Ashley's In Europe

I am on vacation in Europe. First, I must specify that I am fully aware that Europe is not in Asia. That said, I'm going to blog anyway. And with that, let's begin a little story...

Once upon a time a couple of Americans decided to go on an adventurous trip in Europe. This couple thought, “how can we make our trip adventurous when there are tourists in every city and town from Northern Scotland to the Rock of Gibraltar?” Then they had an idea – to go to the part of Europe where no one goes because of their more recent affinity towards revolution and dictatorship. And thus they decided to do an Eastern European vacation to Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary (with a few days in Austria thrown in for contrast), in search of a Europe where people and menus don’t translate to English and where life as it has been continues.

Currently writing in from the airport in Budapest, waiting for a flight from Budapest to Vienna (about the same as flying from San Diego to Santa Barbara). We're flying because it was cheaper to fly from Budapest to Sofia with a stop in Vienna than it was to fly direct, so we're taking a 3 day stop and enjoying our resurgence in the western world. Something about flying this short distance between Budapest and Vienna on Austrian airlines evokes the image of Indiana Jones trying to sneak into Berlin on the eve of WW2 on a Zeppelin, wondering if he's going to get caught going into enemy territory.

Budapest

On all accounts, Hungary is a western nation. The name for Hungary in Hungarian is Magyarorszod– not sure where English got the name ‘Hungary’ since the word for the Hungarian people and language is ‘Magyar’ which doesn’t sound anything like ‘Hungary.’ It is clean, organized, and people generally follow the rules. The remnants of any association with the Eastern block can be found in a few communist style apartment blocks splashed around a city dominated by Viennese architecture, and an occasional sign in both Hungarian and Cyrillic.

German is far more prevalent than English or Russian, and Hungarians are extremely nationalistic (and xenophobic). I can understand a degree of xenophobia from a land-locked flat country that has been dominated by other empires since the beginning of time, and the current situation isn’t helped by the fact that the city of Budapest is literally overrun with tourists, as there are significantly more tourists in the city than there are residents.

I didn’t notice how striking this disconnect was until we arrived in Vienna, where there are tons of tourists, but enough residents that even the thousands of camera-wielding foreigners don’t seem to make too much of a dent in the day to day life of residents. In Budapest, in contrast, I believe partly because everything is exorbitantly priced outside of the reach of almost all Hungarians, the entire central area of the city is a ghost town except for foreign tourists. The only time we ever saw Hungarians who weren’t involved in the tourism industry was when we walked down a side street beside an old communist apartment block and saw some old people sitting I front of their building.

As in other western European countries, most of the young people speak English and Hungarian, although most signs and information are only in Hungarian. We had an interesting experience on the metro when our inability to read the instructions in Hungarian left us without a properly validated ticket which led to us getting hassled by the metro ‘police’ (think underground meter-maids who target foreigners and then don’t speak anything but Hungarian).

Budapest’s metro is, without a doubt, the worst-organized metro system in the entire world, where you need to buy and validate a new ticket every time you change trains. As the metro-maid hassled us with our newly purchased but apparently ‘invalid’ ticket and tried to make us pay an extortionate sum equivalent to her yearly salary, a stylishly western-dressed Indian woman and her two daughters came up and asked us in perfect British-Indian English if we needed help.

When she saw what was happening, she started yelling at the metro-maid in English and then Hungarian, saying that we were ‘tourists’ and that they should leave us alone. She passionately explained to us that the metro-maids always target foreigners and that Hungarians are racist. She was steaming mad and her daughters were mortified (as any teenage daughter would be if their mother got in a fighting match with a metermaid in public, yelling that they were racist).

She kept apologizing to us and saying that Hungarians hate foreigners and that they always do this, and that we shouldn’t pay the fee, we should fight it (shortly after this when we asked to talk to the real police the metro-maid suspiciously let us go).

I don’t know what this woman and her family were doing living in Budapest (working for the Indian embassy?), but what really struck me was how much of a nerve our situation struck with her. How much racism and racial profiling must she face that two Americans getting hassled on the metro would illicit such a strong response from her?

Overall, I’d say that the people of Budapest were some of the least hospitable in Europe. Now, it might be very American of me to think this, but I have to say that of all the cultures to be upset about foreigners not speaking their language, Hungary shouldn't be at the top of the list. In Paris people are mean because people come to Paris not speaking a word of French. French is a common language that many people learn and that is spoken by many people of many nations around the world, and the UN. Hungarian, on the other hand, is totally unrelated to almost any other language and is spoken by a small group of people in a random country in central Europe. Czechs aren’t upset that visitors don’t speak Czech, so what’s the big deal for Hungarians? Alas, it is an attitude like mine that may be their problem…

Suffice it to say, I am glad to be out of Hungary, and back to a place where I can at least say a few words of the local language and not feel like a total idiot. Thanks to years of studying music, if anyone asks me how I'm doing, I can give them the very poetic Goethe response of 'Meine Ruh is hin, mein herz is schwer. Ich finde sie nimmer, und nimmermehr.' Somehow I sense that may not be the conversation starter I was hoping for.