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