a long weekend, a witty vaction

So this is a four-day weekend--kedd [Tuesday] is Nov 1, All Saints' Day, and tuesday national holidays in hungary are celebrated by moving everything that was supposed to happen on hetfo [monday] to the following szombat [saturday]. This works with mixed success, as everyone takes advantage of the four days this weekend, but then most businesses ignore the official extended operating hours to make up for the extra time off. Anyway, we're travelling for our long weeknd to Romania. It will be part ... 2, or maybe 3 (or even 4, depending on what we're counting) of the "Travel to Places we Probably Will Never Visit Again" plan. I definitely think that Romania applies as an obscure place to travel--when we visited the BP Romanian tourism office, they were so surprised and happy to see us, and we were told we needed to "tell all of our friends back home about [their] office and about Romania." Consider it done.

It also makes this part 1 of the "Witty Trips" plan, since we will be in the heart of Transylvania for Halloween (even if they don't "celebrate" it in the sense we're all used to), including visits to the castle seat and birthplace of Vlad Tepes, the inspiration for Dracula. Although things aren't entirely worked out yet, we may or may not be taking day trips to other towns in the area, mountain hikes, maybe Bucharest. Exciting updates to follow, I'm sure.

On the other hand, most Hungarians have told us that once out of Transylvania (which has historically been part of Hungary), the country is not so hot. Hungary and Romania have been rivals of a sort, I suppose, and it definitely shows when they describe Romanians as "very nationalistic" and "unpleasant to people speaking English," qualities which, I suppose, could both be turned a little bit back on Hungary (for the way restaurants will serve you free tap water when you order in Hungarian, but say nincs [there is none] when you use english, for the irredentism bumper stickers, attitude about Transylvania vs the rest of Romania). Now, I'm not saying either quality is particularly bad--I mean, I resent the Americans who don't bother trying to learn the language of the country they stay in as much as the next guy, and that national spirit is what's maintained a Hungarian cultural and linguistic identity for the last 800 years of foreign domination, but I do think it's funny how disparaging they are. One of my professors said, "If you leave Transylvania, go into the Eastern or Southern part of Romania, it is like stepping onto a whole different continent. Not good change, like maybe coming from America to Europe, but... something different entirely."

Well, that actually sorta piqued my interest. After all, you can see pretty small towns with church and main square in a lot of places, but there's no Socialist dystopia that's been razed and rebuilt (by Ceaucescu) quite like Bucharest, or so I've heard. We'll see, though... it should at any rate be an interesting trip (and my first overnight train (!))

For now, helo!

sam

oh, of course! now things are like college

Even though i'm nine time zones away from school and in the heart of central europe, classic bits of the college experience have somehow intruded on the term. The first of which is midterms (i have one tomorrow and one thursday). The problem i have with these midterms has little to do with their existence and everything to do with the fact that they count for an enormous amount of the semester grade (which means, basically, that failure will make me feel lousy), but my confidence in my ability to demonstrate any competence in number theory or real analysis is not great. So aspect of college the first is: 1. spending like twelve hours a day studying for a whole weekend and not feeling any better about things.

i have had the good fortune here so far to stay in good health, which is remarkable considering the amount of food- and drink-sharing everyone does here (just as people our age do everywhere), that most people have been out for at least a little while, and that bird flu is just a few hundred miles down the Danube. "have had" is a misleading verb tense, though, because i awoke saturday morning to one of those stupid head colds that never goes away. Today, i went to a hungarian pharmacy for the first time to get a cold medicine one of my profs recommended with my friend Laura, managed to butcher some Hungarian--the pharmacist asked if i wanted the kids' version or the grownup kind, and i pointed at myself, and said "the I" in a perverse misuse of the Spanish personal a . According to the box, the Citronal por Gyrekeknek [kids'] is for children under 14. Since i don't exactly look under 14, my conclusion was that the pharmacist thought i was buying medicine for my kid(s)... Anyway, aspect of college: 2. getting sick exactly at the time when you can't afford to get sick, and then not having time to take it easy and get fully better.

On the plus side, i went with some friends to the (very exciting and definitely meriting a return visit) West End Mall [west end mall] to see "Goool", the subtitled (thankfully) english-language movie about an illegal immigrant from Mexico (who grew up in LA) travelling to England to live out his dream of playing professional soccer, and utilizing every single sports movie cliche ever made along the way. Actually, i take that back;
*spoiler, in case anyone can't figure out how it will end*
the goal he scores in the final game is in regulation, instead of some sort of overtime or shootout. In the film's defense, though, by the time we made it to the final game, the movie was so long, there was no way they were getting away with an overtime, so i don't hold that one against them. It was an excellent film in most other aspects, though, including terrible acting, fake-sounding dialogue, great montage music, chaste love interest, tough guy on team who doesn't take kindly to new guy but is eventually won over by the kid's heart, etc. Best of all, it was definitely set mostly in England, about soccer, and featured large portions that were Spanish with Hungarian subtitles (thank god for high school foreign language requirements), making it still feel like a movie that would never make it back home. Aspect 3: watching really bad sports or action movies with the guys (although it wasn't as good as Man Movie Night, since Europe refuses to import such staples as Natty Light).

Other than that, though, the weekend involved a lot of sitting around and doing math in order to prepare to do more math. And sleeping. Oh, and listening to Pavement (credit for the referral is entirely cartersr's, btw), which i put onto my iPod from Toby's computer (he works at the radio station at his college, and really likes them), which has for whatever reason become a favored soundtrack for traveling alone through the city. Helo!

sam

a note about the food

So this may or may not be called “postmodern” of me, but I think I’m going to abandon any and all pretense and this being an accurate (in the temporal or complete sense, although I promise everything I write will be, to the best of my knowledge, true) description of what’s happened to me. Think of it, maybe, as the SportCenter Top 10, as opposed to actually watching a whole day’s worth of broadcast coverage. OK, so that’s an awful metaphor, but at least it’s interesting, and hopefully not yet a cliché. Anyway, the point is, I will continue to try to brighten everyone’s day with humor, but there’s no way I’ll ever get everything that happened in Sweden or Balaton or last Tuesday written about to my satisfaction, so if you want to hear more about something, feel free to ask me at a later date, preferably over drinks.

Alright, so a thought for today:

Although I definitely have enjoyed living in an apartment with a couple roommates from my program, and I’m sure that I would have felt incredibly awkward having a host family that would speak no English but do my laundry without any fuss (like Patrick and Don do), or that would dote on me and feed me constantly (like Rachel does in St. Petersburg, or like my grandparents do in real life), I have to say that there are certain advantages to a homestay when studying abroad. Most important (or at least, the one I’d like to presently consider), you never have to try to shop for your own food.

First, I suppose some background is necessary. My college is “residential,” which means that everyone is willing to forego the off-campus apartment with a kitchen for the dorm and dining hall setup—this is relevant because, essentially, up until this past summer, I’d always either had my mom or my college buying (and usually cooking) my food every day. This changed abruptly this past summer, when I lived with friends in Washington, and was thus forced to become food-self-sufficient. Things were expensive, and the 18-block walk from Whole Foods during muggy evenings in July was a bitch, but it’s not like it was essentially any different from tagging along when my mom went grocery shopping back home. Things were expensive, but I lived largely on eggs, tofu, and sautéed onion; I’m not a vegetarian, though I date one, but consider this: tofu (at least in the US, but definitely not here) is maybe, maybe, a third of the cost of bad cuts of meat per pound, and has just as much nutrition. Also, it cooks easily in the same pan as the onion and the eggs and some oil and just a dash of soy sauce, making a dish that has no name but which I ate with great regularity. Anyway, that was the summer.

Imagine, now, if you will, having that wealth of experience under your belt, and then trying to eat on a budget in Central Europe, specifically Budapest. Don’t know where to start? Well, you can start where Peter and I did on our very second day here, walking into what looked like a grocery store (it was, but it was a lucky guess), and not being able to read any of the labels, which are written in several of (in order of frequency) Hungarian, German, Czech, Romanian, Slovak, Polish, Bosnian, Serbian, Slovene, and something Cyrillic; fortunately, neither of us spoke any of these languages, leading to exchanges like

Me: “Is this butter? It looks like a tub of butter.”
Peter: “I have no idea. Is that butter? I thought it was cottage cheese.”
Me: “Um… I think that next to it might be cottage cheese. But see the little picture of food on the lid? I think that the yellow thing there might be butter, so this is butter.”
Peter: “Are you sure it isn’t cheese? I think it’s that thing.” [points to picture on lid]
Me: “That would surprise me. [squeezes tub] I think it’s butter, and anyway it’s only like $2.50 for a pound (half kilo). Let’s get it.”

That one turned out to be butter, thank god, but notable failures occurred when we tried to find juice—most juices here are more like Kool-Aid, and then Peter found what looked like normal apple juice but turned out to be fizzy, which I liked and then finished and then tried to buy again but what I got wasn’t fizzy at all, but undrinkably sweet—as well as so-called “hot paprika” which is completely mild 90% of the time and a little too hot the other ten, but which we (as in everyone we usually eat dinner with) still can’t tell the difference between.

I think we've found our stride since then, mostly in easy-to-prep one- or two-pot meals for large groups, which we host on a rotating basis, but it's possible everyone gets sick of pasta with tomato sauce and sauteed chopped paprika, onion, and tomato, the sort of universal staple, or omelettes, which Peter and I cook when we host. That said, I'm gonna run, since Kelly and Rachel are hosting an experiment tonight with vegetarian green chili.

Helo!

Since it's a study abroad program, I thought I'd write about studying for once

With every passing semester, it seems like it takes me longer and longer to feel like school is going on and I need to take classes and things seriously. Things still haven’t gotten to the point where I’m hitting midterms without feeling like I’m in school, but any hopes that taking a “vacation” and studying abroad would fix this were in vain. On the plus side, the vast majority of students here very much believe in doing homework collaboratively (as do the professors, but I think both these things are typical in math departments), which is something close to my heart. As a result, I’ve been spending most of my evenings in study/study break mode with groups of people; hosting and cooking dinner is normally on a rotating basis. As far as social lives go, it may not be the four-month drunken stumble through Europe associated with most study programs, but on the plus side, I have taken a rather strong liking to bridge, not to mention the various kinds of cookies they sell here (including a two-pack that inexplicably comes with a free dish towel).

This group-study, which now sprawls across a disturbing number of afternoons, evenings, and the occasional late night, has led me to a few thoughts:

First, this past week, maybe because I slept away an awful lot of the weekend, has to be the fastest week ever. It seems like, well, maybe not yesterday but probably around two days ago that we were doing the geometry homework that led to me auditing the class (and not telling the professor until he was walking around collecting homeworks), but that work is due each Wednesday, meaning that that took place slightly more than seven days ago. This is somewhat disturbing to me; I didn’t black out, I wasn’t sick, and I didn’t just retreat into my room for a 168-hour cry, but somehow, that week full of exciting stuff and hanging out with people feels a lot shorter than it was. Maybe I’m just getting old or something, but it’s really scary when your sense of time gets disrupted like that.

*Disclaimer: all conversations (further down this post but also in general) are reconstructed to the best of my ability, which, although far from perfect, is the product of all that work I did for my high school paper, and anyway I think what I have written down captures the flavor of things. If you don't like how something you say turned out, just lmk and it will be strategically spun so you sound funnier or sexier or whatever.*

Anyway, the second thought: I love group homework—particularly math, when then hardest problems are conceptual—for the moments when the Right Idea suddenly pops up for somebody (and, really, it could be anyone present), and then they have to write the whole thing down, make sure it works, and explain it to everyone as fast as possible. The aftermath of one of these ideas is always a little awkward for whatever reason, particularly in cases where the idea seemed like the Right Idea, and it made it as far as the ‘explain to everyone’ part before someone raised a fatal objection. More concretely, we were staring at a problem for analysis, and nobody was having any luck with it. I thought I had the Right Idea, got excited, wrote it out, got a conclusion, and was explaining it to Dan when we got to:

Me: “And then you just take the ratio like that and you’re done!”
Dan: “Um, that’s not right.”
Me: “Yeah, it totally is! See? You just simplify the inequality… I’ll write out an x-y chart for you. Here’s two, and here’s one.”
Dan: “You just proved two is less than one.”
Me: “What? Oh, dammit. Um, what if you… dammit.”

We got an answer later, although it turned out that there was a typo on the problem sheet, which meant that, really, there was no Right Idea for that particular problem. At the time, though, everyone started back on their own ideas, except me (this I would say is typical for Wrong Ideas That Appear Right At The Time), as I attempted to somehow salvage a Corrected Idea out of the wreckage of my hurried notes.

Then, tonight, I was working with Laura on number theory when she got the Right Idea for a problem I’d been looking at since the weekend and had no idea how to even start to approach. Afterwards:

Laura: “We took care of that one pretty well.”
Me: “We? Actually, I'm pretty sure you did all the hard bits.”
Laura: “No, you added them up; I’d forgotten about zero.”
Me: “Now you’re just fucking with me. Adding… and zero? C’mon.”
Laura: “Oh, right. Sorry. Well, we took care of the other stuff pretty well, too.”

There is never anything good to say after a Right Idea. I feel awkward when someone else has the Idea, because, as in number theory, I didn’t really do any work of my own, and am just trying to get enough understanding of the problem to work it out for myself later. On the other hand, I also feel awkward in those instances where I had the Idea, because any praise given seems to me to be undeserved; I mean, anyone could have come up with it, and it was just lucky that I thought of it the right way first. Thus:

Kelly: “Wow! That was clever, Sam. You really get this analysis.”
Me: [laughs] “You just wait until later in the term, when I just show up and desperately need help with everything.”
Kelly: [laughs] “You just keep showing up, and we’ll all be fine.”
Me: [without humor] “No, I’m serious. I’d appreciate if you let me keep coming at that point. Maybe I could wash the dishes to make up for it.”
Kelly: “Oh. Well, I guess we’ll figure that out when we get there.”

As big a fan of ‘clever’ as I am, there are times when I worry that luck has a little too much to do with actually getting an answer for homework. With midterms coming up in the next couple weeks, I guess I need to either dissuade myself from this view or start bringing my dala horse I got in Sweden with me everywhere.

Um, also, any formatting issues are the result of me writing stuff in advance on Word and then copy-pasting it, which for whatever reason blogger doesn't like. I'm going to keep doing it (I like the fact that it capitalizes all those words itself so you don't have to), so I guess we might as well all get used to it. At any rate, have a good one.

Helo! (which is often yelled, and at a time this is somehow jarringly random)
sam

I've been doing some thinking...

... maybe as a way of trying to break out of the math that we all keep doing every day for hours on end, or maybe because you can stop taking history classes, but you can never stop taking history. Or at least something like that--that little piece of prose took a good ten minutes and still didn't turn out right, but I'm not about to erase it all now--the point is that I've done a bunch of thinking about things, and then last night I did a bunch of writing about things, but it was too much to put in one place. I mean, it was long enough that if a friend wrote it, I wouldn't be able to finish it, so I figure it's better to assume your audience has an attention span comparable to your own and break the thing up a bit. (Unlike the last two sentences, which felt a little long, but, again, too much math makes those language skills rusty, hence my panicky return to writing.) Anyway, without further ado, the stuff I was thinking:

I think I’ve come to realize that, really, most of what I’m talking about isn’t funny in the normal sense of the word. I mean, the reverse of what I’m doing would be to laugh about how American students don’t capitalize anything they type on IM or maybe how many Americans have strong feelings about the football teams of colleges which they have never visited or even watched play a complete game on tv or something. It's kind of funny, but may be more coping-mechanism funny for me than hilarious-funny for everyone else.

So, yeah. Calling these sorts of cultural idiosyncrasies “funny” is misleading, and I would almost venture to say that claiming things about Budapest are worth being laughed at demeans them. Instead, I’d like to try out the word “absurd,” in the way those 60s French intellectuals used it. In fact, although my memory is a little fuzzy on the subject (sorry Prof. Wilder, but I either didn’t read or didn’t understand most of that section of your otherwise enjoyable and accessible course), I’m pretty sure that this is precisely the sort of thing “absurd” was chosen to describe—it was an intellectual way of escaping the contradictions and asymmetries of a country modernizing both culturally and economically at an uncomfortable pace, which I would call a decent assessment of how things are right now in the former Soviet satellite state of Hungary. Alright, so now everything--police in hatchbacks, night buses, broken English t-shirts, everything--is absurd. We can still laugh--and I certainly do—but now we can do so with some sort of postmodern self-awareness that we are, in fact, laughing the way modern culture is fragile, dynamic, tragic, and intimidating, but far from monolithic. But that’s enough long, vague words for one day. I think I'll be happy about the humusz I had for lunch, and get crackin' on some of that Galois Theory. Helo!

Sam

ps: as it turns out, even though supposedly interchangeable, "szia" is generally used for salutation, whereas "helo" is a farewell, possibly a little way Hungary subverted its own assimilation of English words

a weekend trip to hungary's biggest summer resort

... would've been really cool and action-packed, had we actually gone in the summer. Unfortunately, as I conveniently forgot after two straight octobers in SoCal, there's this season following summer that's called "autumn" or "fall," and 90% of everything that caters to summer tourists is, well, closed. That was only really an obstacle, though, when we wanted to eat, find somewhere to sleep, party, or take a bus or train. Riiiiight.

The travelling party was just Patrick and me, which was a nice departure from the "go everywhere in Hungary with large groups of American students" strategy we've all unintentionally been pursuing so far. Our itenerary:
2pm: get out of class
4:30 pm: miss train
5:30 pm: catch (more expensive (a relative term, since it was like 800 forint)) train, but have to sit in the smoking car, cause there aren't any other seats
6:15 pm: think my clothes are going to smell like smoke forever, since everyone in our car has been smoking since before we left the platform and nobody bothered to open their window for ventilation
8 pm: miss our station to get off the train
9 pm: arrive at hostel after an hour of walking from the next train station in the sporadically lit countryside (almost all widely-spaced homes, no open anything), discover we're the only guests
9:05 pm: discover the hostel guy speaks hungarian and german, and doesn't want us to try to understand what he wants to tell us in hungarian. Hostel owner calls this guy (who looked like maybe our age or a little younger) on the phone to come to the hostel and translate. He stalls for time by taking us to the room (narrating things in german, like "This is the light switch for the hallway") and leaving us for a minute while he waits for the guy to get there.
9:10 pm: The guy arrives, and the following exchange results:

[hostel-owner is at desk in little office, guy stands in front, I enter]
Hostel owner: [something spoken really fast]
Guy: "When will you leave tomorrow?"
Me: "Kilenc-kor? [9am]" [hand gesture indicating approximation]
Hostel owner: [something]
Guy: "If he is... not here when you leave... lock gate... outside gate? And then throw keys through the fence to nearby the door, and he will find."
Me: "OK"
Guy: "Where are you from?"
Me: "The States?" [I feel like the intonation makes it apparent that I don't agree with American politics and would like to impress upon people that I'm not somehow stereotypically American, whether that's true or not (which I don't actually know)]
Guy: "Where in the US are you?"
Me: "California. I go to college? university? in Los Angeles." [nobody knows where colorado is, so it's convenient to cut to the chase]
Guy: "I see. Why are you... here?"
Me: "I'm studying mathematics in Budapest this term."
Guy: "I see. why did you choose... Hungary?"
Me: "Well, it's my first time in europe, and..."
Guy: [interrupting] "This must be... strange for you."
Hostel owner: [something fast]
Guy: "Please pay... um... thr-... um..."
Me: "Tudom magyar szamok?" [I know numbers in Hungarian?]
Hostel owner: [quotes price]
Me: "OK"
Hostel owner: "Good evening"
[exeunt]

and i thought to myself, y'know, now that you mention it, yeah--"strange" is a pretty good word for it.

Anyway, that was about one third of the English we spoke all weekend, which would be a good sign, like we're learning the language, only most of our Hungarian consisted of the expressions, igen, nem, and um... az [that]?

The argument could be made that the trip was even more interesting because of our utter out-of-placeness--though we saw some other tourists later, all of them were Hungarians, which felt kinda cool, actually. Anyway, everything was very pretty, and I'll give some highlights of the next day at some later point (specifically, the number of trains, buses, etc. we missed), but maybe no photos because Patrick may have lost his camera, and I don't have one of my own.

Szia!
Sam

the first dose of last weekend

Yes, I realize it's thursday, and I got back monday morning, but I'll be honest: I was tired. Like really, really, I'm-catching-the-5:30am-train-but-am-too-cheap-to-pay-for-the-hostel,
so-I'll-just-stay-awake-all-night tired. Also, I definitely was still a little bit drunk when I caught that train at 5:30, but I'll get to that later. Initial observations:

I guess I’d always sort of assumed I enjoyed travel, but since ‘travel’ was confined almost exclusively to North America, I never realized the great differences between traveling and traveling. For one, the latter is italicized. But more importantly, you get to have 'impressions' and make 'observations' afterwards (which you def don't after going to, say, Santa Barbara for the weekend).

This was my first experience with a hostel. The people I met there were all really great: friendly, accepting, and holy crap could everyone speak English well (making me feel at once lucky and guilty for the privilege of having it as my native language). I ended up going to a club with people from Brazil, Spain, Slovenia, and Korea, and all of them had less accent then most people from New England.

Hungary is called a 'transition economy' by the people who label economies, but that's a euphemism for 'formerly socialist', which itself really means 'unsuccessfully socialist.' After college pushed me in the direction of radical left-ism, some time in the former Eastern bloc has, realistically, been good for me; there's a big difference between ideals of egalitarianism and realities of a planned economy, but those differences are best seen on the ground. Examples of this include the ugly, ugly metro line BP constructed in the 70s (which, I swear, when it opened, people walking down to the first time said, "This is it?") and the way large companies in Hungary have almost entirely been displaced or bought out by multinationals (although there are still tons of small businesses), since they couldn't compete.

Sweden, in contrast, is successfully egalitarian in economic philosophy. The things that stuck out in my mind about Swedenwere the way things were fundamentally, deliberately, and successfully different than back home. Education, healthcare, and available affordable housing are considered public responsibility, Sweden still naturalizes larger numbers of asylum-seekers than most of the world, and my god is everyone warm, generous, and friendly. There is an income tax burden that tops out at 55%, plus VAT on many goods, but that doesn't stop people from dressing well, offering rides or bus fare (which happened several times in the space of four days), and generally being helpful. This has been a wildly successful social philosophy, if I can judge based on the fashionable, well-educated, late-model-car-driving population of Stockholm.

This leaves me in a compromise-oriented position (which are always the best to have, I think): although command economics may be the most spectacular failure of the 20th century, there has to be some understanding that social responsibility cannot take a back seat to profit motives (*cough* comment-posting spam robots). Sweden is gorgeous, BP is lively, and somehow taking in a little of both is me, an American college student with a lot of ideas and slowly accruing perspective.

I'm gonna cut this one short (I have a lot to say from the trip), but I promise that next time, there will be history and drinking stories both. Szia!

sam

is this heaven? no, it's sweden

So I'm in Stockholm right now, and I just wanted to say that Sweden is ridiculously nice. The air is clear, the city is gorgeous, and everything is really, really expensive. This is not to say that you necessarily have to spend insane amounts of money when you visit--museums are frequently free, and there's lots and lots to see around the city that's reasonable. On the other hand, clothes? stunningly expensive (all the jeans and jackets we looked at today turned out to be over $100). The metro (here called the T-bana)? a ride is a minimum of $4. And so on and so forth. I guess that there's a price to be paid for a society in which it seems like everyone owns a late-model Saab, Volvo, or Mercedes, and where people walk around the street and look happy all the time.

I actually have to run, because the brownies we're baking in the hostel kitchen are done, but I def have some more specific thoughts about things that will hopefully turn into something coherent by the time I'm home. For now, szia!

sam