The Return

(Yaawwwnnnn....) Oh, hello. Good morning. Jo reggelt kivanok. It's so nice to see you again. I feel like we haven't spoken in ages. I'm on the home stretch for my semester with BSM and the finish line is in sight. The coursework has become harder and the weather has become nicer, which has lead to some inconsistent study habits to say the least. I've also been travelling a lot. Last time I checked in with y'all I was about to head to Krakow, Poland. I made it there and back with a detour at Auschwitz. I can write a whole essay just on that trip alone, but I'll jot down some thoughts now and save the exposition for later. Two weekends after that I rented a car with eight other people and drove to Croatia, stopping at the beautiful Plitvice Lakes and ancient Split on the Adriatic Coast. In between these trips out of town, I explored Budapest some more as well. On May 1 a May Day carnival was held in Varosliget (City Park). Last week I finally visited the famous Dohany Synagogue in Budapest. Two days later my roommate Andy and I rented bicycles and went statue hunting around Budapest to collect pictures for my Hungarian class project.

I've uploaded nearly 1000 pictures to my online Picasa album as evidence of these escapades. You can always view my entire photo library from time in Europe by clicking on the permanent link on the top right hand corner of this web page, or for convenience you can also click right here. Here are a few of the highlights from the past month:

Thousands of Polish law enforcement officers line the streets of Krakow in preparation for the funeral of a civic leader killed in the tragic plane crash two weeks prior.

At the loading dock inside Birkenau, where 1.1 million Jews and Poles were killed. 400,000 Hungarian Jews died at Auschwitz during the Holocaust, the most Jews from any single country killed there. Most people were unloaded from the trains where I am standing.

Getting a picture with the conductors of the train right before we left from Krakow to Budapest.

Karl Marx greeting people near the literature tables for the local communist party on May Day in Varosliget

 One of the many waterfalls of crystal clear water at the Plitvice Lakes, Croatia

A view of Diocletian's Palace in the historic old town of Split, Croatia. We had just finished swimming in the Adriatic Sea, pictured in the background.

Inside the Dohany Synagogue in Budapest. It is the second largest synagogue in the world and the largest in Europe. As you can see, it has three tiers of seating.

Hanging out with Attila Joszef, the most famous Hungarian 20th Century poet. This statue is directly south of the national parliament on the Danube in Budapest. 

Already reminiscing, my trip to Krakow almost didn't happen. I had been taking my time finishing my homework and nearly flaked out on my buddy Dan to go visit Krakow and Auschwitz. I asked my roommates in passing if they wanted to go also, and they immediately jumped on the adventure. Their enthusiasm and Dan's encouragement got me back on the wagon and onto the train headed for Krakow. 

The four of us were in a 6-person couchette. There were two other people with us, filling up the tiny sleeper compartment. One was an American girl, a student at Smith College who was studying abroad learning computer science in Paris. She was on her spring break and was traveling across Central Europe. The other guy was a Hungarian in his late 20's, traveling in a triangle from Krakow to Ukraine and back to Hungary. He was a transport engineer working for BKV, the Budapest public transit company. He told me that the 4,6 tram line that runs around the big körut, the tram that I take at least once a day, has the highest traffic of any tram line in the world, and it even has more traffic than Budapest's Metro line 1, which is the second oldest in the world. 

This was my second time to Krakow and Auschwitz. (For reference, the Auschwitz death camps are located in the Polish town of Osweichem, which is an hour's bus ride east of Krakow.) My first trip was with the March of the Living back in April 2006, four years ago to the month. On this trip I saw many of the same sights. We strolled through Kazimierz, the medieval Jewish quarter of Krakow, and visited Auschwitz. By chance, the four of us walked the 3 kilometers from Auschwitz I to the larger Auschwitz II - Birkenau. I had made the same journey four years ago on Holocaust Remembrance Day with ten thousand other Jewish high schoolers from around the world. This time it was just the four of us. For me visiting Poland for the second time was much different from the first, particularly since I had been living in Central Europe for four months before this recent trip. The most lasting thought I had from the first trip was that I could never live in Poland, ever, and I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to live there. I had thought that living in Poland must be like living in a graveyard. Unclean and unholy. Many of my friends on the March of the Living felt the same way. 

Now that I have lived in Budapest, Krakow seemed really cool. I really liked the medieval architecture and the hip vibe that the city had. It was similar to Budapest, but much older and less urban. As I we drank coffee in an outdoor cafe in a small park on a beautiful sunny afternoon, I remembered my aversion to Poland from four years ago. I felt very hypocritical. Hungary experienced nearly as much death and destruction as Poland, and Budapest was nearly flattened during the war. In fact, Hungary was notorious for allowing the fascist Arrow Cross party to deport Jews to their deaths at an alarming rate, quicker than the Germans were doing in other countries. The exhibit at the Auschwitz Museum dedicated to the destruction of Hungarian Jewry was titled "A People Betrayed." The city of Budapest itself is covered with Holocaust memorials, remembering the victims of the Arrow Cross. Does that same gut reflex I had four years ago in Poland apply to my time in Budapest today? Not really. What does that mean? I don't know.

Okay. Must go to sleep. Will try to update more on the Krakow trip, as well as Croatia, and statue hunting in Budapest, and my inevitable trip to the Dohany Synagogue. Wish me luck on finals.

Let's Conjugate

Today was the first day of the Hungarian intensive language course. About 40 BSM kids came out of the wordwork of Budapest to attempt to speak their first few words of the hardest language in the world. The classes started at 9 a.m. and we were split up into smaller groups of 7 to 10 people. Each group was assigned to a small seminar room and a Hungarian teacher. It was a breath of fresh air for someone to sit there in front of me and explain the different pronunciations and give examples of simple Hungarian sentences. I have found Rhyme and Reason! though apparently they don't understand what I am saying. The first few words we learned were easy:

diak vagyok, es angolul beszelek = I am a student, and I speak English

o Sam van. Sam magyarul tanul = He is Sam. Sam is learning Hungarian.

Of course, there are several vowel punctuation marks that I'm omitting since I don't want to go type on the Hungarian keyboard. There are 14 different vowels in Hungarian, each with its own unique pronunciation, and a few have sounds that aren't in English at all. We learned a handful of verb conjugations and expanded our vocabulary to 30 words strong. At the very least, I've started to properly pronounce the street signs that I walk by on the way to school. I was the only one in our small group who didn't already speak another language besides English. Several people speak French, a few speak Spanish and German, and even Elan speaks Hebrew. The teacher said that my Latin in high school would help me learn Hungarian, though the languages aren't related, so that's a little comforting. However, I didn't come to Budapest to learn Hungarian, I came to challenge myself.

That's why I'm going to make a concerted effort to study the daily lessons, do the assigned homework, and learn as much Hungarian as I can in these few weeks. I don't want to be visiting Budapest, I want to be living in Budapest (Budapesten elek) for these next five months. To do that, there's no way around the challenge of the language. The only way to overcome it is to tackle it head on. I'm excited of the opportunity to learn a foreign language and directly apply it in my environment. I know it will be difficult, but hey if it was easy, then everyone would do it.

One of the more anticipated parts of the first day of language school was meeting the other BSM students. Everyone was very friendly and eager to meet each other. We are from all over the country and all different backgrounds. There are people from Minnesota, Virginia, Philadelphia, Denver, Los Angeles, San Fransisco, South Carolina, Chicago, and Texas. We go to public schools and private schools; big and small. Some of us are seniors and some of us are freshmen (wow). After the language school ended for the day, several people met up at 7 p.m. to walk around Budapest and go to some of the pubs with the local Hungarians. I showed up a little late and joined seven other people at a pub across the street from the Dohany Synagogue called Catapult. By the way, Dohany means tobacco in Hungarian, and the "y" is silent.

After the pub, we walked around looking for a place to eat. I came across a Burger King, across from a McDonald's no less, and decided to get a Whopper. The burger and fries reminded me home, but then it made me miss it more. They just can't make fast food in Europe the way they do in America. You might wonder, How could they possibly mess that up? Isn't it only six ingredients? Well, you can mess up a Whopper and fries and Coke. Now I understand why In 'n Out only opens restaurants within a short distance of its meat factories: to preserve the integrity of the taste. Shame on you Burger King. You need to stick to what you are good at. I don't know what that is. Let me go get a breakfast taquito from Whataburger while I think about. I'll get back to you.