Lost and Found in Budapest

 I have been putting off writing about Budapest for a few weeks because, honestly, I am still trying to process it, even a month later (that and the fact that every spare second of my life has been filled with job applications--if you have any sweet connections, please let me know!!).  For me, it was a delightfully paradoxical city: ridiculously manageable for a traveler yet impossible to fully comprehend.  The streets are just breathing with a history that's as complex as that of any city I've ever visited.  You might see the remnants of a once powerful monarchy, Art Nouveau elegance and totally modern buildings all within the same block.  The food is simple, but the flavors complex (did I mention that I had sour cream on pretty much everything?  No complaints here!).  The opulent wealth of times gone by coexists with a former Soviet austerity which mingles with a forward-and-outward-looking present.  And the result is startling, eclectic, cosmopolitan and wonderful.

Somehow, this picture perfectly sums up my sense of Budapest as a city.
Beautiful architecture adorns what is now the Gucci store,
but notice the bus that it is probably older than I am.

Goulash!  It's so yummy!  Simple ingredients, but with a little kick!

And did I mention the language?  What a lovely puzzle to be solved!  According to my tour guide, it's one of the five hardest languages in the world to learn, yet the second most logical, after Latin! (although some people might argue that ranking languages based on difficulty is a worthless, subjective idea and I tend to agree).

As a lover of all things linguistic (and moreover a total nerd) I couldn't really ask for a more fascinating language than Hungarian.  There are up to eighteen different noun cases (How many of you stumbled through Latin's five?) and compound words that can go forever.  Better yet, Hungarian is related only to Estonian and Finnish and even those two languages are more like third cousins a couple times removed than close family!!  Consider that Hungarian is not an Indo-European language, which means that Hindi, Persian, Italian and English are more closely related to each other than any of them is to Hungarian!

Franz Liszt, one of many famous Hungarians.  The "sz" sounds in
Hungarian is like the "s" sound in English, thus we say his name
like "List."

So how did the Hungarians wind up with such a completely bizarre language?  They are descendants of a group of people that migrated to the area that is now Hungary from today's Mongolia, the Magyar people.  (Mistakenly thought to be the Huns by some of their neighbors, hence we have the name "Hungary" in English).  In fact, that is only the beginning of a history that would see the Hungarians mix with Slavic people from the surrounding countries and conquered by the Turks and then incorporated into the empire of the Hapsburgs. (Obviously, this is the history of an entire country and their linguistics in two paragraphs and should therefore be taken with a grain of salt, I'm not claiming to have covered everything here!)

The many cafes around Budapest make it feel like a very "European" capital.
This elegant cafe is on the top floor of the Alexandra bookstore!

Perhaps the highlight of my time there, was seeing Puccini's Madama Butterfly at the opera house.  Advised by friends who had visited Budapest before, I went to the box office an hour before the show to see if I could get some cheap tickets.  After a confused conversation with a woman at the ticket office, I paid for my ticket, having absolutely no idea what I had just purchased.  

To my surprise, I returned an hour later, ascended the stair case, and opened a door, as indicated by my ticket, to a beautiful private box that was almost in the center of the theater!!  

Hastily and much embarrassed, I closed the door...surely my 13 Euro ticket was not for one of the best seats in the house.  

So imagine my surprise when I asked the attendant, only to have her lead me back to the very same door!!!

I met a lovely student and fellow traveler from China and was delighted to enjoy the opera with him from our own private box.

This is my "ecstatic" face.

To recap, I stumbled into Puccini, a beautiful opera house, an accidental private box and a perfect glass of Hungarian red wine on the terrace at intermission.  This was one of those beautiful, magical moments (sometimes, I like to stop and hug them as they pass by) when I realized that of all the places in the universe I might have been, I was finding myself exactly where I was supposed to be.

Sometimes we forget how awkward and painful learning and living and travelling can be.  There are some moments that are less romantic than others.  Travelling alone in particular can be stressful and a bit scary, even in a big, safe, cosmopolitan city in Europe.  There are plenty of opportunities to make mistakes, get really lost, get frustrated, ask obvious questions, make yourself look like the stupidest person ever and feel lonely.  But, in retrospect, I see that these are also the moments when I was getting smarter, learning how to travel better and more gracefully and learning about myself.  And somehow, it was that stumbling around the city of Budapest (and, let's be honest, the entire continent of Europe) that led me to that seat in that opera house during that show.

And so I am issuing a challenge to myself, and to you, to make some mistakes, to get a little lost and to stumble around a bit, whether it is in a language with eighteen noun cases, a new place you've never visited or even in your own mind.

To quote my nineteenth-century soul mate, Henry David Thoreau (ten points if you saw that coming!): "Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves..." 

Buon viaggio!

The Opera House at night!

The Last Minute of Intermission

The Parliament Building by night.

Rawwr!!

Stained glass in St. Matthias Church

I just really liked this painting.

#NoFilterRequired

For a long time, I have thought that Mother Nature and a solid camera could outdo the obsession with putting filters on every photograph.  Tuscany has seen a lot of rain these past few weeks and the beautiful Spring greens are more vibrant than I've ever seen.  Against the blue sky, it all just looks too good to be true, perfect!!  Filter that!! 

A Toast for Mom!

I'm proposing a toast

Chianti raised in hand

Across this great ocean

To sea and beach and sand

Where a lady I know

Is in her favorite place

Drinking margaritas 

A smile on her face

And I haven't said thank you

Not nearly enough

For loving and caring

Even when it was tough

She watched my first steps

Helped the first fall

And if I'm now crossing continents

It's to her I owe all.

With patience and love

She helped us to grow 

And the lessons in forgiveness

More than we'll ever know.

So here's to you, Mom

On this day of you

I could never say thanks 

For all the you do.

These words are my hugs

From so far away

I'm sending my love,

Happy Mother's Day!!

How can you thank the person who gave you the greatest gift of all, that is, the gift of life?  I'm so grateful to have the greatest Mom, someone who has always loved me, supported me and believed in me.  I miss you, Mom and I just wish that I could be sipping margaritas beach-side with you on this day, your day!

Cheers to all the Moms this Mother's Day!

At the Opera in Budapest

The Worst Part of my Job

Coming into this job, I knew that there would be some things that were part of my job description that would not be fun.  Living in a house with thirty-some-odd college students brings inevitable problems with alcohol and noise.  I knew that I would spend some time "herding cats" around Italy's most-visited cities.  From my first days in Florence,  I quickly learned that the internet and I would not be friends and that the perpetual struggle between man and technology was one that would come to shape the rhythm of my days.

But for every moment when I am tired and frustrated and ready to throw all the routers and modems and cables onto the floor and hit them repeatedly with a baseball bat...there are at least a hundred moments when I feel that I am right where I am supposed to be.  There are times when I get random hugs at my desk and there are times when I get to hear about my students' adventures in Italy and abroad and there are times when I get to introduce someone to the best pasta or pizza or gelato or a hidden treasure in Florence that they have never seen before.  Best of all are those rare, perfect moments when somebody comes to talk to me and tells me how their semester abroad has shaped the way they look at the world, how they feel like the world is opened up to them. In these moments, I remember what it was like to be a student abroad and how it changed the course of my life and how exhilarating it is to think that nothing is impossible because you have the whole world laid out in front of you, just waiting for you.

Which brings me to what has really been the worst part of my job: saying goodbye.  Because at the end of the semester, these people that have been my travelling companions and my friends (even MAPS), these people that I have watched learning and changing and growing for four months (some of them longer!) go to different places and I have to give them a blurry-eyed hug and choke out some words and say goodbye.  And frankly, it sucks.

Of course, there's something beautiful about it, about having new friends in different places and new people to visit and all that.  And it's important that students return to the US, hopefully having learned something and hopefully with changed perspectives, ready to make the world a better place and all that.  Isn't that why we do the things that we do??

But at the end of it, when you've been through so much with a group of people and come to know them and love them, it's still hard to say goodbye because they've taken up a little place in your heart and when they leave, they take a part of you with them, they can't help it.  But, I believe, they also leave a little piece of themselves with you and they leave your heart a little bigger for having known them.  And this is how we grow.

I read this quote by Miriam Adeney on Facebook, posted by a student, and it really resonated with me:

"You will never be completely as home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place."

I couldn't have said it better myself.  

So here, I say thank you to all of my students from the past two semesters that I have had to say goodbye to. And I wish them well and I say that I hope they are taking something real away from this experience.  That after they finish telling their family and friends about the pizza and the wine and the gelato, they will sit down for a moment and reflect on what all of this means, what an amazing opportunity they have had and how much they have grown and learned.  I hope that they will think about what it means for them moving forward.  And I hope, above all, they never feel completely at home again.  Because, just like me, they are curious and restless, dying to keep travelling and learning and meeting new people and embracing new experiences.

And I remind them, that it's really less of a goodbye and more of a ci vediamo. 

Thanks for everything, guys! 

Water to Wine

"[O]utdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence.  It is our daily bread.  Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine- which was, after all, a very small miracle.  We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes."

-Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays 

Grape vine at Montefioralle Vineyard

It's a question that I have realized that we Americans (and pretty much all people living in modern, developed countries) don't ask enough: Where does our food come from?  Up until a few years ago, I, along with many people, would have told you that food comes from the supermarket; but it's an unexamined statement, isn't it?  And one that reveals how completely ignorant and apathetic we are toward some the most beautiful processes of the Earth and some of the most horrifying aspects of our society.  

We'll save a serious discussion of the horrors of the modern food industry for another day. (Incidentally, this is a topic that I'm always interested in and if someone has some good reading or viewing suggestions on this subject, please let me know).  For now, let's stick to vino.

With my parents and Aunt CB and Uncle Dale who were visiting two weeks ago, I had the privilege of visiting two vineyards and drinking copious amounts of wine (which will surprise nobody who knows either my parents or my aunt and uncle).  We traveled for a day in Tuscany with an exceptionally wonderful tour guide, Monika Iris and she introduced us to the delightful Fernando, a vineyard owner whom I can only describe as adorable, making some fabulous  Chianti Classicos and Tuscan reds in Montefioralle, just above the more well-known town of Greve-in-Chianti. 

Us with Fernando in Montefioralle

 In our time sitting around his table, Fernando explained to us what it takes to make a true "Chianti Classico":

1.  It has to be at least 80% Sangiovese grapes.  (The rest can be a mix of other types of grapes)

2.   All the grapes must be grown within a certain geographical area that covers about 100 square miles, the Chianti region of Tuscany, between Florence and Siena.

3.  The grapes cannot be irrigated, they must grow naturally in the climate and conditions that only Mother Nature decides.

Wines meeting these three conditions can then go through the process where they are certified by the government, which controlls the standard, to be officially bottled as "Chianti Classico."

The point that was puzzling to me was the restriction on irrigation.  After all, if you have the opportunity to improve the conditions of the grapes--why wouldn't you??  (Someone can argue with me on this point, but I think it's a very American attitude somehow, trying to control nature).

"Grapes grow naturally in the place where they come from," Monika told us.  Because these grapes are native to the area, they don't need the help.  The differences in precipitation (and all the other environmental factors too!) give each vintage of wine its particular character.

She also added that she felt that Sangiovese grapes have something in common with the people of the Chianti area, including our new friend Fernando and Monika herself who was  born in Germany, but considers herself a true Tuscan.  These grapes, she told us, aren't like the "spoiled" French Cabernet and Merlot grapes, that need a lot of "pampering."  They work hard and they thrive, even when conditions are less than ideal.  It's a characteristic of the people, but it gives character to the wine too.  

Perhaps it's poetic romanticism or perhaps it's true; but I love to think that the character of the people, the character of the land and the character of the grapes all come out in the taste of the wine.  You can taste the dramatic, sweeping views enjoyed by the grapes from the top of the hill; you can taste every drop of rain that did or didn't fall; you can taste the sweet, freshness of the air and, best of all, you can savor the delicious Tuscan sunshine, which could really sustain you all on its own.

Now that is something you'll never find in a supermarket: the chance to dirty your shoes with the soil that nourished the wine and the opportunity to shake the hand that took so much care to produce it.  Now that is something that I can drink to.

So please, wherever you are in the world, open a bottle of Chianti tonight...for me!  

My glass is raised to Mother Nature, to Fernando and to you!

Salute!

The vineyard

Lisboa

The Alfama

Old King in Belem Monastery