Review

Budapest is an excellent city, very worth visiting. At first, it was alienating not being able to understand anything (there are few cognates with English)--newspaper headlines, ads, store names (or what they're selling)--but I guess I got used to it. If nothing else, Hungarian's a fun language to look at and listen to. I'll be damned if I can figure out the vowels, though. (I'm not getting into the grammar, which is completely unlike English, or any Indo-European language--it's agglutinative, meaning [as best I can tell] that it uses a lot of prefixes and suffixes to convey meanings that we'd use prepositions and other word changes for.)

They've also got good (cheap!) food. Hungary's a wine country, not a beer one (but it's next to some beer countries), and it's got good wine (in Hungarian, bor). They use more sour cream than I'd like. This is at least somewhat balanced by their liberal use of pork. They're also big fans of paprika (as per the stereotype) and, surprisingly, poppy seeds. Duck and goose are also popular. The fruit and vegetables were good too.

One of the highlights of my trip was delivering those packages I brought (not drugs, honest!). The extended family had slaughtered a pig(!) the day before(!!) in the country, so we had extremely fresh sausage(!!!). Correction: We had three types of extremely fresh sausage: straight spiced meat, rice and liver, and blood, which was the rice and liver with a bit of blood for color. There was stuffed cabbage, stuffed, of course, with pork and rice. We also had some homemade fruit brandy (plum), homemade pickled hot peppers (I left a jar accidentally in Budapest), and homemade applecake. It was really good.

I took no camera, so brought back no pictures. You'll just have to take my word for it that the architecture and city overall are quite nice to look at.

What I liked best, though, was the feel for Hungarian history and "character" I got, largely from visiting museums. This has two sides. First, Hungary is/was intensely nationalistic. I don't mean this in a world-conquering sense, but in terms of being a country, a people, with a very strong sense of being different from its neighbors. The Magyars only arrived in Hungary in 896 a.d., and they remain separated from their neighbors by language and by this history.

They're really big on their history. I went to the Hungarian National Museum, the Budapest History Museum, the Hungarian Art Museum (there's also a Fine Arts Museum, which includes non-Hungarian art), the Hungarian Photography Museum (Hungarian photographers), the Ethnographic Museum, and the Hungarian Military History Museum, among others. The Hungarian National Museum has a room dedicated to famous modern Hungarians. An awful lot of them, like John von Neumann, don't/didn't live in Hungary, but Hungary claims them eagerly.

Their interest in their history isn't new, either. In the early 13th century, about 325 years after arriving in Hungary, some Hungarian monks went to the Volga to find the other Magyar tribes. Have you heard of any other central European people's ever doing this? (I'm not 100 percent sure they found the other tribes, but they certainly found the Mongols.) History really matters.

Which brings me to the second point. Hungary was on the losing side of the three great conflicts of the 20th century: WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. It was fascinating to see both how earlier history led them to that and how they've tried to come to terms with/rationalize that. (For a novelist's very funny view on more or less contemporary Hungarian character, read Arthur Phillips' Prague. My own impressions of this are still more anecdotal than my other arguments here and will pretty much agree with Phillips'.) For instance, the Military History Museum had an exhibit about the 1944 Warsaw uprising. It, of course, discussed the Hungarian role in it. Here's what I picked up. The Germans ordered a Hungarian army to cordon off the city so partisans couldn't get through, but the army let Polish partisans through. Also, the commanders of that army negotiated with the Poles to switch sides, but the politics were awfully complicated, so they didn't. That seems to be about the best any Axis power could spin its role in WWII. (Also, Hungary participated in the Holocaust, but Admiral Horthy, who ruled Hungary for most of the war, until he was overthrown by the Arrow Cross, protected the Jews of Budapest, though not elsewhere. Of course, once he was deposed.... Horthy came off pretty well in what little I heard about him in Hungary--he was in an impossible situation and tried to walk a tightrope. It didn't work.)

As for the earlier history, I have three words: geography, history, and Trianon. The bad luck of geography put Hungary on the wrong side of the Cold War; in general, in the middle of stronger neighbors like Austria, Germany, and Russia; and in the midst of a slew of ethnic groups that, as ethnic groups do, might not always get along. Hungarian history gave me a better understanding of how Stephen Dedalus' "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" applies to an entire country, if not a continent. Budapest has been a cosmopolitan city for centuries; the Ethnographic Museum showed how the effects of feudalism lingered through the 19th century. No wonder Europeans wanted to get the hell out of there and come here! History and culture can be valuable--they're certainly inescapable--but they can also lead to societal instability and centuries'-long conflicts. Trianon is a specific example of that. It was the Versailles Treaty for Hungary. Yeah, it had a lot to do with WWII.

I did a lot of other stuff that was also fun. I also didn't get to do all the things I would've liked. Budapest, Hungary as a whole, was great. It's the most un-Western place I've ever been; as such, it's fascinating. I should go back.

Incidentally, on the plane back I read an interesting Joan Didion book, Where I Was From, which is a memoir/study of California. The meaning and modern history of California are some of the most interesting aspects of American history. It also lends itself to some excellent songwriting, too, by people/bands like Pavement, the Pixies, Frank Black, and X.