with the Virgin of Guadalupe on it, which totally makes me nostalgic for our old house in Portland with the Revelation and Our Lady of Guadalupe themed bathroom (coolest domestic space I have ever had the privilege to inhabit). She also brought back a can of chipotles, and can of jalopenos. So, this morning, for breakfast, we made a huge batch of scrambled eggs with onions and sour cream and jalopenos. And it was SOOOO GOOOOOOOD.

Look, Stephen's camera phone was able to reach out and capture my joy:

(All these images are really low res because my digital is in Berlin with Ben right now, so all we had was Stephen's Razr to capture the moments as they came.)

Brigette gasped when she ate it and said, "Oh my gosh. Its hot. I forgot what hot tastes like. Oh my word I love it. Real hot food!" In Hungary, 'spicy' generally means 'not creamy'. Its a sad state of affairs if all you want is some chili. Marko couldn't even handle a single bite of mild heat. We are just made of spicier stuff I guess. I miss hot, spicy food so very very much. And tamales. I miss those too.

Later in the evening, I tagged along with Stephen and Sanida, who were had plans to go to this Burger place that Petya had found sometime last term. I was skeptical, but this place allegedly had really really good burgers, and even though I don't eat meat, sheer curiosity and the hopes of some honest french fries lured me along on their adventure. We were also able to recruit Zoltan at the library. I mentioned the burger plan to him, and I watched him hover over his feet, eyes glazed over for a moment, then, with a sudden rush of blood to his face, say, "I think I'm going to invite myself along..." Ha.

So, the burger place is called "Gyros es Burgers" (original) and is just be Keleti Palyaudvar. I was astonished by what they offered. They had a menu of like 20 different burgers with bacon, cheese, fried egg, goose liver, cabbage, mushrooms, anything you could think of. They even had one called "fitness" which was a burger doused in every drippy, oily, cheesy thing they had, but with out meat. And here's the kicker. They even toasted the bun. It totally kicked the In n Out Burger grilled cheese sandwhich's ass.

Stephen and Zoltan each got a burger called The Lenin:

And I don't even remember what Sanida got, but it was gone fast.

This place also had Lowenbrau

which is totally not that great, but which I will forever defend as the only reliable beer in a can in this city (take that Borsodi!).

The food was nutritionally useless and totally good. Stephen and I trucked home after this, curled up around our pot bellies, and watched Twin Peaks. And it was a very good day.

Course, I am failing to mention the long hours of work I pulled during the day and after all this nonsense that had me up till nearly 5 am. I am really starting to stress about the phenomenal amount of work I have to stay on top of. Its kind of blowing my mind. But I am meeting with Yuriy (Юрій!) tomorrow to go over letters that I am sending out to harm reduction clinics in Ukraine, and Russ has been schooling me on how not to freak out over this grant, which I have no idea how to even start, and I got my funding for April, or at least some of it. 200 Euros is better than no Euros, and thats enough to float me through April for my field work. So, things are happening, just not in a very steady or timely fashion.

Ok, enough of this. I got stuff to do....

No, I dont actually have any idea what I'm doing...

2007-02-12T15:58:00.000+01:00

I think I have been talked into applying for a grant. A big one.

I need a cohort. Who's with me?

Cultural Explosion

2007-02-09T17:33:00.000+01:00

Ok, I'm sorry I have been neglecting the blog. I have been super busy. Super crazy busy actually. I don't have any cool new pictures to put up. I don't even have that many new stories, unless you count my response papers on Latour and Althusser (which I choose not to). But here's a short run down of things and goings on:

--I have a second reader. Its Alexandra, and I am pumped. She has already given me a stack of books for the weekend and is interested in working in the sociology of deviance into my thesis. Sounds rad. I think this thing could turn out to be really cool.

--My thesis was officially greenlighted by my advisor. He actually said it was a great project. I rule. And am, therefore, definitely going to Ukraine in April.

--Ola and Asa and I are working on a term-long ethnography project with the radical right in Budapest. We have been going to a lot of rallies and protests and talking to people who are really excited to tell us all about ancient Hungarian runes and how sad the Transylvanians are that they can't be Hungarian nationals anymore. Our department gave us notarized forms that recognize us as students from CEU who are present at these demonstrations for academic and social research and are in no way affiliated with the groups that are acting there. It may be the coolest thing I have ever been given. I feel official. It has a permanent home in my passport now.

--Brigette has started her thesis fieldwork already, and is meeting with ex-pat women from the US. She went to a gathering of 50 or so blonde, American wives-of-diplomats in Buda this morning. They served rice crispy treats, and little cubes of cheddar cheese with tiny american flags on toothpicks stuck in them. There were free manicures and massages all around, and one of the ladies got hair extensions done, for what she called "the trophy wife look." These ladies apparently throw one hell of a toga party at the end of the year, that involves a whopping 20,000HUF ticket price and costumes that are rented from the Budapest Opera. We WILL find a way to go.

Look Ma! Content!
This little one is in training.

--Its Stephen's birthday tomorrow. We are co-opting Teddy's party to celebrate, which I am delighted about.

--Monica is our new housemate. Did I mention that I have a new housemate? We do. She's super sweet, and just moved here form Bucharest to work in accounting up north somewhere. Her parents are visiting for the weekend and are staying with us in the apartment. I forgot about this fact, and was totally surprised to stumble in this morning from a night out to find a 50 year old Romanian woman cleaning fish in my kitchen. Stranger things have happened, but still...
Maybe she could learn something from the ex-pats.

We have so much culture to offer, don't we?

Minor Updates

2007-02-04T16:29:00.000+01:00

% ls
Desktop Bookworm Movies Music Procrastination

% cd
% ls
Desktop Bookworm Movies Music Procrastination

% crap
tcsh: crap: Command not found.

% mkdir thesis
% cd thesis

~/thesis % man topic
no manual entry for topic

~/thesis % man 'research module'
no manual entry for research module

~/thesis % crap
tcsh: crap: Command not found.

~/thesis % ls -l
dr-------- 1 dept 2343 deadlines 01 Jan 2007
-r--r--r-- 3 dept 4793 proposal.txt 15 Jan 2007

~/thesis % cd deadlines
~/thesis/deadlines % ls
proposal researchgrants design youradvisor

~/thesis/deadlines % cd youradvisor
~/thesis/deadlines/youradvisor % who
absentee1

~/thesis/deadlines/youradvisor % whoami
screwed1

~/thesis/deadlines/youradvisor % cat *advisor > list1 | sort
~/thesis/deadlines/youradvisor % cat list1
still the same absentee

~/thesis/deadlines/youradvisor % CRAP!
tcsh: CRAP!: Command not found

~/thesis/deadlines/youradvisor % cd
% find 'thesis'
find: thesis: No such file or directory

% obviously
tcsh: obviously: Command not found

% killall grant_deadlines
No matching processes belonging to you were found

% yes there is!
there
there
there
there
screw!
there
there
there
q

% gah!
tcsh: gah!: Command not found.

....sigh.....

% open /procrastination/

Sepia Universe

2007-01-30T22:46:00.000+01:00

Artyom took these on the last day of the term in December. This is just before the big boulder of final papers came crashing down on us, like that big rock on Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lots Ark...remember?
Anyway, I am really taken with these pictures, because they actually look like what I spend 90% of my day staring at. I have all my classes with all these same people, and yes, even all in the same room.

L-R: Ram, Mariya, Stefan, me, Simion, Gergő

Colin, Florin, Damir

Asa, Brigette

Balazs, Florin

How much do I love this crazy panorama shot?
Gergő, Stefan, Maria, Don

Gergő, (back of Stefans head?), Ola, Artyom, Cosmin

Damn we're a fine lookin bunch. At least, we are if you can see us through all the mess of papers.
Also, I don't want to be making rash assumptions, but I hear that the city outside of this building is beautiful. At least, thats what I hear.

Indeed

2007-01-26T13:36:00.000+01:00

Ok, so you KNOW how I feel about California, but I have been looking at a ton of options, and I am pretty sure that I want to go here.

3 Totally Excellent Things That Happened To Me This Evening

2007-01-25T22:55:00.000+01:00

I went to Batthany Ter with Asa and Ola tonight to start our project for our Fieldwork and Methods class today. There is a group of protesters that gathers there everyday, and we are planning an ethnography project with them for the term. Tonight was our preliminary visit to see the group, and we got F-ing initiated. It was crazy. Some dude, comes up to us and was like, "Hey guys! This is great that you're here! Blahsiblahsiablasdisafskhdfkhjsfalkh!!! Oh you speak English! I'll get someone! I'll get someone!!--here. hold my flag. wave it. wave my flag!--WHO SPEAKS ENGLISH! ENGLISH! SOMEBODY COME TALK TO THE KIDS IN ENGLISH!!"
Omigod it was so awesome.
This was a group of nationalist Magyars who are SUUUPER excited about Greater Hungary and Hungarian identity that stretches across Eastern Europe. Greater Hungary is the current name for all the lands that used to be part of the Kingdom of Hungary, till there was some unabashed ass-whoopin' with the Treaty of Trianon after World War I.

You just lost World War One.
Let me see your pouty face!
They took Transylvania back.
Let me see your pouty face!
Slovakia ran off with Czech.
Let me see your pouty face!
You lost Croatia and the Serbs.
Let me see your pouty face!

Anyway, these guys tonight were super roudy and tons of fun. They told us about another protest that is being planned for Saturday. One guy told us of a good spot on the bridge to sit and watch parliament while they have a hayday on the lawn. There is also going to be another protest action in the morning that will involve cars. Lots of cars. Apparently the city is giving them the run around with protest permits, so they cant march like they want to. Instead, they have opted for plan B which is a caravan down the roads in cars. Now, this is technically illegal, so they are going to dress up the whole event like it is a wedding, just a wedding with a group of nationalist who happen to have brought their banners and theme music with them (O! Magyarorszag!)

Right, but here's the punch. Mr. Super Excited who has been introducing us to everyone who speaks 2 words of English all night fully gives us his phone number and offers to drive all 3 of us around in his car on Saturday during the caravan. He even offers to fame marry Asa and I so we can be the bride and groom at the 'wedding'. The only catch is that Asa has to play the girl.
Awesome.

After this, i went over to Ola's place for a cup of tea, because we had been standing out in the -2 degree cold listening to nationalist diatribes for over and hour, and we coudn't feel our toes. I was so thrilled by this, because I absolutely adore Ola, and I don't often get to hang out with her outside of class. I mean, we only switched phone numbers for the first time this evening, which is totally unacceptable. I went to her place and realized that (a) I am dumb and never realized that she lives with Agnes, a rad girl in my Hungarian class, and that (b) I almost rented her apartment in September, before I moved in with the guys. They are splitting a room that I was going to share with a legal studies student from Croatia named Maria. She eventually told me that two Polish girls had taken the room. Three cheers for me putting two and two together. But anyway, I got to have a lovely cup of tea and hang out with two excellent women, and there was icing on the cake as well. At her apartment, Ola busted out these:

Chocolate covered vodka. These little things are sooo good. We always have them at home too. Stephen and I absolutely gorge on them. But these ones of Ola's are of the cranberry persuasion as well. How freikin incredible are these things?

So incredible.

I finally headed home cause I needed to call my mom back for like the 6th time that day (I actually had to hang up on her earlier cause she called just as the Magyar Uber-Nationalists were starting to play the Hungarian AND Transylvanian national anthems). And let me tell you, when I got home, I found a bounty of pickled things in the fridge. I am so my gramma's grandchild. I can not get enough of pickled things. Cucumbers, beets, cabbage, anything. And I am saddened by the knowledge that when I say something like "pickled beets" you imagine something totally sad and Safeway-like, like this:

Oh man. It just makes you want to cry. No. No, screw that soggy crap that has been in the glass jar for the last 30 years. I am talking Jew-food fresh, locally encased, giant tub from the elelmiszer for $1.45, massive vat of picked beets that were crinkle cut with love in the last week:

YUM!
Oh, and in addition to a giant thing o beets, we also got some super spicy pickled cabbage. It is somewhere in between saurkraut and coleslaw, with a major punch. I cant stop eating.

Word to the wise: super-spicy pickled cabbage = double plus yum. I even want to take another picture of me eating it and upload that too, but I suspect that might be a little much. I am the love that dare not speak its name.

Ima go get some of those chocolates out of the freezer...

Ligaya Is a Well of Greatness

2007-01-24T02:26:00.000+01:00

Ok, I just took this from one of Ligaya's myspace surveys. I think it may be the best idea I have heard all week, and I just had to share it.

19) If you could host a tea party with any six people alive or living who would they be? What would be the seating arrangement?
Ann Coulter next to Jon Stewart. Jesus Christ and The Prophet Muhammed at the head/foot.
George W. Bush and Jennifer Carroll opposite Coulter and Stewart. I, of course, would be busy puttering around refilling tea cups and making sure everybody had enough finger foods.

Perfect. Cept I wanna be next to Coulter. I want to have a better look at what she sneaks into her food.

There was indeed Christmas in Budapest (the booze narrative)

2007-01-24T00:33:00.000+01:00

Ok, for starters, this is the first of a series of blog entries that I have been meaning to make for a little while. I'm playing catch up, so bear with me here. Second, I would really like to insist that I have actually NOT been drinking the copious amounts of alcohol that reading this blog might make you think I do. I'm not a drunk, my liver is fine, I just get really excited about liquor sometimes. Really excited. I mean, what do you expect me to do when people bring GORGEOUS stuff like this in to my life?

I mean seriously. SERIOUSLY! I dont even remember what we had for dinner. But I remember every drop of liquid that hit my tongue.

For starters, I had just gotten back from my trip to Warsaw with Kasia. I had brought back an assortment of goodies, including two of my favorite vodkas ever (and I fancy myself kind of a vodka snob, so know that I take these products very seriously.)
The first is Siwucha, which is apparently a Slavic word for 'moonshine'.

This vodka comes sealed with a cork, and demands commitment. The first time I ever enjoyed this stuff was in Portland when Kasia brought back a bottle, and she and Lauren and I sat on the stoop of the pink house and cleaned the whole thing off in one evening. We didn't move from that stoop for hours, and had the most hilarious time ever. I am so in crazy love with that evening.

Then there is the Zubrowka, the vodka infused with Bison Grass.

This stuff is so delicious, I can't even tell you. But I can try. It's sooo delicious. It is discussed in Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge:

It smells of freshly mown hay and spring flowers, of thyme and lavender, and it's soft on the palate and so comfortable, it's like listening to music by moonlight.

Then came the home brew. Kristina was one of our dinner guests/esteemed cooks for the evening. She brought with her a huge bottle of tuica that her brother had distilled from plums in her backyard in Romania. Oh, wait, maybe I didn't say that clearly enough....ahem DISTILLED FROM PLUMS THAT GROW WILD IN HER GARDEN IN ROMANIA. My god it was beautiful. It was a strong liquor, like palinka, but so sweet and tart, like the fruit. By the time we drank it, it had little alcohol left in it, because before she served it, she simmered it with black peppercorns and then served it hot. Here, she is going to hate this picture, but its the only one I have of the moment!

We were also serving hot mulled wine and all the beer that could be drug in the door. It was a crazy evening, what with all the food and drink. We had a lot of people over to help too.
Stephen's rad girlfriend Meghan was in town:

As well as Emrah, who was with us for a couple of days from Hospitality Club:
Heh, that guy was a lot of fun. We didn't get nearly enough time to run around while he was here...stupid papers and whatnot.

We also had all of Tyler's family was in from California as well. It was a full house. For sure. We are still figuring out which leftovers in the fridge are from that day. My goodness.

Day of Indulgence and General Piggery

2007-01-21T00:07:00.000+01:00

Today was the most gluttonous day I have had in ages. I am totally wiped out from it, but it was oh, so good.

I woke up at like 11:00 or so next to Brigette, who had been over for a fabulous slumber party at my place the night before. It involved lots of Israeli juice products, Polish Vodka,, Bulgarian transvestite Gypsy pop stars, lots of Turkish food, and an Afro-Cuban dance party. It was a truly international evening that we brought to a close on Stephen's fold out couch somewhere around 3am. Behold:

Anyway, I got up at about 11, made (and drank) a huge pot of coffee, and started by day be cleaning the kitchen. It was amazing. The boys were still asleep, so I didnt have them to navigate around, I just cleared everything out of the room and mopped and scrubbed everything down. I even took a steel wool to the counter tops. Oh my god its so clean. Mwa ha ha ha.

Then we hit the road. We rolled out of the house at about 1:30. I had plans to go to Szecsenyi Baths in City Park with Brigette and Asa, and we managed to talk Luc into coming as well. We also met up with some of the new exchange students from Bard who came along for the ride: Nancy and Alex, who went to the baths and hung out with us for most of the day, and Max and Zoltan (best name ever? yes.) who meant to join us but ended up in a world of snafu and therefore were little seen all day. Anyway, here's a shot of some of my most favorite people ever on the way there:

The baths were amazing. Imagine an entire swimming pool at bathwater temperature. I mean hot, turn your skin red bath water temperature. With bubbles. So awesome.

And in the winter, it gets all steamy:

There was also a steam room that was so thick, that you could barely see in front of you. The steam in there was nearly 50 degrees celsius. You couldnt breath in through your nose, because it burned the inside of your nostrils so badly. Hardly anyone could stay in there very long, because it burned, but I loved it. They kept saying they couldnt breath, and I just had this shit-eating grin on my face the whole time, taking big gulps of hot air. It was an asthmatics dream come true. Seriously. I may have to go back just for the steam room.

We were there until we were pruned up like crazy. And Asa only threw me feet first into some random elderly guy once. Never awkward. Never. And now my skin is so soft and happy. [--Hey, Asa, you remember that time we went to the baths and you threw me into some guy? --Oh yea? Well, shut up.]

After this, we all went back to Oktogon, because we were starving, and all stuffed ourselves on indian food at the Bombay Express by Jokai Ter. And I really want to impress upon you the 'stuffed' part. That was really the only meal I had or even needed all day. And oh yum. Saag paneer had never tasted so good.

Then, we trouped over to Luc's new apartment on Rakoczi Utca to hang out and have some wonderful new shisha that he got as a housewarming present.

Before his housewarming party last night, Brigette and I went roaming through the children's section of IKEA looking for gifts. That children's department, by the way, may be the most underrated shopping experience in the world, which is odd, considering that the rest of hte store sucks the will to live or the restraint not to kill right out of me. In addition to several other things, we got Luc a stuffed rat, which we thought would be a good mascot, as he lives in the eight district (Nyoker, baby).

Stephen also pointed out that we almost rented the very apartment that Luc is now in back in September. Very strange stuff.

So, we wallowed around Luc's futon listening to Flamenco music, drinking wine, eating marshmallows, and generally being decadent for a few hours, then decided that we needed to move on with our evening. By this time it was about 8:30pm. We found a Cukraszda down the street that was open till 9. We gorged. It was so good. Cake and cappucino was all that was needed to make that evening perfect.

At 9, Alex and Aungo and I headed off to a bar on Kiraly called Siraly [shi-raw-i] (trend?) to a show that Stefan invited us to. We got there to find a group from my department already there. Why are we the awesomest people ever? We just can't stay away. In the basement of Siraly a fabulous band was playing. They were called Chakra Hacker, which may be the best band name I have heard in ages. They were fabulous, as would be expected. I dont think Stefan has ever suggested live music that hasn't been great. He's got a perfect track record, and I have seen some really good shows that I never would have run across otherwise.

Afterwards, I came back home and watched nearly half a season of Twin Peaks. All I can say, is that I finally get it. I mean, wow. Apparently, this show is central to the early childhood trauma of a whole generation of Croatians. This allegedly has something to do with why Marko will not go into the woods.

Ok, so here's the best part. Because all this happened today, I get to spend all of tomorrow working on fieldwork methods and figuring out what the hell Bruno Latour is talking about. Chains of translation? seriously. I mean, I get it, I just dont get it. Its going to be so interesting when he speaks here on the TBAth of March. I hope he actually makes it, because my notes have been painfully absent of a sea of arrows since I graduated from Reed and left Rob Brightman's charge. I think Latour might just be the man to bring those arrows back into my life. And it will be excellent.

Dancin Queen

2007-01-18T23:43:00.000+01:00

Ok, so I have been told that I have been seriously letting people down with my general absence from the pestilog in the last few weeks. I'm sorry. I was way busy. In fact, I only turned in my last paper from fall term on monday. MONDAY! And on Tuesday, I was very involved in the project of lying around the floor on pillows drinking Soproni and smelling the anise scented tobacco of water pipes like a freikin harem at a shisha bar down the street from our house. In fact, the same one that can be seen down at the bottom of this post. So, that's what I have been doing with my time. Mostly.

We also had Christmas. That was nice. And another house guest from Turkey. I went to Germany for 5 days to see Kate, our hospitality club guest from October. Lots of stuff has been going on that I need to write about. But hopefully I will satiate those who have chided me for my inactivity of late with the story of my evening today.

Brigette and I have decided that we are going to go out and do more this term. Cause, last time we checked, we live in Budapest, and its pretty fabulous here, and there is lots to do that we havn't done. So in that spirit, I went down to A38. A38 is a club that is on a boat on the Buda side of the Petőfi Híd. And not just any boat. Its a Ukrainian stone-carrier ship.

Tonight, Szilvási was playing. They are a fabulous Gipsy band that plays around town. You can listen to some of their songs here:
Kutyamnak a Laba
Kothe Besjom
Zsav Po Lungo Drom
Kana Ando Foro Gelem
The show was phenomenal. This band attracts a crowd of dancers unlike any I've ever seen. I worked up a sweat that soaked through two shirts and a sweater while I was there. I ran into Gergő, who was there with the group, and met some German Erasmus kids at the bar.

On Monday, the same club is hosting Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. I may just have to go. Have to.

Anyway, at the moment, I am home, and finally back in my PJs. And Stephen and I have some Twin Peaks to watch. So, more stories for later.

IKEA of doom

2007-01-09T00:27:00.000+01:00

Ok, so Stephen did a much better job introducing our new roommate and telling this story than I did. But I'ma leave my post up anyway, cause I have it on good authority that I was just born awesomer than everyone.

Well, it finally happened.

The outstanding Swedish design of our pantry just wasn't enough to overcome the forces of gravity this time around.

It could have fallen on Ben's head. Instead, it fell on another table, snapping that in half, and ripped a rack off the wall on the way down.

Fortunately, only one bottle of spaghetti sauce busted, but everything else was pretty ok. Except for the cupboard. That was toast. And it was hilarious watching the boys try to negotiate the best way to get the broken thing out of the kitchen. It was totally like helping someone who has never moved before get a 4 person couch up a spiral stair case--it turns into a physics symposium, and nothing gets done.

On the upside, it turns out that there was a fondue pot and some party favors way back onthe top shelf. woot.

Your IKEA will rebel against you. It has no keeper.
You have been warned.

Főzelék + Earthquakes = Recipe for Disaster?

2007-01-07T22:14:00.000+01:00

I'M NOT GOING CRAZY! THERE WAS A FREIKIN EARTHQUAKE HERE!!

I totally felt it. The whole building shuddered and swayed on New Years Eve. It even woke Kasia up from her nap on the floor. It was like being in California all over again. I texted the guys, and they thought I was being stupid, that it was fireworks or my imagination or something.
But it wasn't my imagination. It was a 4.1!!
Take that boys.
Like I'm gonna trust Ohio to tell me what is and isn't an earthquake...sheesh.
Good thing I rule.

Oh, also, apparently there are people who are sad that life has deprived them of főzelék.
Be still ye mighty beasts of public outcry!
Make your own.

Zöldbors Főzelék
(Green Pea Főzelék)
--The peas in this recipe can be subbed with kohlrabi as well, which is also super awesome.

Saute about 3/4-1 cup finely chopped onion and enough garlic to fit your personal habits in about 2TBSP (but whos gonna know if you add more?)

get these all soft and transparent, like a bad liar, then add the veggies..about 2 cups (and chop the kohlrabi, seriously.)

Let the green stuff brown in the butter for about 15 min. DONT LET THE BUTTER GET TOO HOT. If you brown the butter to much, you run the risk of not being able to make a good rue, or of possibly even burning it, which will make your yummy főzelék taste like butt gravy.

After this, slowly add and stir in about 2-3 TBSP of all purpose flour. Let this cook with the butter into a nice rue.

Then add between 1 and 1/2 cups of veggie broth, chicken broth, or milk, or half and half. I mean, pick ur poison really. The flour should make the soup really thick. It should form peaks. It shouldnt be quite as clumpy as a heavy veggie casserole. Think the consistency of consentrated Campell's soup, but with lots of stuff in it. Experiment with the water till you get it right. Remember, you can always add more.

Simmer this for a while, then serve in a shallow bowl with fried things floating in it. Fried anything. Go nuts.

Then, go here and fully congratulate yourself on taking your first steps into the mind-boggling bastion of excellent oddity that is Hungarian culture!

And then stand in the safety of a door frame just for good measure.

Főzelék

2007-01-06T20:38:00.000+01:00

I have to tell you about főzelék.
Főzelék (pronounced foohzelek, like the oo in book.) is a thick Hungarian soup, almost like a stew with a heavy flour and cream base. It is sold in főzelék bars where the soup itself basically comes in a small trough, and one buys various fried things to float on top and eat in a big, fried, creamy mess.

Wyatt used to go to this restaurant around the corner from our house all the time, and he referred to it as "the gravy place."
"Why do you call it the gravy place, Wyatt?"
"Cause all they have is, like, gravy. "
"Gravy?"
"Yea, lots of kinds. And you put it on shit, and its super tasty."
This 'gravy place' is actually our neighborhood főzalékfaló étterem, which is like a soup-kitchen, cafeteria style főzalék restaurant--the way it is usually served

Főzelék generally has one main ingredient. Its not like Dinty Moore where you have a pile of potatoes and carrots and beef all in the same bowl. In fact, the fillings are usually rather sparce. Főzelék is very heavy on the broth, it just happens to be broth with the thick consistency of pre-concentrated cream of mushroom soup. Főzelék is usually vegetarian too (unless of course you get the big hunk of friend chicken to go on top instead of the fried veggies or soya).

Common theme ingredients include cabbage, tomatoes, peas, lentils, and yellow beans. Sounds like all the vegetables that you dont want to eat, I know, but trust me. Its really really tasty.
I am definatly becoming a master főzelék chef before I come home.

Letters to the Editor

2007-01-04T18:20:00.000+01:00

Kasia offers her "truthy" accounts of my previous "truthy" account of the truth.

basically, i came to the u.s. in 85. i went back once in 86 and once in 87. after 89, i went back every summer until college. in the 7 years since i started reed, i've been back (i think?) 4 times, but never for more than a month.

Also, it's not that Marko and I have the same taste in music. As his friend put it, I have no taste in music. I listen to all kinds of stuff. I am kind of musically retarded. So I'm really, really blown away by people who have very specific tastes in music, and know a lot about it. I'm also intrigued by this "indie rock" thing, because it's a classificatory genre of music that is based around the economics of the music, not the actual quality of music. So Marko offered to edumacate me. And so far, it's working out great.

Finally, I can't believe you tried to front like all we were drinking on that park bench was wine. Trying to make us sound all classy. FESS UP DUDE. WE WAS DRINKIN WEE LITTLE BOTTLES OF HOMELESS HOOCH. AND LOVING IT.

--Kasia

...And it was a beautiful thing

2007-01-03T21:57:00.000+01:00

I got a Kasia for Christmas. And I absolutely loved it.

I flew to Warsaw on December 19th, and got to spend a few days there with her and her family. It was a fabulous trip. On the one hand I got to see a new city and be shown around by someone I knew. But I also loved it for the opportunity to see the people and places that Kasia holds so close to her self-image.

She has lived with her family all over the place: in Berkeley, DC, Boise, Jersey, even Germany. And every year until she was 16, I think (maybe even later), she would spend the summers with family in Warsaw. She grew up in a truly bi-cultural environment. And, because she moved around so much in the US, for as long as I have known her, Kasia has always contended that the only place where she ever felt at home, because it was the only place she came back to year after year, is Warsaw.

I also got to see Kasia climbing railings like a monkey. And in that moment, it was clear that the world was as it should be.

We slept in through half of the day the whole while I was in town because we were up bothering each other, being addicted to MySpace surveys, and working on schoolwork until 3 or 4 am next to each other on the little fold out couch in her gramma's back office. We spent a little time each day wandering around to see what we could see, but spent hours sitting in cafes and just talking, catching up on all the stories that cant be told over e mail or during our occasional trans-Atlantic drunk dials. We just talked. For hours. Over poorly mixed kirs, overpriced espressos, and the most delicious falafels I have ever had in my life. Which was fitting.

We went to the University of Warsaw one evening, where Kasia's gramma is a sociology professor. We also stopped by the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, where we saw a phenomenal exhibition called Polish Painting of the 21st Century. It was phenomenal. There is a great little scrolling gif of some of the paintings if you follow that link. I didn't get any pictures of the exhibit, but I did grab a shot of the main staircase, which had been doused in brightly colored paint from top to bottom.

I flew back to Budapest on the 22nd and feigned productivity through Christmas and the few days following (I still have so much work to do before class starts on Monday). But on the 29th, Kasia flew into Budapest to ring in the new year in Jokai Terrorist style. Kasia is one of the coolest people I have ever met. You may have noticed that I live with two of the coolest guys ever. Needless to say, the colliding of my two universes rendered a product that can only be called "swell."

It was a brilliant event, her three days here. I never noticed this, but she and Marko have the same taste in music. You would think I'd have caught onto this by now, not only because both of them enthusiastically wear their music collections on their sleeves (I mean, if there is one thing I know about Kasia, its her not so secret love of bands like The Killers and Neko Case, and Marko is like a walking John Cusack from Hi Fidelity, who knows more about American indy rock than I do). Also, Kasia made me a huge stack of CDs before I left Chicago, cause she's a rockstar like that, and Marko ONLY comments on my music when I play something she sent me. We ended up not making it to the shisha bar we wanted to go to on her last night in town, because the two of them spent nearly 2 hours transferring 5 gigs of music onto Kasia's computer from Marko's personal collection. Here is a picture of the two of them at New Years reciting the words to every Depeche Mode song ever written. Seriously.

The night before New Years, Stephen, Meaghan, Kasia and I walked down to the Elizabeth Bridge to go to the Rudas baths. Thats where we found all the crazy lights that are in the pics of the previous post. The baths on a Saturday night was just too full for us to handle the wait to get in, but we ended up walking around the city at night, which is always one of my favorite things to do.

On New Years Eve, we all went to the Living Room. A whole crowd came. Stephen's girlfriend Meghan was in town, and Marko brought two friends from Croatia, Veno and Nada, who we first met when she came to visit over Halloween (check out those pics here). I had plans to meet Asa at Oktogon, where a huge street party had been set up, but these plans got derailled, and he ended up calling me at 130am from someones apartment on Oktober 6, having been towed in by David Pupovic, with no idea where he was. The gods were indeed with us.

Later on, Marko and company stayed at the Living Room to get down with their bad selves, and Stephen, Meghan, Kasia and I trooped off with ideas of home. Instead, we started talking about cool places to visit before Kasia left, and in the end, at about 2am on New Years morning, we somehow made it to and into Szimpla (not the killer backdrop eh?).

We ran into some other CEU students, and Kasia immediately introduced herself as my facebook wife. This totally took the other students off guard, and they were like "ah, are you....really? Is that true?" Kasia responds in excellent form with "Well, I have no idea how long this is gonna last, since she is HAVING A PUBLIC AFFAIR!"
I still dont think they had fully figured out what was going on by the time we went home. I have never laughed so hard.

Her last night in town, Kasia and Marko and I stayed up till 5 am drinking wine in the park, watching Cunningham Muffins videos, and generally enjoying the heck out of each other's company while we could. She went back to Warsaw yesterday, and should be about in Chicago again by now. I miss Chicago, and the people in it. I want to have a slumber part with Sean and Ligaya so much I cant even tell you.

But its ok, because I apparently seem to have a nack for keeping a hold on rad people as life progresses.

Oh, and this just in. There is a good chance that I will get to don a tux as a groomsman in John Mayer's wedding. The happy penguin proposal will keep you abreast of new developments.

Onward to the papers. woot.

Budapest Puts On Its New Year's Rags

2006-12-31T03:17:00.000+01:00

OMG you guys!!1!1!!!1ONE!
Stephen just made his very own blog.
its pretty fabulous.
In fact, I might say that is, um, full of wonder.
Yes, wonder and merriment.
hungaryfor.blogspot.com

Oh, yea, and New Years made Budapest all purdy.
heh. neato.

I am totally writing papers right now.

2006-12-27T16:32:00.000+01:00

Who knew that marko and i both have an uncanny resemblance to chaka khan?

Movies

2006-12-18T18:42:00.000+01:00

So, I went out and bought myself an early Christmas present the other day. I got another external hard drive. And it is already my favorite thing ever. Its made by a Hungarian company called Sungoo (yea, I dunno...) but it was 250 GB for under 35,000 HUF. And it comes with a warranty, so who am I to complain?

Plus, it came PRE-FORMATTED for both OSX and Windows, so I won't have any of the compatibility problems with my housemates' PCs like I do with the HD that my Mac's disk doctor formatted. I'm such a happy camper.
So, I am working on storing all of the great things that I have been watching all year. I wanted to pass along a little list of the best things that I have seen and/or am desperately looking for:
The Beauty Academy of Kabul
Vizontele
Gegen die Wand (Against the Wall--Eng title "Head On")
Leila
Atash (Thirst)
Taxidermia
Yossi and Jagger
La Battaglia de Algeri
The Business of Fancydancing
Vukovar

For the love of jebus

2006-12-18T13:46:00.000+01:00

I have so much work to do over break. Holy lord. I'll see you in Janurary. Maybe.

I went to the zoo and saw raccons! What have you done with your life?!

2006-12-17T06:27:00.000+01:00

A breif photo tour of the Budapest Zoo.

Its n the east side of Pest, near City Park.

3pm. Nearly dusk.

Before you even go in, you can see the elephants. Around dinner time, the elephants are particularly interested in passing children.

At the Budapest Zoo, you can put the bald eagle in a cage...

Get up close and personal with very clean barnyard animals...

Meet new and interesting people.

The white wolves came right up to the fence. All the animals were pacing because it was feeding time.

I'm an otter, and I do cute little human things with my hands...

Raccoons. At the zoo.

Sloth can Salad.
I just lost the game.

We speak the international language of "Don't screw with the monkeys"

All animals come with their own braille display and a tactile model. And I ask you: is it worth it?

How much do I love the little skater kids at Hero Square?
So much.

Hats!

Butchery!

Credit Where Credit is Due

2006-12-14T00:01:00.000+01:00

It occurred to me that there are a few things that i have never said thank you for that are really important to me.

Mom:
--For making me take piano lessons. There. I said it. Let us never speak of it again.
--For teaching me how to flatten peanut butter cookies with the back of a fork.
--For taking me out of school that day when Ms. Bovine and I got in a row.
--For telling me it was OK when I wanted to drop everything that I had been working for for 4 years and study anthropology instead.
--For not totally freaking out when I went on food stamps.
--For not totally freaking out, in general.

Dad:
--For teaching me to fish. Even though I am a vegetarian now, I still know how to do it, and I think that this makes me way cooler than everyone else.
--For taking me to Kentucky.
--For taking over my youth group when everyone else bailed. That may have been my favorite year ever.
--For keeping me a bedroom.
--For playing Ikari Warriors with me everyday.

John:
--For teaching me how to tie knots, and the difference between a cleat and a winch.
--For driving all the way out to LA to get me.
--For putting up with me.

Carolyn:
--For offering things no one else would think of offering.
--For teaching me how to use cover up.
--For being the best advocate I ever had.

Santa / Satan

2006-12-10T18:28:00.000+01:00

In Hungary, Santa is not accompanied by elves. He comes with a host of devils. Seriously. Santa and his little devils.
Agi explains:

Chicago Brings the Mayhem.

2006-12-09T18:56:00.000+01:00

Oi.
Alexis got here on Wednesday, after a lovely trompe de l'aeroport in London that ended up with her getting here at 11pm out of Gatwick instead of noon out of Luton. Such chaos.
This is a lovely shot of her and Agi at the bar that my whole department descends on every Tuesday evening. We ended up here after a soc department lecture about mega churches in Oklahoma City. It was surprisingly phenomenal. The lecture-and the bar.

And its Christmas season here. Like, officially. They even have a Santa to greet the kids at school and everything. Plus a sleigh for pictures, which we found hilarious. Agi brought her awesome little girl Theodora to meet Santa on Thursday, and she looked at the display and said, "Oh, look! Its Rudolph!"
"No Agi. That's a moose. Why is there a moose pulling Santa's sleigh?"
"Oh what is it supposed to be. He's a caribou right?"
"A reindeer yea."
"Oh, we Hungarians don't make these distinctions. We just call them all 'szarvas'."
Here is a picture of Stephen driving the moose:

It made him so happy...

So, yea, post moose, we went to the bar down the street. Most of us kept ourselves busy with more stories about Agi being killed one time by an italian tiger on a boat filled with monkeys.

Aungo savored Hungarian bar food:

And Asa, before he had had a single drink, shifted out of his earlier melancholy into his usual state:

After this gathering dissolved, a few of us decided to crash a poli-sci/IRES gathering that was happening at a place on the north side of Szent Istvan krt, but it was such a mess there that our group became divided and lost almost immediately, and the few of us who got out alive (namely, me, Alexis, Aungo, Agi, Brigette, and Colin) went back to the 7th district to a rad little shisha bar. I cant remember the name, but it reeked of authenticity and is right behind the KFC. yea.

Lots of fun.

Oh, I have to add one more thing, though. Brigette, Marko, Alexis and I wandered down to Szimpla for David Berliner's goodbye party on Friday night. We were hungry before hand, and some of us had mentioned pizza. The guys have been known to go down to this place called Pizza King. Marko swears that its totally good.
Exhibit A:

Marko also apparently drinks Bacardi Breezers. If only we had known how screwed we were at the time. The pizza, after OVER AN HOUR, finally hits our table, and is way sad looking. And the damn Hungarians put the dreaded corn on it. They put corn on everything. Marko, enthusiastically digs in, and says "This stuff is really good." While simultaneously smearing ketchup all over his slice.
Exhibit B:

We tried it, and this was quite possibly the grossest pizza I have ever had in my entire life. Like, ever. Even worse than that one that Sean and I ordered from JoBo's on Clarendon that had adhered itself to the box. Even grosser than that. Raw dough. No sauce. Yellow peppers. Corn!
Veni, Vidi, No Likey

So, we did the only thing that we felt was appropriate with the remains, after we had picked through all the slightly edible peices. We made a diarama.

Shakespeare Gets Paid in Hrivnas, Son

2006-12-03T04:34:00.000+01:00

What? OMG WHAT?! This is just making my whole friekin day better.

This person apparently keeps the random translations coming daily. Click on the pic to see the whole blog.

And see the original in all its brilliant glory at Married to the Sea. And while you're there, buy me a T shirt, cause I'm so worth it.

The Roommate Has Landed!

2006-12-02T18:18:00.000+01:00

Internet be damned!

We have been having the worst time ever getting the internet to work here. We even got all of our portforwarding and ping issues straightned out. We are wireless network geniuses at this point. Which totally doesnt help us because there is no juice coming out of the actual cable internet line. I actually got an error message in Hungarian telling me that the cable company's server was offline the other day. Christ. And our download speeds have been down in the gutters. Even google was timing out. But, somehow, it all came back this morning. In a flood of bandwidth. And I got to wake up to see this:

Look at that swarm! I love it.

So, in a fit of foresight and serendipity, used this new found internet tour de force of connectivity to scan craigslist for a new flatmate, cause Stephen was pacing around stressing about it.

Oh, have I mentioned this? Wyatt is moving out. He's going home for Christmas and staying home. I TOLD Marko that he wouldn't think the horsehead in the sheets was funny...

But anyway, we have pouted and cried to the limits of our abilities, and still Wyatt has decided that he will be happier at home. So, we need to find someone who can pay rent. At this point, anyone with heartbeat and a checkbook will do. No one from school wants to move in with us cause our apt is on the slightly more expensive end of things that are available. I mean, the difference between what I'm paying here and what I could be paying if I lived on a smaller street is like maybe 70 Euros. Maybe. But that's a lot when you are on a student budget and living entirely off of George Soros. So, the anxiety level about finding someone to live here has been high, escalating something like this

So I did a quick search on budapest.craigslist.org, and found only 1 ad for a person wanting a room to let. It was from Ben. Ben is Australian, is moving to Budapest, and wants a room for about 200 Euros per month to rent from January to June. Sweet lord amighty. We need someone to pay us about 200 Euros a month for a room from January to June! Its like Jesus himself brought us together.

So, I email the guy and tell him what's up with our room. He replies in a matter of minutes, asking if he can see the apartment today, cause he happens to be in town apartment hunting, and leaves for London again in a matter of hours. So he comes over, takes one look around, and says "Hi. Im Ben. Y'all are great. I want to live here."

Rad. Oh, but it gets even better. Ok, so Ben is no ordinary 28 year old dude. He is a concert conductor who is coming here to start an apprenticeship with the Budapest Festival Ensemble. A conductor! Sheet music scattered all around the apartment a la Immortal Beloved! How luscious is this going to be? He's a rather proper fellow, but was really excited to be living with a group of students (somehow) and was just thrilled to find a place that has already been set up, got the internet connected, bills going, etc. He's only going to be here 2-3 weeks of every month, and then in London for the rest of the time, but I think this thing is going to be beautiful.

And the moral of the story is: don't stress about change and responsibility. Just wait for the forces that be to tell you "Hey, now would be a good time to take care of your shit." and then proceed to arrange everything for the future in a matter of hours under the graces of serendipity, divine providence, and falafel. Oh yes. There was falafel involved. And I am not at liberty to divulge those details. I can tell you, though, that I am a happy little camper right now.

So, here's a tasty little treat, just from me to you, to help bring in the cheers for a new roommate. Huttah!

Hammer and Tickle

2006-11-28T01:55:00.000+01:00

This is the trailer of a movie called Hammer and Tickle that played at the Tribeca Film Festival last May:

There is a BBC article on this film that I have tagged on my del.icio.us. (yay plug!)

I found out about this film because I discovered a book by the same name buried in the "old soviet stuff" section of the CEU library the other day. The book and the movie are totally unrelated, but I find all this fascinating none-the-less, despite the "toilet humor-cum-revolutionary claim to autonomy" turn that is made at the end of this clip. That part is pretty lame. But otherwise, I smell a final paper in the brew. Thankgod the Israelis dont set deadlines till 3 weeks past the end of term. I might actually have time to think about this before I write something.

In the meantime, can someone please explain to me why we are still reading Bordieu? Why have we allowed 'habitus' to become the bread and butter of introductory paragraphs? Its just depressing.

"The Poetics of Culture: Anthropologists wanted. Makes more than most poets." (m.sahlins)

It's a living

2006-11-26T14:35:00.000+01:00

GARY BECKER
An interview with Professor Gary Becker, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, about the War on Drugs.
By Matthew Bristow
http://www.colombia-reports.blogspot.com/

What effect do you think legalization would have on Colombia and the Andean region?

I think it would be a significant improvement for Colombia and these other countries. It may increase the amount of activities that go into drugs, but I think it will greatly weaken the cartels because now this would be more of an open competitive market, so drug cartels would be less important. Now you need cartels to fight the legal system. If it’s legalized, you don’t need it. So if you go back to experience of the war on alcohol, prohibition, in the United States, we had Al Capone and a lot of gangsters involved in that industry, as soon as we legalized it again it pretty much all disappeared. I think it would be a great boon, maybe more important for Colombia and the other countries in that Andean region than even for the United States.

A Saturday Adventurer is Me.

2006-11-25T16:22:00.000+01:00

You know you have hit all the hot tourist spots when you are able to read everying you come across all day in English. Kinda weird.

So, Stephen's friend Kim is staying with us this weekend. She is teaching highschool at the Ramstein air force base in Germany, and was able to get away for the long thanksgiving weekend. I think Rammstein might be the only place in Europe that even knows what Thanksgiving is. It definately confused a few students at CEU. Common beleif is that this is the holiday where we give Indians the Small Pox. I told them that that was basically it, but with jello and football.

Today, we went to City Park to go to another flea market. We are flea market whores. We love them because, well, for me, the Hungarians have a sock technology that is way beyond our own in the States. I mean, you can get blue and white checked thigh high socks for a dollar. seriously. That's amazing. And Stephen likes buying flashy things for his cellphone, and Marko likes buying fake art. Its rad.

This building houses the largest baths in Budapest, in the middle of City Park.

There is also lots of "art" scattered around the fields there.

The flea market had an excellent assortment of random crap, not the least of which was the most extensive hood ornament colletion I have ever seen.

But this place was really touristy and commercialized, so we were getting charged like 5-10 times what we should have been for some of the crap there. Just cause someone from Bristol is willing to pay 5000 forints for a postcard from 1920 doesnt mean that its not totaloly ridiculous. lord.

So, instead, we left and got excited about a big checkers board painted on the asphalt.

And ran amok in the beams of the monument of the 1956 revolution. Look at it. At the back, they are divided, and weak, pitted and rusted, but where the beams are togehter at the front, its united, its smooth and steel and sharp, and cuts through the iceberg of communism! So symbolic!

We went to our favorite Hare Krisna restaurant for lunch, and passed some poi jugglers up at Nygati. Stephen was like "whatever. That shit's not on fire. I don't care. Let's go eat." Ha.

After lunch, we went up to Vörösmarty Ter for the Christmas market that has just opened up. They are setting one of these up in the square in front of our house too. I cant wait. Mulled wine for breakfast lunch and dinner, dude. Rawk.

The place is full of touristy junk, but also blacksmiths and glass blowers, which are really fun to watch.

There was also food. Oh my word. We were pained to not eat more after stuffing ourselves on Krisna food. There were pastries, and these crazy rolls of chocolate marzipan. Plus TONS of roasted onions and paprikas and shrooms...there was even a place selling black pudding. ew. And buckets. BUCKETS. of mulled wine, selling for like a dollar. Amazing and yum.

They also sold these awesome pasteries that is made of sweet fluffy bread dough wrapped around a huge metal dowel, rolled in sugar and maybe something else exciting like crushed walnut and then fire roasted. They sell them in the subways, but never piping fresh like this. I was totally amazed.

People were walking around eating these things so piping hot that steam was shooting out the top of htem like chimneys. OMG yum. Kim got in the pastry mood as well.

Im telling you, I have never had white bread of the caliber availible here in Hungary. In July, I am coming home fat and happy.

Is It Black Friday in Your Country?

2006-11-24T22:15:00.000+01:00

ITS BUY NOTHING DAY!!

Go out and celebrate by not participating!

Thanksgiving

2006-11-24T09:48:00.000+01:00

A very unorganized attempt at dinner that started with a thought no deeper than "Hey, Its thanksgiving. Should we, like, eat some stuff?" turned into a fabulous house party a la Americana.

We had to do the best we could with what incredients were available to us. We ended up with the following menu:

Homemade mashed potatoes and gravy (thank you very much)
Corn
Real StoveTop stuffing, compliments of Kim, who is visiting us from Rammstein this week
2 rotisserie chickens from the szupermart
Lots and lots of cheese
Bosnian meat
Cherry pie-type thing
Lots of bread and rolls
about 12 bottles of red wine

So, we had accepted the fate long ago that canned pumpkin just DOESNT exist outside the US. But we couldnt find any real pumpkins (too late in the season) or anything even remotly close to cranberries anywhere. And no one from anywhere in eastern europe that we could find even KNEW what a sweet potato was. Such sadness. But we made up for lost dishes by making a lot of everything else and basically suffocating ourselves. It was good.

The potatos have affected me.

Sasha helps cook.

Stephen is ready to eat. Like, now.

Peter tortures the dog. Charlie, the pup, is staying with us for the night, andis contribting by licking fallen scraps up off the floor. It is so nice to be cooking with a dog in the kitchen again. Peter contributed a Pizza Hut pizza to the dinner.
We actually kind of got in over our heads. We didn't have neraly enough in the way of plats, forks, or chairs. But the sheer quantity of carbs on the table pretty much took everyone's attention away from that fact rather quickly.

The gorging begins.

We can actually see the food colleting in our eyeballs, giving us that glazed over look.

Some of us lasted till 2am.

But all the excitement got the better of a few.

awesome.

2006-11-23T01:20:00.000+01:00

Ok, so I JUST now noticed that the link to the Joseph Sywenkjy photography link, off to the right there, was dead cause I hade a typo in my HTML script. Its fixed now. And its amazing. You really should take a look at it.

Very Important Stuff

2006-11-21T23:59:00.000+01:00

So, I have had a TON of work to do for class lately, a mountain whih is made only bigger by the fact that I have fallen behind from being sick the last few weeks. So, to handle this stress, I have been doling out a heavy dose of procrastination, and have, as a direct consequence, been discovering some awesome things.

For example:
*Facebook. wow. I found two guys from summer camp, an ex boyfriend from when I was 15, and Jesus.

woot!
*I have been watching a lot of music videos with Marko in YouTube. Radiohead's "Little Plastic Trees" is particularly good.
*I have seen the whole first season of Drawn Together. And there is really nothing like it.
*I have started cutting people's hair in my kitchen again. First was Wyatt. he asked for a simple de-mulletting, but I did a pretty good job, so Sasha came over for a cut tonight, and Stephen has put his name on my dance card as well.
*I have fallen in love with a band from Colorado named Matson Jones and a band from Belgium called Styrofoam. I have also been known to dance around the living room to a Ukranian group called тартак.
*I have been planning my trips. If all goes well, I will have both the time and money to go to Rome, Morocco, Cairo, Athens, Bucharest, Zagreb, Split, Slovenia, Odessa, and Minsk. Yea right.
*I am on Skype all the time. All the time.
*I have been watching a bunch of weird european and middle eastern movies, including The Battle of Algiers, Yossi and Jagger (the Israeli BrokeBack Mountain), and Leila (Iranian story of patriarchy, sexroles, modernity, and rice pudding).
*I am now a frequent visitor of technorati and del.icio.us
*I have been wildly distributing pornography from the 1920s across the US. Literally.
*I know more falafel places in town than that guy who sells falafel downstairs. And I think I am a few threads away from breaking Asa's resistance to coming over and making real, true, yummy, fried jew food for me and the house. HOOMOOS!
*I am a SoulSeex addict.
*I have renamed our network password like 7 times now. There was a while when it was "The Action Packed Mentalist Brings You the Fucking Jams" but Tyler threw a fit, so we changed it again.
*I have started playing planarity again.
*Podcasts. Oh, dear sweet podcasts. NYT, BBC, NPR, Mars Hill, This American Life. There is never a moment when I dont have something to listen to while not working...

Genius, Polonius. Pure genius.

2006-11-19T18:27:00.000+01:00

Wikipedia, and its various warring factions, has recently become a centerpeice of house life.
That being said, this is the best idea ever, and I love it:

wikidumper.blogspot.com

This page is absolute Genius.

Hot link meta-narrative? Oh, yes, I think so.

Friday Evening at TESCO

2006-11-17T22:12:00.000+01:00

Post midterm, meta-functionalist, uber-nihilistic students bumbling through the faculty tower...

Mucha Luca rocks the multivitamin juice.

Burts Beeees!

Are you frikin ready for it? Buy some beers to drink on the way, hop the red line to the Ors, and drag our sappy selves to the place of all that is not holy.
Welcome to TESCO.

This lady sells me my shoes laces. She rocks.

*gasp!* 3000g.

Plastic toy aisle!

In eastern Europe, the coffee maker aisle is always the long aisle.

These candles are strictly "cemetary only"

Head, shoulders, knees, and toes, knees, and toes!

Tesco, local purveyors of fried rice and cultural sensitivity.

Pepsi-cino. What the hell is it? And why does it frighten us so?...

If there is ever a world in which giant fish crammed into a tiny tank isn't fascinating, well, I'm not sure I want to be alive to see it.

This guy sells breakfast cereal to children. Hooray!

All Corona is called Coronita here. Its a trade mark issue. And its awesome.

The Liquor Aisle!!

TESCO brand rum. 739HUF/litre. gross.

Nothing makes a party like tequila in a sombrero.

Unicum. Ok, I have a story about unicum. Unicum is like glorified cough syrup. It is to jagermeister what jagermeister is to...to anything really. Its made by a company called Zwack. Well, Mr. Zwack, the owner of Zwack incorporated, makers of Zwack Unicum, gave a speech at the opening gala at my university. He actually talked at great length to the cultural relevance of Unicum, and its symbolic meaning for Hungarian society. Then he began reminiscing about the 56 revolution, and told us that, while he was too busy being a fat cat in Austria to be here to fight off the commies, his bottles were perfectly round, just like a soft ball, or a grenade, and were excellent for making Molotov cocktails, and that that was his contribution to the revolution.

Once outside, I suggest we break open the Pepsi-cino we bought, cause we live wrecklessly. Sasha reacts with horror.

And the verdict is....

it tastes like ass. Like gross instant coffee Mr. K cola powdered vanilla flavor horrible unredemable ass. god. awful.

If only we had seen this first. Oh! Pepsi-CINO! like Cappucino! Yuck!

-FIN-

Home Movies

2006-11-13T04:23:00.000+01:00

So these videos are a little old, but, seriously, could we be any more hilarious?

The Work Force

2006-11-11T05:24:00.000+01:00

Sometimes, I wonder why I am still in school. Sometimes, while I am ignoring the fact that I am in school and have lots of work to do, I wonder why I spent the last several years of my life working ridiculous jobs that paid jack. I was a college graduate for Christ's sake. Why was it so beyond me to make over $10 an hour? Then, I recall my college experience, remember why I was relegated to those crap jobs, and wonder how I came out of college with a $120,000 brain and no real job skills to speak of. Then I realize that my current schooling isn't giving me any real job skills either. I have friends who dropped out of highschool and started making annually more than I have pulled in in the last 4 years in the tech sector cause they know a god bit about net working. Damn. Sometimes I think I should just get a job.
And then, like a good friend, God leads me to visions like this one, as if to say, "Jen, what the hell are you thinking?"

one bank on Vimeo

I will always wonder about those corporate retreats and company picnics that I will never go to. Will my search for joy be in vain without them? Maybe. If poeple sing like this at all corporate events, then definatly. But at least I can put all my books aside, stack my drafts on the shelf, and curl up next to me computer to watch this guy sing about his bank and muse about what might have been.
Remember when you were in college Jen?
Remember when you did math? Lots of math? Lots of big hard scary math that no one else could do?
All this time, you could have avoided getting $9 an hour to raise bi-polar kids for the state without health insurance, and been putting that skill to work for your wallet.
You could have been contributing to the private sector, think tanking with numbers all day, with an Newton's cradle and a $100 Cross pen on your desk.
Right now, you could be wearing hose.
You could own "work clothes"
You could work at the bank.
You could be working for that guy.

...and then I doze off, counting in my head the boxes of staples that I would be stealing from that guy's supply closet.

Italian Solidarity

2006-11-08T19:29:00.000+01:00

Eat it, Rummy.

Rumsfeld is stepping down, South Dakota voted down an abortion ban, and the Dems took back the house. What else can blow my mind or make my day?

Well, this for one.
I think its pretty hilarious actually. Protestors in Budapest have been receiving international shows of solidarity from none other than Italian footballers.

Images like this are creeping up all over the place. "Avanti Ragazzi" means, literally, "Forward, boys and girls." The whole phrase can be roughly translated from Italian "Onward, fellows of Budapest!"
Its a reference to a song that was written about the 1956 revolution by the same name.

Avanti ragazzi di Buda
avanti ragazzi di Pest
studenti, braccianti, operai,
il sole non sorge più ad Est.

Neato.
Now if only I had a clue who this Robert Gates guy is.

Why Am I So Irritable? Let Me Count the Ways...

2006-11-07T22:01:00.000+01:00

So, a lot of the rioting nonsense of the last few weeks has died down, at least in public. November 4th was supposed to be a big day of mayhem. My University even shut down its facilities because it expected trouble in the 5th district. Nothing like that happened though.

There was a huge, candle-lit march down Andrassy Utca, which went right by our front door. People crammed shoulder to shoulder on a 4 lane road for at least 45 minutes. The local news put the number of people at about half a million. It was pretty amazing. It was supposed to be a FIDESZ march, but most people said that they came out in support of a democratic government (ie, not Gyurcsani) and in protest of police violence of the past few weeks.

Police violence. There has been a lot of it. More and more videos keep popping up from the inner city here, and they are really kind of mindblowing. Like this one, where the cops swarm a single guy, beat the holy crap out of him, and leave him there:

What? Seriously...what? What the hell is that? How are people not being stripped of their badges right and left? The government is even backing police behavior, saying that they acted within their scope and with discretion to serve the public order. My ass.

There was also an incident that I found totally unbeleivable the first time I heard about it, until I found an article on Chew.hu about it.

Around 7:30 p.m. [on October 23], a police van stopped in front of the building and between eight and ten officers jumped out. Two attacked guests sitting on the terrace, the others entered the restaurant, shouting, "We'll beat up everyone's heads, you rotten filth!" They attacked the guests, including foreigners, and also the cook working at an another restaurant next door...[T]eargas was then fired into the restaurant, the door was shut in the face of the owner, a woman, and the officers left.

There is even a paragraph at the end of the article about two Americans who ended up hiding in the bathroom for hours to keep away from the police attacks. Good gravy.

AND to top it all off, I have been sick for like 4 weeks now. Its mono. Its not mono. Its bacterial. Its not bacterial. No one can tell me what is wrong with me. They only tell me to go home and rest, which I dont do. I do not rest. I do not stop and slow down. This is not my bag. And during midterms no less. I have already been to campus twice today, despite my house arrest, and that is another part of why I am in such a bad mood.

I asked David Berliner to advise my thesis project this year. He's rad. He's an old school, Malinowskian, emperical, field-work driven anthropologist. And he's hilarious, and smart, and great to work with, and totally loves me. AND he's fully skipping out of Budapest in January to pick up a tenure track position back in Belgium. I almost threw my coffee mug out the window I was so mad. Working with David was really going to make my year (and my project for that matter).

He is being really kind and generous and helping me work out another reasonable advisor. He's helping me piece together my whole thesis board actually, which is really helpful, especially since his pending sorti means he can talk shit about the department and tell me who to go to and who to avoid for this or that. He's also offering to edit my drafts as the year goes on. I am totally taking him up on this. If I can't list him on the official page, I at least want to mark his involvement in the acknowledgements.

But, as they say in Belgium, c'est la vie. At least I got to meet the guy. He was part of the reason why I decided to come here. I got a good semester out of him, I guess. And he described me as "a brilliant student" who is "really promising" today. I don't know if that was consilliatory pillow-talk, but hopefully that means he's down to keep in contact in the future as I go back to school and keep returning to Europe for fieldwork. We'll see. In the mean time, I'm too busy brooding about it. And I have midterm papers to write.

Ok, no more stalling. I have a long date with Appadurai for the next few hours, then I am proverbially drinking myself into a proverbial stupor when the election returns come in. Stephen and I are going to gather around the streaming NPR broadcast and cry into each other for the political sake of Texas and Ohio. Have I mentioned that Rick Perry is a major jerk wad? Well, now I have. And I mean that in the most academic sense possible. I think the term was coined by Gramsci, but don't quote me on that.

Oh, but one good thing did happen in the last week. We had Kate. Have I mentioned Kate? Probably not, cause I suck. She's in all of our Halloweed pictures. She's from Australia and is backpacking her way through Europe. She stayed with us for nearly a week. She was so rad. She became housemate #5, and its really odd and kinda sad not to have her here anymore. She got to put up with us being big ninnies who couldn't go out to see the city with her because of mid-term work, but she did manage to spawn adventures to Kerepesi Cemetary on All Saints Day, which was pretty bad-ass, as well as a trip to the flea markets by Keleti Palyaudvar, which we hadn't made it to yet. She left a big mark on the house. Not the least of which is one of my favorite pictures ever taken in our living room.

My god, we're hilarious.
We miss you Kate!

Chicago, Chicago, You Are My Sun

2006-11-04T20:03:00.000+01:00

This is the coolest shit I have ever seen. All they do in the streets in Budapest is throw cobblestones. Why am I here again?

Mucca Pazza's Real, Live Website

L'viv! L'viv!

2006-11-03T23:21:00.000+01:00

Brigette and I went to L'viv last weekend. I am just now getting around to posting pics and things because I have been sleeping all week because I apparently have frikin MONO! I got the initial diagnosis on Thursday. My blood work comes back monday, but I am going to be heart-stoppingly shocked if that is not what I have. I am so pissed. I think I got it from someone in Chicago. I'm not naming names, but there is only one person I know who can claim immunity, which also means that they are a carrier and filled with evil desires to give me mono! Or something like that. Either way, I have been a cranky disaster in the apartment all week. I have no idea how the boys have put up with me. I can't even put up with me at the moment.

Ok. Whining aside for now. Brigette and I kept a journal while we were there. She helped me remember a lot of things to write down, and totally coddled me with patience and nescafe and pineapple juice on the trainride back when I was sore and pissy with tonsils like easter eggs. She's pretty swell like that.

Friday

So, our journey here was marvelous. We took a domestic train to Zahony, then got off, and bought a ticket to Tchop, the first town across the Ukranian border. This train ride took about 10 min, and was really more of a customs formality than actual travel.

We had a few hours in Tchop before we boarded another train to Lviv. Tchop is a beautiful little place. It appears to me a military town. Every other building is labeled MILITSJA something or other, and there were men (and 1 woman) in uniform everywhere.

The cashier at the train station was really, really nice to us, and helped us find tickets, line numbers, and the right tracks and cars, even after I stumbled through our itinerary in broken Ukranian for her. People here have all been phenomenally nice, actually. As we walked around Tchop, we met several people who managed to wave goodbye to us before we went back to the train station to leave.

We found all the produce markets at the center of town (which is, honestly, about 3 blocks from the outskirts of town) and watched some men unload a massive truck full of cabbage into a stall on the sidewalk. We saw boys driving horses-drawn carts that looked like rickshaws full of roofing material and piping around to different construction projects. We met several stray dogs, took pictures of some of the railroad switches, and ate some Ukrainian apricot-flavored ice cream. It was gorgeous and sunny all afternoon.

The train from Tchop to Lviv was great as well. It took about 6 hours from start to finish, but, my lord, the Carpathian mountains are just beyond beyond beautiful. Brigette and I never factored in to the equation the fact that we were coming out in the fall. We couldn’t have come at a better time, because the scenery from our train was like something out of a jigsaw puzzle. The low, rolling mountains nestled the train in a wide valley for most of the trip. Small villages with farms dotted the landscape, and brilliantly colored trees of red, gold and orange gave way to terraced fields and small stone houses, haystacks, and herders. The tracks were lined with cattle and goats through the more populated areas, sometimes roaming free, sometimes being led by a lone farmer back towards home.

Public transportation in Ukraine is some of the best I have ever encountered, not because of the quality of the cars or the efficiency of the system, but because there is a human being over looking every single step of travel. When we got on the train in Tchop, the conductor took out tickets. When we reached L’viv, he came back, stamped receipts for us in hand, and reminded us that this was our stop. What I would have done for someone like this on our Slovakia trip 2 weeks ago. In L’viv, there is a woman on every tram that sells you tickets once you board. No searching for machines and correct change, no laboring through a transaction at the cigarette counter, no wondering when to validate, if you are on the right line, or risking getting caught because all other options failed due to a massive language barrier. No, you just hop on the train, throw a bill at this lovely lady, take your change, and you’re golden. Its great.

When we got to the center of the city, we didn’t know exactly where we were going, so we wandered around for a bit, and stopped into several bars to ask for directions. I was able to get by, but totally had flashbacks to David Sedaris’ inane mumblings in Me Talk Pretty One Day.

“Excuse me, might it be the case that you would be knowing where it is found the Mitskievicz Square or George Hotel? Is it but far? There is walking? or is there a train that is of the place?”

Everyone we talked to was so patient, so friendly, and so very, very generous and helpful. One woman even walked out of her flower shop at 11:30 at night and walked us 2 blocks before pointing us down a road that would take us straight there. People here are just amazing.

By the time we got settled, we were ready to eat anything that wasn’t moving (we had nothing but crackers and juice on the trains all day, and we left Budapest at 7am). Unfortunately, even in the heart of the city, even the McDonalds were closed, which is the international signal for “game up” when it comes to scoping for food. But we ended up finding a patio bar that was still open, and each had a liter of L’vivskie Premium lager and half a dark chocolate bar for dinner.

We’re not very nourished, but fully anaesthetized and totally pumped about the free breakfast at our hotel tomorrow, which, by the way, is totally posh and only $30 a night. I love it.

We’ve only been here for a few hours, and Ukraine is already topping the list of best places I have ever been.

Saturday

We got up today to a phenomenal breakfast at the hotel. The best coffee I have had in ages, fresh bread, cheese, cherry preserves, omelette, and kiwi yogurt. Kiwi yogurt! Frikin A. I love it.

We headed out of the hotel to wander around the city. The center square reminds me so much of Boston Common. There were families everywhere, and children driving wildly into agitated flocks of pigeons in the Power Wheels that were available for rent on one side of the courtyard in front of the opera house.

We found countless bazaars with vendors selling jewelry, clothing, embroidery, and “native” artifacts like icons and nesting dolls, and tons of soviet military paraphernalia: medals, certificates, gas masks, ID photos, jackets, patches, shoulder bars, even bayonette tips, knives, and shackles.

We saw a handful of orthodox churches in the first hour out of doors, including the famous Armenian Church, built in 1363.

This place was so beautiful and eerie on the inside. It was simple, yet impeccably wrought. Even the paintings on the walls were striking. I particularly like this one, in which a priest is being carried on his death pallet by several other clergymen, flanked on the sides by transparent, hooded figures lighting the way with candles. One of the pallbearers is looking over his shoulder, as if he sees them. We saw so many beautiful works of art in so many different churches and cathedrals during the day, but none were this frighteningly human.

We also found a book sale in front of a building that used to be an old printing press operated and funded by a church. I beleive the building is still technically on the church grounds, and there is a huge, imposing statue of a certain printer who was instrumental in the operating of the print shop and the training of other printmasters several generations ago

Here, I bought a military portrait of a soviet soldier form the 1956 invasion of Hungary. It was only 5 hrivna. On the back is a hand written note, that says "With many fond memories of our service together, to my friend Michaelo, from Vasil. 2.7.56" Fascinating.

We also found a flower market while heading back into the center. The only word that I can really use to describe it was dazzling. It was huge and packed with stalls and vendors with displays swollen with fresh mums and roses.

We ate lunch at a restaurant called Veronica on Shevchenko Boulevard. It was a really nice place with waitresses in full uniform and candles and customers dressed way fancier than us. We dropped nearly $20 on lunch (120 hrivna) which is completely unheard of, but we so enjoyed it. We had this fabulous aubergine and tomato dish (after living with Marko this long, I cant seem to call it eggplant anymore....i dunno. He yells at us about it a lot. Its like aubergine hegemony in our kitchen) as well as sour cherry varenyky, which is like a cross between peroghi and ravioli, with sour cream sauce. We also had coffee and bread and a few other things. It was so good.

In the afternoon, we had coffee at the home of Maria Baczinszkaj, a friend of Professor Lisa Crone, who taught my Ukrainian lessons in Chicago last summer. Maria, or Baba, as she prefers to be called, is a social worker, who came to Ukraine as a peace corps worker and then never really left. She and Lisa know each other from Harvard, where they studied together in the early seventies. She was delightful, gave us biscuits and coffee, talked for ages about all of her favorite museums and restaurants in L’viv, and gave me pages full of names and titles of persons and agencies whom I should contact for my thesis on HIV in western Ukraine. She was so wonderful, and it made the whole day just to get to meet someone new and spend part of the afternoon as a houseguest in a new place.

After our coffee with Baba, Brigette and I walked back up the hill towards the Armenian Church and went to a place called Dzyga, which was recommended to us by both Baba and Sasha from CEU. This place is a bar, a café, an antiquarium, and an art gallery. It’s amazing. Situated at the dead end of a ripped up cobblestone street, surrounded by paintings, stone arches, and glittering lights hanging like a blanket of stars between the buildings, the entrance feels more like the gate of a grotto than the front door to an art bar.

We meandered through the halls, openly pined for the ink paintings on the wall, and eventually settled at a table outside where we ordered a plate full of blue cheese, brown bread and several servings of mulled wine.

Yea, we took a picture of our food. Wanna fight?

While we were sitting at the bar on the street, the strangest thing happened. A large group one table over started braiding paper napkins together. Within minutes, the paper napkin chain had become a floral halo placed on the head of one of the girls at the table, parading around with mums in her hand like a bride. A guy from another table came over and acted like her groom. The whole group was drunk and loud and hilarious. People from her table brought out bread with salt spooned on top, and fed it to everyone in the bar. They had candels, had made fake rings out of foil gum wrappers, and they had a full on fake wedding in the middle of the street.

We talked to Sasha about this later. All he could say was, "Oh yea, a mock wedding. I know that Ukranians are like that, but I don't know why."

There was toasting and singing and screaming and bride capture and a long portrait sitting while everyone took hundreds of pictures on their cell phones while wiping hte tears from their eyes because they were laughing so hard. It was easily the craziest thing I have ever witnessed. And we totally didnt get it. But we were given alcohol, so in the absence of understanding, we were at the least able to participate.

We ended up going back to the hotel later than we meant because of this crazy mock-wedding thing at Dzyga. Once again, it was nearly 11 and everything was closed. So, for our second night in town, we had a dinner of beer and McDonalds french fries.

By the by, did you know that McDonalds doesn't change the names of their food in Ukraine, they just write it in cyrillic? Its nuts. My personal favorite was the Big Tasty (Біг тасті) and the Fillet-o-Fish (філе-о-фіш). What nonesense.

Sunday

It rained all day. From the moment we stepped out the door untill we got back to Budapest, we were totally soaked to the bone. We checked out in the morning, left our bags with the hotel, and headed straight for the Ukranian ethnographic museum, down the street.

This place was interesting. The ground floor was the "folk exhibit". This is what traditional Ukranian people wear. This is what a traditional Ukranian country house looks like. This is a Ukranian moustache. Here, we got to learn all about the crazy painted eggs called pysanky that are all over Ukraine (and the origin of easter eggs by the way) that were used as sacred tokens that held magical powers.

People used to rub them over their donkeys to make them more fertile and collect them in the house in just such and such a way or else they wouldn't be ensured a good harvest. Totally the zaniest peice of cultural history that I had never run across before in my life.

The next floor up was a huge exhibition of table and cupboard clocks from central europe from the 1700s, and the floor above that was like a local art gallery. Weirdest, best museum ever.

For lunch, we went to a spot recommended to us by Wawa the day before, called Pyatza Hata. It is a cafeteria style restaurant near Franko University. Again, we wanted to try everything and dropped a ridiculous amount of money on food. I think we each paid about $4 for lunch, our trays were spilling over, and people were giving us strange, "you just got enough food for a whole family" looks.
But it was SOOOO good.

We had borsht, and kasia, and pasta, and garlicky aubergine, and buttered potatoes, and coffee, and tomato salad, and cheese, and thick bread, and cabbage salad, and dessert. Oh my word.

We started off exploring again, but soon after this, we got really cold, really cranky, and started feeling awful. At least I did. Remember, by this time, I have had the "flu" (no Jen, thats mononucleosis) for like 3 weeks now, and I am cold and achy and kind of want to die. We ended up grabbing our bags and taking the tram back to the train station where we booked out tickets back to Tchop.

Buying a ticket back was much more difficult than buying a ticket there. I mean, no one in Ukraine speaks English. No one. But at least the folks in Tchop, being in a border city, are used to people coming around with language barriers to deal with, and they treated everyone with a lot of patience and generosity. The cashiers in L'viv, on the other hand, are a much crankier folk who have to deal with drunk asses like the guy in line in front of me all day, and sometimes, the last thing they can handle is two american girls who dont know the word for third class. Plus, Brigette had only brought train times with her, not line numbers or origins or final destinations. So, it was my job to make sense of this:

and just hope to get us on the right line.
We actually had one woman yell at us and tell us to go away. She was asking me a question about our fare much to quickly for me to understand, untill she finally gave up and yelled "You don't understand? What do you mean you dont understand? How am I supposed to do anything for you if you don't even understand? Go to information. Go!" I understood that.
But we ended up getting what we needed just fine from the next cashier, whos line I picked because she looked the most like a grandmother, and so I was projecting kindness and gentleness onto her. It totally worked.

The ride from L'viv to Tchop was uneventul. We slept most of the way there. In Tchop, we went through customs a second time, at like 4 in the morning. I again had a great time withthe people in this city. The border guards were especially hilarious. One lady took one look at my American passport and said "Amerikanska. hrm. ah, [in Russian] You don't speak Russian, do you?" "nope" I said. Then she said "[in Ukrainian] and surely not Ukrainian, eh?" I answered her, "No, I speak a little Ukranian," to which she responded with a huge smile and was like "Really? How lovely, you can go on through." Funny stuff.

The train from Tchop to Zahony was definatly noteworthy. This is not just a national border, but an EU border as well, and this line is ripe with smugglers pretty much around the clock. While we were on board, we saw two guys strip the plates off the air vents in the ceiling, pull back the vinyl coverings of the inside of the car, and pack nearly 250 packs of cigarettes into the roof space. They were absolutly surgical. It was amazing. When they were done, they closed up the vents, checked that you couldn't see anything with a flashlight, wiped all their prints off the ceiling, and then moved to another car. The whole train watched this go down, and barely anyone even looked up. Everyone is just so normalized to it. When we got to Zahony, the Hungarian border guards ripped through peoples luggage, and asked us specifically about cigarettes. One sweet looking old lady had 50 packs of cigarettes hidden in her bag that were found and confiscated right away. But to my knowledge, none of the ones packed in the ceiling were ever found, despite the guards scrutinizing the vents and looking into them with lights and banging on the ceilings, listening for things rattling around. Those same cars were attached to a larger engine and several other cars heading for Budapest. We slept the whole way there, 5,000 cigarettes in tow, and didnt rouse until nearly 9am, when we pulled into Budapest on Monday morning, just in time to go to class at 11.

Halloween!

2006-11-01T11:24:00.000+01:00

Mom, Dad, I live with these people. Send peanut butter and money

Pirates.

Becoming a zmobie

Making Sasha dead.

Yar.

Brigette got mad skills.

Damir, Mariya, and Colin. or: creepy count, nymph, mormon elder.

Christine = best assasin ever

Trouble.

Brigette and I being totally awesome to Sasha, after he passed out in my bed.

Jen, Kate and Brigette.

Nada and Peter playing with blood in the bathroom.

Um, yes.

Elder Delmore gets down with his bad self.

I never managed to figure out who that guy was.

dead love claps.

You dont even want to know what my apartment looks like right now. Oh God. So many people crashed here...I slept in a chair. and Brigette's arm still says "knob". Ha. We rule.

Tatras

2006-10-31T16:12:00.000+01:00

Finally got the group shots from the Tatras Mountains.
This is definatly the best picture that I never posted.

SCANDAL! brought to you by Sorin Antohi

2006-10-26T18:39:00.000+02:00

Sorin Antohi was, until last Friday, the founding chair of the history department at CEU. He has a huge legacy here, and is the pet of countless administrators, students, and professors. He is incredibly popular here and regarded in very high faith.

Then, the whole university got this e mail from the University president today:

To: Members of the CEU Community

On Friday, 20 October 2006 a Romanian newspaper published an article indicating that Sorin Antohi does not have a Ph.D. degree, although he mentions in his c.v. that he possesses one. We learned about this article from Sorin Antohi himself who, in an e-mail letter sent on the same day, acknowledged that the article was true and also submitted his resignation from CEU. The resignation was accepted (see acceptance letter attached). We have clarified in two communiqués that students who had Sorin Antohi as their Ph.D. supervisor should not fear negative consequences regarding the validity of their diplomas (the two communiqués are attached).

Yehuda Elkana

And it came with this attachment:

20 October 2006

Attn: Sorin Antohi

Dear Sorin,

Having received your letter dated October 20, 2006, with sadness and

regret, I hereby accept your resignation from all your positions at

CEU as from today.

The termination of your employment contract will be settled

following the standard CEU protocol for resignation.

Based on the fact you disclosed in your letter, CEU does not plan to

take any legal actions against you.

My best personal wishes for the future.

Your Yehuda

CC: Executive Committee

This is the explanation, that keeps getting posted and deleted and posted and deleted from his wikipedia entry. Please don't miss the part about his apparently fabricated publications. Good gravy:

Think it ends here? NEVER!

The wiki continues:

In a 2006 open letter published in the Bucharest-based 22 review, Mr. Antohi admitted to having collaborated with the communist secret intelligence service, the notorious Securitate, during the 1970s and the 1980s. In that capacity, he secretly reported information damaging to the lives of many of his close friends.

Wow.
I mean, just, wow.
Makes me think that missing that deadline for my for my social inquiry paper by a few days isn't such a big deal after all.

Another Oct 23 Narrative

2006-10-26T03:14:00.000+02:00

Can I just say, that the people at index.hu and the reports that they come up with are mind-blowing. There is no media ANYWHERE in the states that has coverage like this. I am just speechless and filled with joy.

This walk-through was put together by the lovely folks at index.hu. You will recognize some of the pics from the earlier post. There are a few points where their narrative differs from ours. We're sticking to our story, with confidence that most versions of Mondays events are probably equally true.

Thanks to riotsinhungary.blog.hu for making this HTML available.

21:00 - 24:00 Blaha Lujza téri, Ferenciek tere, Erzsébet híd

next »
« previous

There are fewer and fewer people on Blaha Lujza tér. On Ferenciek tere, at the Pest side of the Erzsébet bridge however, protesters build a massive barricade using materials taken from a nearby construction yard.

Interesting...

2006-10-25T16:14:00.000+02:00

These are excepts from the CEU network forum tread about Oct 23.

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 3:29 pm Post subject:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My friends and I ended up right in the middle of the crowd by accident...By the time I reached the upper floor of the Deak Ferenc Ter I could see the smoke, it was a tear gas granade, thrown or shot by the police. It went all the way down into the underground territory. People were running around, some stood shocked, some were scared, but most of them were not prepared to be in such a situation. When I rushed out to the street I ended up in a cloud of tear gas, which was shot by the police every 20 to 30 seconds into the crowd. I saw the old Soviet truck being pushed towards the riot police, I saw how the protestants [sic] started the old Soviet tank and tried to guide it through the crowd, but I saw no barricades there. I saw no extremists, skinheads or fascists. As a matter of fact, the more I was moving away from the epicentre the more surprised I was. It almost looked like the crowd wanted to have a regular demonstration and the government didn't want that to happen. People around me were in their 30's and 40's. I saw a large group of old people, in their 60's and 70's. What really surprised me was the riot police...I saw the police officer on horse hitting a woman right in front of me. Her only fault was that she was not fast enough to turn away from a galloping horse. This happened about 150 meters away from the epicentre, where the riot police were standing in line. I saw police officers beating the crap out of anyone they can catch and drag behind their lines. And I was extremely surprised to hear that the police acted professional and legitimate. Throwing tear gas into the subway underground territory is extremely dangerous and unjustifiable. Riding over protestants [sic] with horses is hard to justify as well. But then again, maybe I am just overreacting. After all, I don't know all the truth about the people who were surrounding me in the crowd, except for their age and their appearance (seemed like regular Hungarians to me). After all, maybe the police did act professionally and it's a new European police tactic of breaking up the crowd with rubber bullets, water, gas and horses. After all, maybe right wing extremists are young people, elderly and middle aged regular Hungarian protestants [sic].

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 3:41 pm Post subject:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Strange things are happening...Halfyear ago, in Vladivostok, a police officer hit a woman in front of TV camera and was immediately fired. Until now I didn't hear about any policemen arrested for his actions against innocent people.

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 7:04 pm Post subject: Budapest is Politicaly Hot....

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As a Political Scientist it a very interesting thing to observe. as an American I feel like Hungary has something in common with the United States Independence. May-be there should be somthing the people can better identify with like parades, fireworks, a day off from school and work...I'm very happy for Hungary. Not to long ago Americans were not aloud behind the iron curtain. now here I am that says allot.
...You see, Hungary is a very politicaly opressed country, it has been ruled by so many for the past two thousand years. its a political phenomena we can observe first hand. its a very beutiful thing.

Ok, so I still stand to be convinced that the last guy on the thread is an American (hello syntax), or even a sensible human being. I understand the draw towards witnessing and recording political events like these, but its a little sickly to call police violence and mass rioting a "beautiful thing". I cant recall the last time I say someone get their face ground to a pulp and then commented on the beautiful interpersonal harmony that is forged from violent social behavior control. I dunno. I'm glad these threads are anonymous, cause this guy is just asking for a smack down.

Also, I have to add that I too am surprised that the police violence isn't really being responded to. Even if there is no official response to officers acting out of line, there is usally a public outcry.

Where are the crowds of people shouting "Rodney King!" over and over? Aren't they supposed to be here?

Well, at least teh politicos are still getting each others panties in a wad. This article was posted by Caboodle.hu

Parliament rejects session to discuss Budapest riots
By: HATC
2006-10-25 09:42:00

Parliament's House Committee yesterday dismissed appeals for a special session to discuss the previous day's riots in Budapest.

Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány spoke about the events in a speech before the day's main business, though Fidesz and Christian Democrat MPs left the chamber in line with their boycotting policy.

Gyurcsány said: "those who sought to hurt me have taken their revenge on the nation. Demonstration is rightful but we will not tolerate riots and I expect the police to fight against them with all their might," he added. "They do not understand what they are playing with," continued Gyurcsány, turning to the empty Fidesz seats. "This situation was brought about by a politician who does not respect God, nor human and constitutional democracy," he declared.

Parliamentary regulations require debates to be declared 14-28 days in advance. Fidesz and the Christian Democrats dropped their plan to hold a debate on the riots because of these requirements and will instead raise questions at official meetings of the law enforcement, human rights and national security House committees.

"This extraordinary situation arose because a police attack was ordered on the opposition's demonstration," said Fidesz caucus leader Tibor Navracsics.

Free Democrat chairman Gábor Kuncze retorted: "We have reached new heights of political idiocy, hearing that the police provoked peaceful demonstrators, who were equipped with metal balls and molotov cocktails under Árpád flags." The red and white striped Árpád flags were also used by the Hungary's Nazi Arrow Cross movement.

"The original offence was Gyurcsány offending the nation, but Orbán's reckless behaviour is also leading the country to anarchy," said Democratic Forum leader Ibolya Dávid. "Both should resign," she concluded.

For the record, my impression is that the people who were waiving the red and white flags had more to do with the Greater Hungary cause than an anti-semitic one, but I can't really back that up. I mean, I'm not sayin, I'm just sayin...

October 23 Riots

2006-10-24T01:20:00.000+02:00

- updated 2:00am 25.10.06

I must also refer you to the Riots in Hungary blog and Pestiside.hu, which have fabulous records of tactics and narratives of the event. They are full of great commentary, pics, and videos.

In September, Gyurcsani, the prime minister of Hungary, was caught on audio tape admitting at a socialist dinner event that he had lied extensively, and not just lied, but partook of the made-lots-of-stuff-up-on-the-spot type of lying, to the Hungarian public about the state of the economy in order to win the national elections in April. He also admitted to his administration generally "fucking up" the government and state management for the past 4 years.

The next day, protestors stormed the Hungarian TV station. The crowd wanted to read a call for Gyurcsani's resignation on the air. They were held back by police, and the conflict dissolved into full scale rioting that lasted through the night.

Some very interesting videos have been creeping up concerning the demonstrations against the Gyurcsani administration from September. These are a choice few:

Below is video from the rioting on October 23. The logistics of the protests are explained below, but watch for the following things in these videos:

*Normal People: This all began when the police began teargassing a crowd that consisted of everyday folk, people who brought their kids and dogs, who had gathered for a peaceful march in commemoration of the 1956 revolution. Fueled by police violence and antagonism, many of these average citizens with no political issue began to take up arms against police.

*Police Brutality: So, its pretty hard to miss. But the actions of the police observed first hand at these events include: Firing tear gas canisters full force, horizontally into crowds, firing rubber bullets at close range, throwing cobble stones into the crowd, beating and clubbing unarmed civilians with out provocation, and generally, inciting most of the violence by antagonizing the crowds in an extreme way. The crowd at my university has seen their fair share of protests and everyone agrees that the police were unreasonably brutal, often straight out vicious.

*Hungarian flags with holes in the middle: Before the 56 revolution, the Hungarian flag had a communist star in the center. Hungarians cut this star out of all the flags when the communists were [nominally] expelled.

*Red and white striped flags: This is the flag of the pro-nazi party from 1956. The presence and number of these flags at the riots yesterday are causing many Hungarians to write the whole event off as the work of some scum bag, nazi hooligans. As I have been talking to people, I have found that this is exclusively the opinion of people who were not actually there on the day.

*Fascists and FIDESZ members: Folks carrying those red and white striped flags. They threw a whole lot of rocks and molotov cocktails all night long. They also are responsible for the tank incident, which has been described on other mainstream websites as "the glory moment"

*The crowd screaming "AVH": These are the initials of the Államvédelmi Hatóság, or the Hungarian secret police, under the Soviet regime. They were known to have brutally killed many citizens, and kept political prisoners in concentration camps

Oh, and the tank. So the tank was on display in front of a huge hungarian flag (with a hole in the middle) in downtown Budapest. It is a soviet model from the 50s. A few members of the opposition party (as I said, more explaination below) broke into the tank, and began driving it towards the brigade of riot police. Marko, Stephen and Wyatt were standing on it when it started moving. That video follows the clip of the tank moving through the crowd.

Some of these videos were ripped from TV and news sites. Some, we recorded ourselves.

video collection from index.hu
THIS ONE IS NOT TO BE MISSED!:

At Erszebet Ter. Video taken by Wyatt:

At Nyugati Ter:

At Deak Ferenc Ter, from Index.hu:

From atop the same tank. Video taken by Wyatt:

At Deak Ferenc Ter:

Taken from Pestiside.hu

There is certainly a proto-anarchist movement of some sort at work (I used the term "movement" loosely here) that desires violence, either for political ends, or simple entertainment. This, however, describes only a handful of those opposed to the government, either in the crowd or in Hungary as a whole. At the same time, the Hungarian public's confidence in the police's ability or willingness to maintain order and behave responsibly is in free-fall, and comparisons to the communist-era security forces are becoming more common and louder every day.

Even giving police the benefit of the doubt, what I saw suggests incompetence and poor training; using teargas to drive a small group of violent protestors into the remnants of an official opposition rally certainly does not seem wise. (Employing teargas in a strong headwind is also counter-productive.) Meanwhile, given my experience I can't help but take seriously the disturbing rumors that individuals arrested in the previous round of rioting have been imprisoned without any proof that they were involved in instigating violence.

For sure, in a democracy - and despite the histrionics of some in the opposition, Hungary is a democracy - there is no room for violence of the sort desired by the small number of those who came out yesterday hoping for exactly what happened. But when the state deploys overwhelming force against a crowd that seeks nothing more than to make itself seen and heard, violence becomes inevitable. In particular, there was no legitimate reason for the government to decide that average Hungarians could not be seen and heard within kilometers of their own Parliament, especially as some of these same people had risked their lives or freedom protecting this same building, or working to return it to the function it was designed for.

Narrative:

This account of the riots on Monday are based on personal accounts and other eye witness accounts. Wyatt, Stephen, Jen and Marko were in Deak Ter as the violence began, in different locations, some of us central, some to the east. Marko, Luc, and Jen were with the crowd near the front lines at Astoria and on Blaha Lujza. Stefan was with the crowd locked in at Astoria. Marko also returned to Erszebet Hid late in the night. Heavy television and media coverage was also consulted.

From what we have been able to gather, this is how things went down. On Sunday, several opposition party protestors, FIDESZ, a Christian Democratic nationalist party, who very much want Gyorcsani anywhere but in the PM seat (ideally, they want him on a stick, but out of the government is enough for the moment), had a minor skirmish with police at Kossuth Ter, near the parliament. Because of this, the police closed the square. According to several accounts, opposition protestors tried to enter Kossuth Ter again on Monday, but were pushed south by the police into Deak Ferenc Ter, where another, larger group of nearly 100,000 were gathering for a planned march down Andrassy Utca. The video above that is labeled "Nyugati Ter" was taken only a few blocks east of parliament on the körút, or ring road, that connects to Andrassy to the South East.

The police began to enter Deak Ferenc Ter from the north (above), walking along Bajcsy Zsilinszky Utca from Nyugati, and also from Andrassy Utca, from the east, where the citizens march was supposed to head. This was a peaceful citizens group, who were all surprised by the sudden police presence.

There were several protesters, allegedly pushed back from Kossuth Ter, who were causing problems in Deak Ter. With out warning, the police began shooting paint into the crowd, followed quickly by teargas.

So much tear gas was released, that the fumes were visible and the air was painful to breath nearly 1km away. The crowd started setting up barricades against the police. They drug large letters from a display in the square, and spelled the word "szabadsag", which is Hungarian for "freedom" in the middle of the road, reinforcing it with fencing, wood, and benches from the nearby area.

The police started pushing the crowd south onto Karoly Korut. Part of Deak Ferenc Ter was being repaved. Cobble stones were stacked along one of the metro entrances. Opposition party members began breaking the cobblestones and hurling them at the police. Other people in the crowd started making a massive wreckpile in the middle of the road, in an attempt to prevent the police trucks from moving any further south. I want to emphasize that this was NOT made entirely by opposition protestors.

Then the tank started moving. Opposition party protestors broke in and started the engine. They drove it into the road and turned it north, heading towards the riot police. Most people were incredulous, and could not understand the police's behavior. The video above looks like total mayhem, but from the ground, people were getting out of the way while hollaring and cheering for the tank. People were doubling over laughing on the side walks. Horns and wistles blew in support. The tear gas got thicker.

The police started firing rubber bullets.

Then, the police started pushing the crowd even further south. The crowd got backed up at Astoria, On Karoly Utca and Kossuth Lajos Utca. More barricades were set up against the approaching police. Tear gas continued to be fired on the crowd in massive quantities.

The crowd began moving east towards Blaha Lujza Ter. The police entered from a side road from the north, and separated the two groups of protestors, leaving the largest group at Astoria on the west. The area was fenced, and the protestors on the west continued to receive the unending streams of tear gas fire. We saw the police shooting the tear gas cannisters straight into the crowd, hitting several people. This is where others report seeing the police throwing cobble stones back at the crowd.

The police then turned on high power hoses, and turned these towards the less dense crowd of protestors on the Blaha Lujza side of the divided mass. Several windows of buildings were shattered as the jet of water turned 90 degrees to the left to be directed at the crowd. The police continued to push the largest mass of protestors down Kossuth Lajos towards Erszebet Hid, the bridge just to the south of Lanchid, the chain bridge.

This group began building bigger barricades against the police.

Tear gas kept being fired on the crowd. As the police antagonism kept on unabated people began chunking more cobblestones from behind the barricade. This continued on until very late in the night.

This whole ordeal began at around 4pm.
This is what the crowd pushed on to Erszebet Hid looked like at midnight.

and elsewhere:

To the best of our understanding, the crowd was held back for a very long time. The numbers slowly dissipated as the night progressed into the morning hours. The last of the crowd dispersed as the police rammed the makeshift barricade with a city snow plow.

There are few reports of any violent action at parliament, further up Andrassy, or along the ring road, though thick fumes and tear gas cannisters indicate that riot police used violent crowd control tactics in these areas as well.

It should also be noted that, as the night progressed, many people who we feel comfortable grouping into the "average citizens" category started leaving, while stronger instigators stayed to continue clashing with the police. While the above narrative is meant to paint a picture of the reprehensible antagonism and violence on the part of the Budapest police, a great deal of violent and destructive behavior was seen from an ever growing crowd of opposition protestors, facist groups, and pro-nazi party supporters. Above all, it is important to note both the size and the diversity of the crowd.

Happy Birthday Dad!

2006-10-22T12:44:00.000+02:00

May your bowties always be this awesome, and your lobsters always this big compared to your head.

Dél-Budaval, and Underwater Gypsies

2006-10-22T12:37:00.000+02:00

We went into the Buda hills today: Me, Stephen and Marko.

The whole anthro department was supposed to go, but the trip got postponed till next weekend. We discovered this when I called Agí to confirm directions. We had already left the house and it was a beautiful sunny day, so we went anyway.
We took the tram on the körút around to Moskva Tér, and then from there took another bus to the fogaskerekű vasút, or cog wheel train which went up a valley on the north end of the buda hills. There were tons of kids on mountain bikes waiting to go up the fogaslerekű, and even one moutain unicycler...the first I have seen since I left Oregon. I was hoping that the kids wre going to bomb down the hill (and there is even a zoo up there! Budapest zoo bomb!) but the vast series of trails at the top were hardly a disappointment.

The train pulled up a hill with a slope of about 15% in the residential XIIth district for quite a ways, and dropped us off at the top of Széchenyi Hegy (Setsenyi Hill). There was a woman making old fashioned cotton candy out front. She had a huge bowl in front of her and she was pouring in sugar straight from the grocery store, making gobs and gobs of this sticky white goodness. We paid 300,HUF for a huge bundle the size of a pony keg.

From there, we walked along a small road, past all the gorgeous restaurants and shops in buda, to Gyermekvasút (Children's Railway). This place was crazy.

Its a rail way that is run and operated entirely by children under 14. The kids who worked the cash desk, the conrollers, conductors, even the kid who stamped our ticket, all looked about 10.
It was like being in children of the corn, except they were excited about trains instead of killing Linda Hamilton. Also, it is entirely unclear where they get the kids to do this job. Are they from a school program? Some sort of tourist industries magnet? Is this volunteer? Compulsory? No one knows...

If you dont let me do my job, they're gonna kill my dog...

Ok, so maybe I'm over doing it. But it was totally weird, none the less. We took this train to the top of the hill, and were supposed to take a chair lift (did I mention that Budapest has a ski resort? hehe. yea) down the east side of the hills to see the city, but we got there late and were distracted by a huge frikin castle on the next hill over.

So, we read the sign out front. Our hungarian is getting better, so we were able to determine that Hungary's Queen Elizabeth (Erzsébet Királynő) was coronated here in, I believe, 1867. We hiked up this big hill, and climbed up to the top to get this awesome view of the whole city. It was not a clear day, and we could not see forever, but parliament was visible from where we were. You can kind of see the Danube behind Stephen, though the haze.

After we came back, we scarfed some dinner, and I headed out to meet Brigette, Asa, Gergő, Mariya, Stephan, Luc, and Drago at the Gödör Klub in Erzsébet Tér for the TransitFestival, a but international music event hosted by a slew of NGOs that were raising awareness for several causes in the area. The Gödör Klub is underground in one of the main squares downtown. Its a really gorgeous entrance, with these massive marble steps and fountains leading down to the glass doors. on the roof is a pond, that actually sits about a foot deep at ground level, but it is lined with panes of class, so from the dance floor, you can look up and see the water rippling over head. It's pretty fantastic. There are some really neat pictures on their website.

While there, we saw some fabulous music, including a Hungarian Roma band called Parno Graszt.

Even though I have the worst cold ever known in the history of ever, no one if the club, including me, could stop jumping up and down like mad for these guys. Click here to listen to a short mp3 on the band's website. They rule.

Slovakia, MF

2006-10-18T22:14:00.000+02:00

Ok, so in case you didn't read Kasia's comment from last week, a group of us went to Slovakia last weekend. We travelled to Poprod, in the north, and trained into the Tatry mountains for the weekend. It was beyond beautiful. The pictures that I gleamed off the net 2 posts ago do not lie.
Here is a map, so you can orient yourselves. Poprod is just to the right of the marker for the Tatra National Park.

I went with Wyatt, who I live with, Colin, who is in my department, and Peter, who lives down the street. Peter is currently an undergrad at Lewis and Clark here on exchange. His roommate Eli owns a Reed "communism atheism free love" t shirt. Its a small world. We stayed our first night in the nearest, cheapest hotel with vacancy. The four of us crashed in the tiny double room below. It was cozy, and olfactorally familiarizing, to say the least.

Poprad is a nice enough town. Its small, and industrial. This is a view from the hotel balcony, which is right by the train station. This is basically the view that the tourists get:

I have never seen a city with such a "good side of the tracks"/"bad side of the tracks" divide, though. It was amazing. There was an old, rundown commuter rail that ran through the City. To the west, it was sparkly and new. The town square was renovated and freshly spackled. New fountains, stores with hiking gear and fashion jeas, and trashcans on every corner. To the east, the city is much older, communist block buildings are crumbling and there is a significant population of Roma families living in a scattering of shanties. The whole neighrborhood is glittered with laundry drying on fences dividing small earthen lots. Its eerily beautiful.
Our first night in town, we bar hopped through the touristy side of the city. We ate dinner at a restaurant that Wyatt recommended (he had been through Poprod before), and it was absolutely amazing. The whole weekend, we ate so much peroghi and pasta and fried cheese and garlic soup. We made ourselves ill on white flour and dairy fat. We also consumed a ridiculous amount of beer. Ridiculous. Poprod has its own brewery, called Tatran. We didnt realize until half way through the weekend that this stuff is 12%. Oddly, we didnt notice. I think that means we're officially European now. Anyway, this stuff goes for 20 Slovakian Krowns per half liter. That is about 70 cents.

We also hit up a dance club. A small, Slovakian mountain town dance club. Holy Jesus. I havn't been part of a scene this ridiculous since I was at The Electric Cowboy in Muskogee Oklahoma in 2000. The girls were all in heels, jeans, and funky white tanktops. The guys all wore Bball shoes, huge fubu shirts, and bandanas. One guy even had a huge Adidas scarf tied around his head. Seriously, he looked like the karate kid. Nothing was weirder than the dancing though. There were a lot of mirrors in the place, and most of the girls spent the majority of their time dancing with themselves in the mirrors. This girl was particulary fond of herself. She spent hours ignoring everyone and everything except her own hair:

There is also only one dance move if you are a girl. You step from side to side like a jr high valentines dance, and wave your arms around in front of you like a sign interpreter. Its hilarious, and only bested by the way men dance. People have described certain dancing skills before as "epileptic fits". I tell you now, that all of those people are wrong, because it is nothing compared to this:

Ok, so onto the good stuff. We trained into Stary Smokovic from Poprod, and from there, went east into Tatranska Lomnica, which is near Lomnicky Stit, the second highest peak in the Tatrys at 2634m. This is a view from halfway up:

It was gorgeous. We took a lift to the peak, and walked along the ridge. We could see the range from all directions.

This is a pan shot that wyatt took from the top. He took all these pictures actually.

We stayed the second night in Tatranska Lomnica, then went back and spent the last half of Sunday in Poprod. I took a ton of pictures with my little AE-1. Maybe I'll scan some of them and throw em up on Flickr when I get them developed.

Then the shit hit the fan.

Suffice it to say, we were supposed to get on a train to Kosice. Certain members of our party got on the first train that said "Kosice" on the door, not realizing that it was headed in the wrong direction. Before we were able to convince our comerades of hte mix up, the train started moving. We were supposed to be home in Budapest at 8pm. But, where did we end up? On a train to Bratislava. BRATISLAVA! For the love of God. Please, do me a favor, and scroll back up to that map at the top. Find Bratislava. Connect the dots. Poprod-Kosice-Budapest. Now, Poprod-Bratislava. Holy balls. And we were SO far off the beaten path, that we hadn't met anyone all weekend who spoke more than a small handful of english words like "you, cigarette?" "yes" "ticket" and "train...up....you, up." Plus, everyone in Slovakia speaks german as a second language. None of us speak german. I had gotten by with signs and menus because it is relatively similar to Ukranian, but there is NO way we can explain this to a train conductor. You cant play stupid tourist when you cant communicate at all.

So, ok, we pulled into Bratislava at 9:30pm, already an hour and a half after we were supposed to be home in BP. We soon discovered that the next train leaving for Budapest departs at 5am the next morning. So, we were committed to a night in Bratislava. So, we crabbed some zsemlis and a few bottles of coke, threw our packs on, and headed out on foot away from the train station prepared for a long night. We headed into the "historic center" of the city, which is the Disneyland downtown of the city--a place where all the sandwhich boards in front of hte restaurants are in English, if you know what I mean. But it was still incredibly beautiful. They had a bright green laser that started at Michael's Gate and was bounced all through the neighborhood by mirrors until the main strip by the Danube. Very very cool.

We also hiked up to the plateau where stands the Bratislava Castle. The actual castle was closed, but we were able to walk around the retaining wall and see the whole city. These are some views from the castle:
Ah, the lovely Danube.

Bratislava looks awesome. Colin and I have talked about coming back to see it during the day sometime, as well as visiting some of the amazing little towns that we saw on our accidental train ride across the Slovakian coutryside (which totally blows the quite scenic Hungarian country side out of the water. Its beyond words. Imagine the Columbia Gorge, with lakes instead of a river, castles everywhere, deep forest, and small towns with creepy yet beautiful clusters of communist blocks painted up like a Cuban ghetto. My God. You have to see it with your own eyes.)
We headed back to the train station at about 3:30am, after sitting in a coffee shop for a few hours. Look how happy we are to be alive right now:

We made it back to Budapest at 9:30am. I slept for about 30 minutes on the train. Then I had class from 11, straight through till 8pm. It was not my best day. But it was awesome, and almost worth the whole trip, just to get to write this to my masculinities class:

It's, Like, Totally Official

2006-10-12T10:01:00.000+02:00

I just want to go on record to say that the responsibility for exceptional quality of my life lately rests on two shoulders: Jesus and Gemma.

Manifesting

2006-10-12T02:57:00.000+02:00

Guess where I get to go all weekend to be in the mountains...

Is the suspense killing you as much as its killing me? ha ha.

Starting HW at 2:30 am. Awesome.

2006-10-11T02:30:00.000+02:00

Ok, so I'm dumb. I have a ton of reading still to do and a paper to write that I was *technically* supposed to e mail in 3 hours ago. But its ok, because, instead of working, I spent the evening hanging out with the boys and Emrah, watching hours of his video footage of the G8 protest in Athens, learning about and listening to lots of turkish pop music, and learning about the geneological history of Turkey's radical Left. We also ate some wicked good Turkish lentil soup that Emrah made us for dinner. He's a really rad guy, and it has been great having him here. Too bad that we've been so busy. But I found a solution tonight eh? I still have delusions that I will not be totally destroyed tomorrow, because I slept for a few hours this afterno6n, so I am still rather awake. But this is gonna be bad news no matter how you cut it I'm sure.

So, to help myself feel justified in making the decisions of priority that I have made in the last 8 hours, I will leave you with a video or two of a beautiful Turkish group named Kerdes Turkuler, given to me by Emrah.

This song is in a movie about the Turkish military coup of 1980.

Houseguest (plus some riot cops)

2006-10-08T23:06:00.000+02:00

So, we have a house guest. His name is Emrah, and he is from Turkey. He is a student and is in Budapest for a bio tech conference. Marko met this guy through Hospitality Club. He was supposed to stay with him in Ankara when he was traveling over the summer. Now, we get to actually return the favor. We also get to offer our well honed direction-giving skills to show people how not to get to the 12th district by bus on a Sunday night. We rule!

He also came bearing gifts, not the least of which was a bottle of rake, which is a Turkish liquor made from grapes and anise. You mix it with water and it turns white, like ouzo, but it doesn't taste like ouzo. In fact, it tastes kind of like heaven.

He also brought along a huge box of baklava. It was so full of amazing. We gorged on the stuff. We were in the middle of studying when Emrah showed up, so Stephen was able to grab a few shots of our working and eating, including this beaut:

Ha! When will Said jokes stop being funny? Never.

Oh, ok, so I promised pictures of these damned protests ages and ages ago. I will post those soon. I promise. Right now, I have to go finish that book in the picture above. And its already 11, cause Luc, Sasha, Brigette, Spencer, Asa, and Asa's girlfriend Nurit all came over to watch Rabbit Proof Fence, and we ended up hanging out for ever because Stephen made food, and then Marko downloaded the Disney Educational Film about Nazi Germany called "Education For Death" which we just had to see. You yourself can see it here or try the viewer below. Depending on your browser, one will probably work better than the other. It is NOT to be missed, I swear.

But anyway, its late, so I will just leave you with this one of the riot cops in front of parliament. Ah, the EU flag flies high....

My Kingdom for a Slow Weekend! I mean...nah.

2006-10-08T14:14:00.000+02:00

Ok, so the weirdest thing happened to me this weekend. But I'll get to that later. First things first:

Marko and I went to a showing of The Complete Works of William Shakespear Abridged at the National Theatre on Saturday. It was as fabulous as ever. The theatre house is outside the ring road on the south side of Pest, right on the Danube. Its a crazy looking building. Imagine if Frank Lloyd Wright ate the parthenon, and then spit it out again in a giant hairball...thats kinda what this place looks like.

This picture KINDA does it justice, but you cant see the giant temple that is buried in the fountain, or the half a pirate ship sticking out on the other side. I shit you not. This place is totally nuts. Oh wait, here it is:

That shit is bananas. Who makes buildings like that? I can say, though, that you can totally crawl way out on the bough of that ship (which is really high over a lot of water by the way) and hang off the end. And NO ONE makes you get down! Its great. I love this whole European disregard for the business of others.

Anyway, the crazy stuff happened after this when we went to a house party at David's house. This is David:

He's in the poly sci department at CEU, and, because there are so many danged Davids everywhere, is commonly referred to as "David from Serbia." Anyway, I had talked to a few people about going out dancing, and had gotten a few recomendations from Agi's husband, Yusaf, about where to go. Marko was down. Sanida was down. Ciprian had voiced interest. So, I was ready to take people to this place called Kultiplex in the 8th district near Ferenciek Tere, which is right by Tuzrakter, Nagy and Kisci West Balkan, and all the other good places in town. By about 11, I was ready to head, so we gathered our troops. Me, Cip, Marko, Sanida, and Luciana, Sanida's awesome roommate from Argentina. This is 5 people, including me. Managable group, right? Wrong, cause we get out of the apartment, and Cip and I look behind us, and see this:

Can you see the people way in the background, like 3 street lights away? Yea, they are all following me. I have no idea why. Somehow I became the leader of this group of like 25 people who all left the party en masse with the misconception that there was some sort of formulated group plan. Kultiplex is a 10 minute bus ride away, and lots of people are not happy to be going so far away, so people start yelling "hey! whos in charge!" And of course, Marko is like "Jen! Its Jen Carroll! She's our leader!" Marko is a bastard.
Case in point:

Anyway, right about this point, the night bus pulls up, so Cip and Sanida and I get on, and so does everyone else. 25 people on an already crowded night bus. Cip and I were having a good laugh about this.
Now, I want to be clear about one thing. I may sound exasperated here, but I do want to emphasize that the people who came out with us are really really awesome. The group was mostly composed of the people whom I really like and the people who I actively want to get to know more. But still. It was a little chaotic.
So, we get to Kultiplex finally, and its rather empty. boo. Yusaf's predictions were not, in fact, accurate, so we hang out for one drink.

Course, by this time, a lot of people are mumbling "Why did we come all the way down here just to sit around another table? Goodness. I don't even know who some of you are. I thought I was going out with like 3 or 4 friends. I'm sorry that I ruined your evening. Sheesh.
So, me, Sanida, Luciana, Cip, Wyatt, Marko, and two guys from Princeton (names? eh?) round up and head to Tuzrakter, which is a 10 minute walk away. Sanida had never been there, so it was great. It was drizzling a little bit, but the place is beautiful when the weather is like that.

Oh, thats Ciprian. This is the guy who managed to get 30 people to follow him over to his house for a party at 4 in the afternoon on a thursday during zero week. He's a character. So, yea, we didnt get home till late.

But don't worry. I still managed to get some sleep and get up the next morning for church. Literally. I have an ethnography project to do for my Anthropology of Religions class at Szent Istvan Bacilika, which is right around the corner from my school. So I went to mass this morning. Brigette was supposed to come, but she got stuck on a bus that she thought was going to Deak Ferenc Ter, which actually took her over to the Buda side, and she got eaten alive by fate and circumstance.

This basilica is beautiful. This is a shot from the outside. The flags marking the 50 year anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution are up in this shot, so its a pretty new picture.

My school is literally 25m behind where the photographer was standing for this shot.
The inside is almost too much. Gold and gilt and paintings and gloss and marble everywhere.

But mass was pretty casual, so it was nice. Lots of tourists everywhere on Sunday mass. That kinda pissed me off. I dont mind people coming in and seeing the place, and they keep the actual nave roped off, but people would come into the seats, and then go, and then come again, and then talk very loudly in english about the tickets they had just bought at the penztar for the tour later, and were, generally, just plain obnoxious. I wanted to smack a few people, but catholics dont really keep bibles lying around the basilika, so there was nothing to beat people about the head with. The preist and I had a totally culture-cross moment when it came to communion. Apparently, I take communion like an american protestant. Who knew? But the guy was super nice, and patient withteh fact that I spoke very little Hungarian, so we were cool.

I am told that there is a Ukranian orthodox church down by Erszbet Hid. I may head there in 2 Sundays as well. Sounds like a neat place.

But now, I have to go clean, because our place is filthy, and some people from my department are coming over later to watch Rabbit Proof Fence. I have to mop, or else I am going to start screaming like Ligaya when ever someone comes over. "I live in my own filth! ahh!"

Tour of the Szinpad

2006-10-08T03:21:00.000+02:00

i live here. Sorry for the funky compression a la GoogleVideo. I tried to compress this my self with FFmpegX, but I keep getting script errors with all the videos taken from Stephens camera. ah well....

Tuzrakter

2006-10-07T19:49:00.000+02:00


This is the ruin pub that we now know and love. Google video did some funny compression stuff. we'll see how long this lasts up here...

Notes

2006-10-04T15:53:00.000+02:00

I have come to notice that all my days seem to start when I get home from school. For some reason, that is how I am segmenting my time in my head.
Here is what the last one has looked like:

Tuesday
8:30pm--get home from school. Fry and egg and shove a sandwich into my face.
9:00pm--house meeting about content for Disantidisestablishmentarianism.
9:30pm--make tea. read Trouillot.
10:30pm--have an argument with Marko about the proper way to pronounce the words "grocery" and "chicago." Get frustrated because the Oxford American Dictionary agrees with the Croatian. Write this off since there can be nothing that is both Oxford and American. Tell Marko this.
10:48pm--listen to the story of how George Soros single-handedly caused Britain to pull out of the EMU by borrowing a billion pounds from the bank of england and then selling them on the exchange market, causeing the pound to crash. He apparently made 2billion in the process though.
11:09pm--Read Durkheim
1:00am--Draw bath. make more tea. Read Durkheim
1:30am--get in bath. Read Sahlins.
2:00am--get out of bath. make some spinache. Read Sahlins on the counter of the kitchen while stirring.
2:20am--eat spinach. Read Sahlins.
2:30am--sleep.
Wednesday
9:30am--get up. Make tea. Put cereal and yogurt in a bowl. Stir. eat. Read Malinowski.
10:00am--get dressed. pack food. Pack bag. Try to wrangle mind-boggling bed-head with water and gel.
10:30am--head to trains. Read notes on Chakrabati on the train.
10:40am--get to school. Review Chakrabati in the lobby.
11:00am--Class: Colonialism and Postcolonial Studies.
11:55am--Break from class. Meet Vlad, who is looking for a native English speaker. Get a formal introduction from David Berliner. Find out that Vlad studies Ukraine too. Make plans to meet in front of the library at 12:45 so I can review the english in some subtitles.
12:00pm--Class: Coloniamism and Postcolonial Studies
12:45pm--Meet Vlad in the library lobby. Watch the trailer of the movie he and his wife are making on Romanian gypsies. Its called Birds Road. Its really good.
12:50pm--Hear "oh my god its jen! jen carroll!! yay!!!" and then get knocked to the ground by Marko who has just run across the hall to tackle me. Get found by Stephen, and discuss wireless routers for the house. Then apologize to Vlad.
12:53pm--Discuss the gypsy population with Vlad, discuss the idiosyncracies of the English language. Spend about 10 minutes talking about the literature on biological citizenship in Ukraine. Get an offer for contacts in L'viv. Score.
1:15pm--fire off a few e mails. Want to write kasia back, but have no time.
1:20pm--review notes on Merton.
1:30pm--Run to nadi's bufe. Get a sandwhich. Run into Asa and walk to class together.
1:40pm--Class: The Logic of Social Inquiry.
3:20pm--gather with the department to discuss where we should go this weekend for Mariya's birthday. Decide that, since I have never heard of the place but have had 3 people mention it today, that God really wants me to go to Zoldpardon on the Buda side on Saturday night to go dancing. i think so, yes.
3:35pm--grab food from locker and go to LapTop lounge. Shove quinoa into my face. Blog. Check e mail.
4:00pm--Listen to the CD of Polish hard-core music that Osa made me. Read Malinowski.
5:30pm--Class: Hungarian
7:00pm--Run like mad across campus
7:03pm--show up slightly late to class: French.
8:30pm--walk home.
9:00pm--convince Wyatt to go running with me.
9:05pm--deny incredible urge to eat.
9:15pm--go running with Wyatt.
9:45pm--shower.
9:50pm--go into the kitchen and eat the hell out of something.
10:00pm--Start over. Read Said and Sahlins till the sun comes up. Prepare presentation for Anthropology of Religions tomorrow morning at 9.

Housewarming and the fire warehouse.

2006-10-03T17:27:00.000+02:00

So, we finally opened up our space! We got the kitchen straightened out, hung Turkish communist party flags on the wall, and invited 120 of our closest new friends over to start spreading the love.
We had our official house party last Saturday night. It was great. Tons of people showed up. One measure of this was that there were at least 70 bottles of wine to take down to recycling the next day. I took a big long video of the flat so that we could post a virtual tour of the place while it was filled to the gills with our friends, but I am having trouble uploading it, so, for the time being, you'll have to make do with this pick of the living room, which was taken sometime around 9:00

We met a few of the neighbors, including one guy named Andrew who lives above us. He is also American (our building is full of foreigners). He is 25 and writes for Newsweek. We all openely wondered what it is like to have real job skills.
After about 12:30, we all went out to Tűzraktér, a wicked ruin pub in the 8th district.
We lost a few people at Tereszkörút, and had to wait around at the train stop for a bit, but don't you fear! The sociologists brought whisky!

Anyway, this bar, Tűzraktér, is great. The name means either "fire warehouse" or "fire space" in english, depending on what vowels you use (this varies even in the bar). It falls into a category that people here call "ruin pubs." The space is actually an old soviet needle factory that is owned by the government, but has been abandoned for years. Tűzraktér has been present in this space since 2003. The directions when we first went there were as follows: Take the blue line to Ferenciek Tere. Get off, and head south about a block. Turn right at the rubble. When you see 200 bikes parked out front, you know you're there.

The main space is the courtyard, which has been painted time and time again with murals and graffiti art. There are usually visual displays on the walls too. One night, they were playing this trippy loop of Jon Benet Ramsey. Didn't know how I felt about that. Anyway, the bar is off to one side, and has like 14 people working behind it to keep up with the crowd. There is some dude selling sausages and grilled eggs off to the side (we love this guy....)

And there is always this little camp of fire jugglers off to the other side. There are also frequent art exibits and several back rooms that serve as galleries and dance halls for trance, house, stuff like that.
The main building that surrounds this courtyard is 5 stories tall and has been taken over by artists. Some may live there, but it is mostly used as studio and performance space. We havn't done much exploring up there, but its in the works. Anyway, on Saturday, we were here till 3am.

This is what 3am looks like. We're sleepy. But its ok, cause we have cookies at 500,HUF a bag.

More videos to come....and I still havn't delivered those pictures of the protests that I promised. Soon, soon. We will have internet at our house come Friday, and this will all get much much easier.

tee hee

2006-09-26T16:53:00.000+02:00

Everyone loves a good Screen Shot of a chicken standing in for the state police.

The Szimple Life

2006-09-25T09:55:00.000+02:00

So, a few interesting things happened this weekend. The good news is, I was cultured and educated. The bad news is, it was by one of these guys:

3 guesses which one. Say hello to my department, y'all.

So anyway, last friday, I went with Asa to Rosh Hoshanah services at the main synagogue in Budapest. This place is beyond description. It is absolutely gorgeous both inside and out, and is allegedly the largest synagogue in Europe. We didn't stay too long, as Asa was weirded out by the use of an organ and hymn-like singing. He said that he felt like he was in mass. Not that I was bothered. But anyway, off we went for more adventures.

A bunch of use went to this huge outdoor bar on Thursday called Szimpla, which is about 1 km from Jokai Ter where we live. It is on Kazinczky Utca (thats Hungarian for "road", in case you didn't put that together on your own), and they have marked the significance of this address by putting this on the back of the door to the men's room:

He he. Excellent. This place is in the courtyard of an old soviet factory block, as are most of the awesome places in this city (speaking of which, look for a posting on Tuzrakter soon, which may just be my reason to live for the next 10 months). On this night, an old documentary on animals in the Budapest zoo--they have raccoons in the zoo, y'all--and were playing some excellent house music. 1L of Dreher Bak, which is like Hungarian Guiness, is 400, HUF. Thats less than $2. You can also buy silk tank tops and a new cell phone at the bar. Hungary really is into the all-inclusive set up. I love it.

Oh yea, formal introductions. Guys, meet my flatmates. Thats Stephen, me, Wyatt, and Marko. Our house is called "The Szinpad." The name actually makes sense if you know that our frontdoor is under a huge neon sign that reads "Kolibri Szinhaz". I ain't gonna tell ya. You gotta look it up. Our door buzzer is labeled "You just lost the game." We think that we rule.

Also, this is Sanida, who went to Hockaday. She's been living in Bulgaria for the last 5 years though, and doesn't really identify as American anymore, though I often remind her that I know where her parents live. She taught me the Bulgarian way to drink Turkish coffee and read the grounds when I was done. She's pretty rad.

Swagger

2006-09-25T09:51:00.000+02:00

Though its a little late in coming, I wanted to indicate for the record that International Talk Like A Pirate day was duly observed in our house.

And How.

And Now for Something Completely Different

2006-09-21T12:51:00.000+02:00

So, I hate to distract attentions from the very exciting uprising that has been causing tear gas containers to collect at the front door to my apartment (location location location!), but I havn't really taken the time to mention the fact that this city is absolutely gorgeous and that we have all been enjoying the hell out of our selves.

I have been meaning to blog about this past weekend for days now. SO much happened: group trips to statue park. House portraiture with busts of Lenin, erasmus parties, drunken Portugese women, and also a trip to Margarite Island on Sunday. This place is SO beautiful. The entire island is a big park. There are pools and baths and fountains and triathelons and swingsets and gelato. What more could one ask for? Except maybe some horsies? Everyone loves horsies.

We spent most of the afternoon on the island, just walking around, turning cartwheels, eating gelato, poking bugs with sticks. This is also where the famous "Croatian ice cream" incident occured. Marko got all excited that there was a cart selling Croatian brands of pop-cicles and ice-cream bars, but got all pissy when none of us bought any. Have I mentioned that he shaved off that beard yesterday? But he left the moustache, leaving himself with an uncanny resemblance to Ron Jeremy. He started walking around the house in his underwear to mark the occasion. Scary.

Dusa took a bunch of pictures while we were there. This one is definatly my favorite:

The New Night Life

2006-09-20T12:58:00.000+02:00

A few from within:

And without:

After these first incidents infront of Magyar Televisio (MTV--Hungarian State Television) Pestiside.hu has not been able to stop pointing out the frat-boy/picture-phone demeanor of many of those present at these demonstrations. They have been calling this The Tracksuit Revolution.

I think they're onto something.

Another interesting note: The only channel in Hungary that was not covering the violent scene outside of the MTV building was MTV itself. While rioters were tearing down the front door and setting fire to their building, they were airing cartoons.

Magyar Vagyok Nem MSZP

2006-09-19T15:51:00.000+02:00

I WILL BE POSTING PICTURES IN THIS ENTRY SOMETIME TODAY. GIVE ME MOMENT, MMM?

We walked down to parliament this afternoon. People are still gathering in front of the building, and Freedom Square has been held closed by the riot police since it was cleared out last night. It is pouring outside. Artyom mentioned that this is very bad weather for a revolution, but the people wespoke to all indicated that no weather would be enough to keep them from being present in the streets at this moment.

I spoke to one woman who was a secondary school teacher. She translated several of the signs and banners for us. She read the inscription "We are burying the Gyorcsani goverment! From here you will never come back!" from a large coffin that is on display in Kossuth Ter. Everyone wants the entire government to step down, not just the prime minister. She told us that Gyorcsani removed everyone in a ministry position when he was was elected last April, even though they were all of the communist persuasion. This woman said, "He brought all of his buddies into the government with him. On paper, we are ruled by communists. In reality, they are all billionaires."

A BBC reporter overheard this woman telling us about the political issues, and tried to interview her. He asked her what she thought was the thing that Hungarians are the MOST angry about. She immediately got very upset with him. "What are we angry about? This government is sucking the last drops of blood out of this country! You are from the BBC! You know exactly what is going on here." He then asked her if he could bring a camera over to conduct a proper interview. She faunched and said, "No, I am a teacher. I will lose my job tomorrow!" "Will that really happen?" asked Mr. BBC. She looked at him with a sneer and said "Don't be so ridiculous."

We were discussing all these new developments in one of my sociology classes this morning. Agi mentioned that taxes in Hungary are outrageous, and that near 50% of one's income goes straight to the government. Apparently, this prime minister made lots of promises about LOWERING taxes before he was elected to office. And he doesnt just mean "Read my lips: no new taxes." He means actually taking this massive burden off of business in Hungary. Apparently CEU has been in dire straights financially ever since they moved to Hungary, because they actually report wages and pay their faculty and staff honestly. This means that for every dollar that they actually put in the hands of their teachers as salary, there are nearly two more dollars that they must pay out in taxes and fees to the various loyal governments and regulatory bodies.

My professor is of the opinon that Gyorcsani will be forced to resign by the end of the day. I guess time will tell. And tell quickly.

The Roof Is On Fire

2006-09-19T09:28:00.000+02:00

From Portfolio.hu:

Protesters have launched an assault on the building of Hungary's national television on Monday night, setting cars on fire and engaging in fight with the police. By 1 AM the building was reported to be on fire, presumably from a car that has been set ablaze earlier.

Catch the whole article here. As well as another excellent description of the incidents from HVG.hu, posted here.

This was a crazy thing to see on the TV last night. For starters, there were 2 different crowds in Freedom Square yesterday. The ones who were throwing stones and chunks of park benches at the worlds most ineffectual riot cops, and the ones who were standing just a few meters back, standing in awe, drinking beer and taking pictures of the whole thing on their cellphones. Teddy texted Stephen to let him know what was happening, to tell us to turn on the TV. He was sitting on his porch watching the whole thing go down. He said it was like watching a football game...Maybe Romanian football is underesteemed by its reputation. Who knows. Funny thing about the riot cops, too: the people who were most amused by their inability to even hold ground against the protesters were the students from either the Pacific NorthWest, or from Serbia. We were like, "If this crap went down in our cities, people would be on the F'ing ground!"

Either way, the big talk of the town is now these Warriors of Democracy (man, am I ahead of the curve or what!?) and their [probably empty] threats to burn the city to the ground. I think most people just find it hilarious that someone would propose such measures in order to get a point across.

Burning BP down to the ground? Never. People wouldn't stand for it. I mean, there are really good doner bufe's here! But its apparently open season on foreign cars, especially when they are parked in front of the castles of the media, and the man is inside, broadcasting while the front door of the building gets ripped down by an angry mob.

Now, it is also looking like the opposition party is set to boycott parliament in protest of the current government's "truthiness." This just keeps getting better and better.

In a 2006 open letter published in the Bucharest-based 22 review, Mr. Antohi admitted to having collaborated with the communist secret intelligence service, the notorious Securitate, during the 1970s and the 1980s. In that capacity, he secretly reported information damaging to the lives of many of his close friends.
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	+	On 20 October 2006, the Romanian press reported that representatives of the Romanian Ministry of Education discovered that Mr. Antohi never defended his doctoral thesis in the country. Antohi's CEU website claims that he got his doctoral degree in 1995 from the Faculty of History, University Al. Ioan Cuza of Iasi. In fact, Mr. Antohi was expelled in 2000 from the doctoral program. The website also lists among his books some titles published by Polirom press. Journalists from the "Ziua de Iasi" daily were unable to locate any of those volumes.