Intro to Paris, over books, wine, and food

The semester at Central European University technically ended more than two weeks ago, and with my arrival in France yesterday morning, the nearly two months of traveling around Europe has officially begun. Most of that travel will be in France - hence the blog title change - where I begin in Paris, hosted by a friend whose host is kind enough to lend me a room. I have yet to get to know the septuagenarian who owns this apartment and who speaks little English, but this room is telling: shelves upon shelves sag under books on Rodin and the history of film, or by Hugo and Verne, or a translation of Gulliver's Travels that reminds me I need to reread this favorite; cupids and curlicues are carved into the ceiling and walls, and against the walls sit/hang black-and-white photos (I can't tell if they're aesthetic or historical), a Klimt-like painting of a violin in a kitchen, a red-and-yellow Soviet tapestry bearing Lenin's face; I write by the light coming through the double glass doors that open out onto a balcony, which overlooks Boulevard Voltaire in the 11th arrondissement, and by the light of two lamps made by their owner out of whiskey and champagne bottles; the best part are things like the lamps all around the apartment, knick-knacks he has made out of metal or wood or simply picked up off the street.

The fatigue and disappointing weather limited what I did yesterday, but in the evening, friends new and old put together a simple dinner and our conversation for those more than four hours hinted at things to come: fashion; school; living with French speakers, while in Hungary we lived with people from our program; organic and genetically-modified food; wine; France's protest culture; the Algerian War; colonialism; movies; differing views on hygiene; religion.

After a few days here, the plan is to move gradually south, hitting Lyon and Marseilles in the coming weeks, before heading to Berlin, Geneva, and then back to Budapest one final time.

__
Reading: Kafka, The Castle
Listening to: Lily Allen

Field trip: Debrecen refugee camp

Technically I'm not a refugee because my family left Vietnam voluntarily and for economic reasons, though I did live in a refugee camp in the Philippines for a few months. But I remember nothing, so the trip with my Refugee Law class to a camp in Debrecen was really my first. It would be foolish (but probably unavoidable) to predict what such a camp would be like. We drove three hours east by bus and entered what looked like an elementary school: dry, green and yellow grass; subdued, white and beige buildings with flat roofs; and in the middle, a wooden jungle gym and a blacktop for football and basketball. One classmate said it looked like a summer camp. Another took offense at the gray walls and barbed wire along the perimeter.

At first we expected to be observers, like apprentices come to examine this specimen called the refugee. I think I expected them to be used to visitors, but they're there for such a short time we might have been the first such group to drop in. So they stared at us as much as we did them. It occurred to me as they tried to answer in Hungarian that they might have thought we were locals and they were the outsiders (while we had thought something similar of them). But Central European University is made up of so many international students (and few Hungarians) that this Refugee Law class is often introspective and just about everyone is an outsider.

We had a panel discussion with the camp director and then the decider, an asylum official, both in a bright yellow room with childrens' drawings and posters from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on the walls, origami cranes hanging from the ceiling, and crayon marks on the floor tiles. At any given time there are some 700 asylum seekers hosted at the camp, where they stay for two months on average and receive around $30 petty cash a month. Debrecen generally serves as a stopping point for asylum seekers from Eastern and Southeastern Europe on their way west.

"They don't like us," the director said of Debrecen's locals and authorities. It's probably safe to say that such a negative reception conflicts with the view of most people in that room, and yet I get the impression it's a common sentiment (racism? xenophobia? nationalism?) in any region with a sizable foreign population. I don't think I could ever empathize with such a sentiment, but how, I wondered, could there be such a wall between our openness to foreigners and their rejection of them, both of which seem 'normal'? It's true, we're a self-selected group, students who choose to study refugee law. Still I don't understand it.

Part of it, the director suggested, was the perception of criminal activity among arrivals (though I stress perception because I reject the claim that it is any more prevalent among this group than another). Some shoplift, he said, admitting that just that morning police took a camp resident into custody on human trafficking charges.

I don't know which bothered me more - the crimes, or a potential cause of the crimes, namely the inactivity among the refugees. Most don't stick around long enough to find employment as they wait for their cases to be decided, and of the children, only one-sixth of them can be accommodated at the local schools. As someone asked the director how people spend their time, a handful of children banged on the door, divided between remaining obediently outside and spilling into the room like paparazzi anytime someone went in or out.

"This is what the kids do," the director joked. "I don't want to say what they do when they're more active! Same for adults."

The children turned out to be the unexpected highlight of the trip. It began slowly, with two or three boys peering curiously in through a six-inch gap in the window. As we walked by the jungle gym and the football matches, one or two would greet us with the only Hungarian they knew, "Szia!" But once the camera came out, all hell broke loose. I took a couple shots and showed them to the children, who quickly caught on and clamored around the camera. We had no common language, so they pointed and posed, competing for the attention of the lens. (Note: At the camp's request, I am not posting any photos of them.) It was a shallow friendship but I'm not complaining, because the icebreaker encouraged the children to follow us around for the day, and when we left, they waved goodbye and cartwheeled and ran along the side of the bus.

__
Listening to: More Dirty Dancing [soundtrack]

Hungary - photo album

[Click on headline for the Facebook album]

__
Reading: The Budapest Sun
Watching: Simpsons, "Lisa the Drama Queen"
Listening to: Foo Fighters, "Best of You"

Alice in ... Central Europe?

That I should end up studying at Central European University and that it should turn out so well resembles my fate at Columbia: each is a result of negligible research and lots of luck (not that I believe in luck, whatever that is). Basic facts about CEU I should have known, I didn't.

For instance: George Soros funded the university, which is part of the reason Russia in all seriousness believes it to be a haven for conspirators who want to overthrow the Kremlin. My Russian foreign policy professor mentioned so in class today, and considering Soros' contributions to the 1989 revolutions, it's not so crazy (he deems himself "responsible for the 'Americanization' of eastern Europe" according to the New Statesman). The professor went on to tell us about a former student who applied for a job at the Russian foreign ministry, which turned her away after seeing CEU on her CV. The general recommendation if you want to work for the Russian government: downplay your Western education. How ironic, after Russia invited so many Westerners (including Jeff Sachs, Columbia celebrity economist extraodinaire) to help with rebuilding directly after the Cold War.

Other, more relevant facts I should have known: CEU is a graduate school on a strange quarter system, so I'll be done here in March. Also, the only really Hungarian thing about the school is its location, as students, teachers, curriculum, etc. are generally international. So although I'm "immersed" by taking courses like any grad student here, it was not what I had expected immersion to mean. A bubble indeed.

The role of Lady Luck, then, is to prove that none of that really matters. Although my conditions have been a sign of poor planning, they also signify to me what Camus has said, that you can find pleasure in nearly anything. I don't think it is a contradiction to reject the nonsense of fate or luck but believe that everything ultimately works out. I get to finish the term with months to travel. I study refugee law with people from the countries we discuss or Russian foreign policy with people who remember Yeltsin's election. I constantly run into other students I recognize, the school is so small (population: 1,500).

And I find other ways to meet Hungarians. One such recent friend asked me last night, "How do you like Budapest?"

"Well, if I didn't like it, I wouldn't be very happy here," I said.

When he asked what makes me unhappy, I said nothing, that happiness is a choice and I'm always happy. I didn't notice the potential incongruity, but he tried to work it out: "So if you didn't like Budapest you would be unhappy, but you are always happy... So you are happy everywhere?"

That seems about right.

__
Reading: Melanie A. Sully, "A Contemporary History of Austria"
Listening to: Josh Groban, "Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)"

President Obama

The interminable campaign season, together with the appointments, 3 a.m. phone calls, confirmations, and exit interviews that followed, all played a part in so diluting the Barack Obama elixir that I completely overlooked the significance of yesterday's inauguration. Almost subconsciously I thought of it as just another formality in the long series of Obamania - and in a way it was, the difference being that we have a new president.

"I wish I were in DC," some study abroad friends would lament. Or at least in the United States. Instead we spent the days leading up to Jan. 20 wondering where we would watch the inauguration, fearing that we'd end up at a bar that screened the ceremony with a Hungarian voiceover. But we joined maybe 100 other CEU students in the school's auditorium, so aside from a time lag and tech glitches ("We the people... we the people... we the people..."), it worked out. When you think about it, it wasn't too different than the States in that we'd still be sitting around a CNN broadcast. Or I could be wrong. The excitement certainly came nowhere near what we would have experienced back home: clapping was intermittent, the streets were almost imperceptibly more crowded than usual, and few revelers hit the bars and clubs.

I never know how much of my observations represent things as they are in Hungary, especially in this CEU bubble of international students. But my friends and I sat there as some of the only people in the audience with a new president, and I think we felt what Obama represents. We watched side by side with citizens from a dozen countries, read from pamphlets about Obama's stance on Americans abroad, shared drinks with an Australian... among us, collectively tied to Jews, Indians, Hungarians, Vietnamese, Canadians, and of course, Americans, we felt diversity.

Curbside parking

Notice, especially, the white lines drawn on the sidewalk and street in the picture (bottom left). Not only do drivers park half on the street, half on the sidewalk, authorities make it easier by demarcating just where to do it. My adviser at Central European University explained that more cars inundated Budapest than it could handle, so people park this way, or entirely on the sidewalk. Kind of makes the whole parking-on-the-driveway and driving-on-the-parkway seem sensible.

__
Watching: CNN's Christiane Amanpour, "Scream Bloody Murder" (and soon, the inauguration!)
Listening to: Groove Theory, "Tell Me"

Our humble abode

To get beyond the surrealism of a new city, to feel that you have actually left home and shifted your existential status in relation to the rest of the world, becomes easier with the help of local architecture. Although there is much to learn and describe about the design of Budapest, my first thoughts go to the construction of apartments and similar buildings, like mine pictured. It seems a common Hungarian solution to at least one architectural challenge is to build apartments around a courtyard, allowing more opportunity for windows. The idea may not differ so much from the shafts of Manhattan, but there is something much more thrilling about coming and going through the courtyard with the dwellings of neighbors rising around you.

Inside our apartment, though, I guess I ended up shafted anyway. My room makes dorms look spacious, anomalous to the rest of the apartment with its 14-foot ceilings, which makes me think space is poorly distributed. But I knew what I was getting into when we signed the lease, and it appeals to my minimalist tendencies. The only part I find strange is that I so easily accepted the windowless conditions, having forgotten what a fuss I made about finding a room with a view in Vietnam. No matter. I sit now in our airy living room, which if the sun were out and the blinds drawn would glow with natural light. The blinds themselves are a funny thing, too. They're heavy with wood bars to cover the large windows, so to open or close them is borderline hazardous and requires pulling or loosening a thick cloth strap.

Laundry also entails more effort than usual because most people have washing machines but not dryers, so we hang dry our clothes. I can't complain, though, about the heated racks in the bathrooms, which in many homes include a shower far removed from a toilet. Most toilets have round metal buttons (as opposed to levers) to flush, though I saw one at Central European University with a pad instead. The doors, as with those in the rest of the place, lock only by key. That always adds extra time entering and exiting (so we're screwed in case of fire), and explains why there are so many locksmiths wherever we go. Otherwise things are quite 'normal,' including kitchens, although real estate agents like to say that American-style kitchens are those that meld into a living room or some other part of a house, and everything else, I suppose, is un-American.

Forces from beyond

This picture was taken around noon on my way to class at Central European University. The men in green must have felt they had tortured us long enough, so here they are, spreading the salty love after snow has fallen. I would have felt pretty silly tiptoeing and sliding, but we were all in it together; a man in a car saw me struggling on my merry way and shouted something in Hungarian. I don't know what it was, but let's assume nice. I also made eye contact with a couple guys having just as much trouble and we shared a laugh.

Oh, the background? Just the Basilica, down the street from my school. I think the Latin reads: "I am the way to truth and life."

CORRECTION: "I am the way, the truth, and life." - courtesy of a friend who knows nine languages. (Updated 1/15/09 8:04 AM)

Are we there yet?

In our last discussion about traveling around the continent, a friend here suggested we just go to the airport some weekend and take whatever cheap flight is left. I loved the idea, but it is dawning on me how little this time in Hungary may actually be Hungarian. Maybe I should have begun with why I chose Hungary of all places: sometimes I wish I had a more noble reason, but it is only slightly less random than closing my eyes and pointing to a spot on a map. Travel has always been part of the life plan, so when it came time to choose a study abroad location, I went through Columbia's offerings, decided my Spanish wasn't good enough (I still rue the day), and narrowed it down to three cities with instruction in English: Copenhagen, Prague, and Budapest. The price tag and the level of immersion ultimately determined my decision.

Then again, I don't know if it is so bad to blindly point to a map. I encourage everyone to travel, to study abroad; for someone who is easily bored, it is one of the perks that make life interesting. And there is so much interesting out there (out here!), why do I need a reason to go to Budapest?

Much as I loathed the prospect last term of wasting time taking Hungarian (one of the hardest languages to learn), doing so changed my expectations. Eventually, I was not just going abroad, I was going to Hungary. I set my Google Alerts to it, learned a bit about 1956 and 1989, talked to anyone with any connection to the country.

But then I arrived. To put it one way, my paltry knowledge of Hungarian is one of the more advanced of my study abroad group; it might even beat that of our point person here, who is Romanian. Another point person is American (granted, with very good Hungarian). Maybe it is just us, I thought. But it seems to be true of Central European University in general. In my first class, the professor went around the room asking our names and backgrounds. There was another American, one or two Hungarians, and the rest from nearby countries (Romania, Poland, Russia, etc.).

But I do not complain. If there are two traits I value, they are these: open-mindedness and optimism. It is true, all of this might limit how much I learn about Hungary, especially if I am spending more time traipsing around Europe than appreciating what is right here. But either way, am I not learning about different cultures? Meantime, I focus on Hungary, starting with teaching you the most important word you would need here: koszonom ("thank you"). Learn it, and you will be better prepared to visit Budapest than some of those already here.