The European Union

In my mind, Hungary fits into the same category as Estonia in that I never imagined I would go there. Or it did before I got there. Now Budapest is in the same category as Berlin - cities I could live in.

I'm rooming with A. for this whole trip. We got to our room and immediately discovered that our window faced the street and opened all the way. Which subsequently meant that she and I spent quite some time sitting on the window ledge, one leg in our hotel room and one on the roof, watching people walk by. K.J. and Meg. joined us in our room. We had arrived too late, though, flying out of Stuttgart, to really do much. We went out, and ran into some fellow IES-ers at a bar just down the street, but everything was closing down. So my first night there, we just wandered.

The first day was perhaps the most enjoyable. We attended lectures at the Central European University. It is in the middle of town just a few blocks away from one of the landmarks of Budapest (another famous cathedral).

The first lecture was a political science one, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Our entire trip is on Central and Eastern Europe, and all of the countries we are visiting in the next week have similar stories. Soviet-backed Communist governments stand for years in the face of opposition then suddenly collapse, and these countries suddenly have to transition to a status worthy of the EU. But at that point, they begin to differ some. Poland and Hungary were the two countries seen as most promising by the EU and were first approached. Poland's doing well, Hungary is not now.
The issue in Hungary is at its basis political. About 15 years ago, when the government seemed to be stabilizing, word got out that the government had corruption. More specifically, the president was caught telling his cabinet in a private meeting something along the lines of "We have screwed up this country with corruption and we have to fix it!"
It was a liberal government, so the conservatives went to the street. Ever since, there has been no middle ground - the government goes back and forth between the conservative and liberal factions every election period, and nothing ever gets done because things have become too polarized for anyone to work together. When this took hold, everything else destablized, including the economy. Hungary now has no timeline for joining the Eurozone.

The university itself teaches in English and offers mostly post-graduate programs based on law, human rights, and international politics. I picked up a few brochures.... but won't tell my mother yet.

We had the afternoon free and A. and I got left with Dan. leaving. Everyone else just disappeared on the subway. So we decided to stick in the area and explore. Dan. wasn't terribly accustomed to how A. and I explore yet, so we introduced her to our unorthodox methods of navigation. Which most of the time mean no methods of navigation. But on this particular day, we followed graffiti.

We were wandering, and I peered down one street and said "hey! there's a big building! want to check it out?" so we went down the street. When we reached the big building, we discovered that it was just an abandoned factory (but it had looked a lot more epic from a distance!). So we kept going down the street just for lack of anything else to do. Europe is full of these little tunnel-looking alleyways, and we passed one in which the outside was painted purple with white polka-dots. The three of us peered inside and saw graffiti, and so agreed to go 5 feet in just to look. We went 5 feet in and realized it went further, so in increments we followed the graffiti through the dark tunnel into a brightly lit courtyard. Absolutely covered in gorgeous graffiti. It wasn't just tagging, it was art.

courtyard

entryway

courtyard

As we were poking around in the colorful courtyard, music suddenly started. Very loudly. And I recognized the band as Seeed... which is essentially German reggae. And so our navigational methods shifted from following graffiti to following music (which, in all honestly, is not the first time we've followed music either...). And started opening doors.

What we found was an old warehouse, probably Soviet era, which had been converted into a bar. We never figured out what it was called, but we had to go through a few levels of doors to finally get inside. Everything was covered in newspaper/wallpaper, posters, and graffiti. We talked to the DJ a bit, and he explained that the Trabat in the corner, which was almost cut in half and reconstructed at an odd angle, was his stand. There was a massive scorpion skeleton (even though scorpions don't have skeletons) hanging from the ceiling. Overall, utterly amazing. The barkeeper laughed at our aweful Hungarian skills but let us try, galiantly.

graffiti bar

the DJ's stand

graffiti bar

A. went into the restroom and emerged a few minutes later, telling us we had to go in, and to bring our cameras. It turns out that the insides of the stalls were completely covered in anime, and there was a comic-strip of sorts ... I don't know... reminding us of what the proper order of things was? There were huge, thick ropes hanging from the ceiling (rather creepily, actually) but, being as obsessive about absurd decorating techniques that I am, I took a few pictures anyway.

... in case you forgot?

the anime covering the walls

We went back later that night with more people (an odd group of people, actually, who rarely hang out with each other but were all interested in going) and stayed for a few hours when there were actually people there. Shthi. taught the Hungarians the electric slide.

We explored a little more afterwards, walking mainly on the one sidestreet where the bar was. We passed one building twice. The second time we passed, about an hour later, a balcony suddenly wasn't there anymore. A. has the picture, I think, of the building with the balcony (because it was a cool looking building anyway) and I have the picture of the building without one.

there was a balcony there about an hour before

watch out for cars!

We also found a market. We took money out of an ATM to do a little shopping - I've never held a 10,000 note of anything, and you'd think you'd feel rich. Turns out it's a little less than 100 dollars.

That night, our program treated us to a boat tour of Budapest on the Danube. Budapest is actually established on two older towns on opposite sides of the river, Buda and Pest coincidentally. Apparently it's still somewhat of a defining factor, which side of the river one lives on (or builds on). The city is absolutely gorgeous by night, and the Parliament building is absolutely absurd.

The next day we actually got a tour of the inside of the Parliament building. The building itself is, to me, gorgeous on the outside, but way too gold on the inside. But it was impressive none-the-less. And is a source of pride for Hungarians in general - it has always been a symbol of the Hungarian people and their own independence, even in times of occupation or oppression.

Parliament hall

crown and sceptre of royal family

Parliament entryway

oldest mainland subway

We then took the subway (the oldest subway in mainland Europe and, somehow, also rivals Londons in age but I don't remember the details) to the House of Terror.

victims

The House of Terror is a museum established in the building that was headquarters both to the Gestapo during the era of Nazi occupation and then the headquarters of the Hungarian secret police during the era of the Soviet-backed regime. To me, Central and Eastern Europe carry a weight with them that we got a taste of in Estonia, but I spend way too much time reading and researching the Cold War. The House of Terror was the first really heavy experience. It is now a museum and structured as something to walk through with photos, TV screens, exhibits, etc. But these rooms were used for interrogation and imprisonment.

officer's desk

files

At first things went all right; the exhibits seemed very structured. It wasn't until the room of files that things really hit me. This room had a television screen running peoples accounts of experiences in this building, but the walls were entirely composed of bookshelves full of records. The benches and desks that one could sit at had plastic covering, and underneath this were more records. The room was full of paperwork on citizens that, until the collapse of the Communist regime, were a representative of completely one-sided observance. The government had everything on their citizens, and the citizens knew nothing of the government. An issue that came up in Berlin and Estonia, and no doubt will in the next few stops I make.

row of cells underground

The basement is where things really got iffy for me. For years after the collapse of the regime, political scientists and historians were trying to figure out the extent of oppression and power the government had held. For the decades before, people would simply disappear, and sometimes never be seen again. There were rumors of underground cells - prisoners were always blindfolded after interrogation upstairs and could see nothing of their whereabouts until they were in the cell, so what people in later years had to go on was simply the remembrances of survivors of a feeling of going down. But no one could establish from memory where the cells would be. It wasn't until years of excavation ensued that the maze of underground cells was discovered. Now it's part of the museum - you can go in individual cells, and pictures

cell door

are posted of people suspected to have been held in each - I've gotten enough of a feel of the Hungarian language to somewhat effectively distinguish which of the people were executed there, which died of other means, and which were released. Most were executed. The elevator ride down is one of the bleakest experiences I've had - everything is dark, and cold, and a TV screen in the elevator shows a man who worked there describing the actual execution process. From there you can wander the dungeon system - the room used for executions still had the gallows inside.

prisoner

torn flag

One room was bigger, and was entirely devoted to a particular revolt. One of the stories was of a man who was only 18 or so at the time, and he and his friends were captured. About 8 total. Only he and one other survived - they became victims of a show-trial in which most of his friends received the death penalty, and one or two others received life sentences. He endured about 10 years of imprisonment and was released, but never saw his friends again.

The very last room was covered in tiny, framed pictures, about 2 inches wide and 4 tall. There must have ben 300 of them, if not more. They were all of the people who were known to have worked in this building against their fellow Hungarian nationals.

I was one of the last to leave the museum (I always take entirely too long in museums for others) and Jen. was kind of enough to wait for me. The others went off to eat. We walked and talked, mostly. She and I had found ourselves in similar situations as we studied the EU - it's easy to get lost in and lose faith in the political system. The EU is so bureaucratic, and my own opinions of it are waning. The House of Terror was a reminder of why I study politics. The idea that something like this could happen is, to me, horrendous, and the idea that it is still occurring around the world is even worse. For me, it was a reaffirmation of why I have chosen what I have, even if my direction is still a little iffy. It was also an indicator of the fact that, I think, this trip is going to be a little rough for me, even though it's the one I've been looking forward to the most.

What I find intriguing about Europe in general is the relationship between the past and the present, and what is seen or not by the public (even the buildings, or in the case of Freiburg, the openness about victims of the Holocaust). But Hungary isn't just dealing with that, which is what I expected in terms of dealing with Nazi occupation and Soviet-based authoritarian regimes, but the relationship between the government and the population in general is still prevalent.

The other thing I really wish I'd had time to try to understand is the language. I figured out enough in the House of Terror to recognize a few words, and I tried at various bars and restaurants to speak it. But it's very hard. I love the difference between how it looks and how it sounds. I've never had to remember street names based on how many Z's were in it, but that was actually a fairly effective method here. There are lots of "z"s, "v"s "t"s and "g"s that all get smushed together a lot, and to me, written Hungarian looks very sharp and angular, if that makes sense. Not necessarily harsh. But it is a very soft sounding language, with a lot of "sh" sounds and what "j" sounds like in French. The grammar aspect was interesting, too. In many languages, gender is a big grammatical factor (French and Spanish both have male and female nouns, German has both, plus a neuter and plural case which is treated as a gender). German has, along with 4 "genders," 4 cases for the subject of a sentence, the direct object, the indirect object, and possessives/indefinite time, which all change the articles of the nouns. This is part of why people find German grammar hard, but once you become accustomed to it and can think in it, it changes the way you think about objects. I think about inanimate objects differently in English and in German and thus see them differently, I suppose. The same thing happens with verb cases. Anyway, to wrap up my language rant, a lot of languages like English and French (in my experience) have, essentially in terms of articles for nouns, one case. German has four. Magyar has sixteen. I can't even imagine how that aspect of the language would change perception.

After another half day or so of exploring (and discovering mulled wine, which in Hungary is delicious!) we hit the road for Slovakia.