München...

it's always good seeing old friends. since it was my third trip there, i decided it was probably time to see the city. and i did! it is gorgeous. i shall live there once in my lifetime... there's nothing like napping in the nude park and having a bird poop on you. sigh. münich.

grumble of the track and tilt of the train-- somewhere in austria i cannot sleep. maybe from insomnia, exhaustion or excitement, or the empty-stomach cappuccino i drank 16 hours ago... this train to munchen is much more bearable than my first-- a midnight 6 hour hop on at verona, joining the already too-crowded hallways from rome. standing room ? barely. we are heading north. we walk in circles, retracing former footsteps. do we question along the way? when i do i constantly note how i'd never imagine myself to BE where i am. i like this way of thinking.
stopped, standing at st. pointenhof, somewhere west of vienna, south of the german border. a calling card and three postcards dated three weeks ago slide out of my notebook. my eyes are heavy from the nyquill.
if i were to write a life philosophy, it would not be brief. there would be many footnotes, cross references, and abbreviations. one might have to read a number of books to understand it. perhaps then you could understand me.
eyes open, keep them. my snobishness is perhaps poorly concealed disappointment in people. my hopes are so high...
lindsay said, and i smiled, 'aww... ella you are too smart to work for the government. stay in school.' vying for me to move to santa cruz wiih her.
sleepiness is where i picked up my poor posture-- hunched shoulders, curved spine, lazy chest-- but it is sometimes during these severely deprived moements that lifelife comes . i remember sitting (in poor form) on a curb in an elementary school parking lot in champaign. awaiting my nannying charge, i watched the children play. i couldn't have gotten three hours of sleep the night before-- two jobs, a full course load, and altogether too many clubs left me lagging-- i reflected, in a completely euphoric state, how beautiful fall is; how wonderful children are. simple wisdoms, simple breaths.
Loosdorf.
my eyes are heavy. perhaps it will come.

Szentendre

what is this communism? vague etchings of... housing projects lining the slovakian landscape. memorials defaced, replaced in hero's square. red posters, soviet occupation. stories of underground intellects, freedom-fighters. state-sponsored news, iron curtain to journalists. but what of these fabricated, abbreviated memories? what is this thing called communism? or 'post' communism?
this young-- in so many senses young: with a shallow history, young and hungry, believing-- american woman travels with the rest of them-- walking the same streets, sitting at the same cafes, frequenting the same museums. as such a normal member of... history? culture? what is it in their faces that i cannot read... what is it those non-physical remnants of this thing. called. communism.
i read marx and i went to live in hungary.

unbearable lightness...

a year of two after emigrating, she happened to be in paris on the anniversary of the russian invasion of her country. a protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. fists raised high, the young frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning soviet imperialism. she liked the slogans but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. she lasted no more than a few minutes in the parade.
when she told her french friends about it, they were amazed. 'you mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your own country?' she would have liked to tell them that behind communism, fascism, behind all the occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. but she knew she would never be able to make them understand. embarrassed, she changed the subject.
...
these are questions that had been going through tereza's head since she was a child. indeed, the only truly serious questions are the ones that even a child can formulate. only the most naive of questions are truly serious. they are the questions with no answers. a question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. in other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.
--Milan Kundera

Homecoming

we are returning from all ends of these lands orszagat, she noted heavily. our first weekend free and we have thus descended. croatia, krakow, ljubljana, belgrade, zagreb... cities foreign and still exotic in my mind now fill up my tentative weekend calendar.

ana, my adorable mexican-guatemalen roommate, has made it her personal business to visit the ukraine. 'they have the most unhappy people in the world,' she told me sadly, shaking her ringlet hair. it seems fitting to me that she knows this, for she is the singularly most smiley person i've ever met. her happiness is contagious, and i'm ever cheerful living with her.

all of us sharing the flat-- ana, christina, sam, and i-- are sitting in our living room scouring our travel books, a pasttime that will not get old so long as we have monday mornings to exchange our weekend tales with the whole EAP group. 'maybe i should take a preliminary trip to scope out the place,' she is reconsidering her previously proposed trip in november, 'before it gets so cold and i've no change of cheering them up... to see their comedy clubs and all...' her dimples come out full-form as she considers her charge.

'but snow flurries?! is that when it snows so hard you can't see your hands?' this time i laugh and calm her down, explaining 'blizzards' are the bad ones, but flurries are peaceful massages on the skin, quieting the city and its people.

these californians kill me with their thwarted sense of weather. you'd think we were going to antarctica with the amount of snow gear they brought and the fear to accompany it. my fellow wisconsonian and i laugh.

Bratislava

thisthis, i breathe, as the opera
lights the faces the applause lights
the square and i,i
am left breathing left living
thisthis moment.
like crying with audrey in the rain
a block in my chest goose-
bumps my arms and
tears flow out mine eyes.

i tried by squinting my eyes
closed to imprint his face there
the patterns of hair
the wrinkles, but of
the smiling eyes just
satisfied
with remembering.

--
from the little english he could speak, thanks to an expatriate brother in australia, and the little magyarul we could muster, we conversed for hours on the train north. smiling old man, lost in his memories, trying to convey the importance of his country's history... passing small towns through the yellow-stained train windows, towns we could not see unless we stood up to peer through the window opening at top: tatabayna, gyor all along the duna. and a final vislat!
--
beautiful little town, hauntingly surrounded by communist-built housing... picture your dorm building through a prism, endless mirrors reflecting the stone and windows for miles and miles there is no horizon behind these. castle on a hill, national museum, soft language... sigh.

Egesedegre!

Cheers.

Walking constantly around the city. CEU, Central European University, is sooo beautiful and new, but their policies seem to be typical Hungarian... laid-back. Strange coming from a Californian, I think, complaints on the lackadaisical, haphazard way of living here... Anyway, no course listing as of yet-- school only starts in a week-- but check back later.

i run in the city park varosliget many mornings. they've drained the water from the pond to do refurbishing on the main bridge. behind hero's square is a palace and a square of reconstructed hungarian architecture from around the country... mini churches, palaces, etc. big enough for you to walk in but not to the scale in real life.

had a tour of hero's square with my art history class... images of its history. statues removed, hidden, broken throughout the tumult of this country's history. the square itself has been appropriated as a tool of the ruling regime to manifest its own credos, stories, heros. according to the epoch, hapsburgian rulers are defecated or hailed... nazi occupation covered with posters the ancient hungarian heros... the communists covered them with red cloth and images of lenin, marx, and engels.

amerikai vagyok

not to worry, all you amerikai. the hungarians know how to party-- the clubs are good.

i'm also never drinking again.

budapest is built upon a multiplicity of thermal baths; its healing waters are known all over europe. it's the thing to do during the wintertime, but who's waiting for the cold? had a lovely walk around the city park the other day, live right by it. hero's square is the decorated center of the park with monuments to the country's greatest historical figures. (why are they always men???) i don't have a suit, so we tried to go to the baths but the ones in the city park do not allow nude bathing. others do. instead, my friends and i visited the hungarian wine festival and made friends with lovely wine-growing families! saturdays are definitely the wedding days, and there are brides everywhere... oh, to be married in budapest... castels, rivers, trees...

after having 'intensive' hungarian courses for a week, i can now say three things: i am american (amerikai vagyok), i am a student (diak vagyok), and thank you (koszonom). progressing well, methinks.

today? post office, trying to track down hungarian documents to establish residency, market, and two classes this evening...

Duna

strongest current i've ever seen. it flows from north to south-- hungarians learned the geography of their city against its flow: south on top, north on bottom. the river makes the city, a center of their mentalities-- separating the old city from the new, the hills from the plain, Buda and Pes(h)t. six bridges (hit) that span this fast moving water, the Duna, such a simple, fitting name for this female force.

my favorite, Erzsebet or Sisi bridge, connects the two parts at the foot of the Gellert Hill. coming upon it, you encounter the Gellert Hotel on the Buda side, the city's oldest and only remaining hotel from before WWII. its baths are some of the most beautiful in the city. Erzsebet was Franz Joseph's wife, together rulers in the late 1800s of the Hapsburg Empire. although born in munich and ruler of austria, budapest held a special place in her heart. their princess di, hungarians developed a speical love for her.

the Duna: runs from Vienna to here. at night it frightens me to cross, i think of how fast moving it is, how if i was pushed in i'd drown. anyone would drown. like swollen waters of the mississippi after a flood... so wide. i think about during and after the second world war, when all of the bridges had been destroyed by retreating nazis. must have been a local economy to get people across, though i cannot conceive of how anyone would cross without a motor.

there are sculptures on the Pest side, right before the Parliament. bronze-cast shoes. a monument to the hungarian jews who perished? sad, faded bronze, empty shoes. conveys an emptiness, a haunting trgedy of some collective past memory.

Hungary, Magyarorszag, the Hungarians attest, has the most looted history in the world. the mongols (tartars), austrians, turks, hapsburgs, fascists, nazis, and soviets all had their own part in stripping the people of their autonomy. perhaps their biggest blow to their physical empire, though, and one they still do not forget, is the treaty of trianon that was signed in 1920, reducing the land mass of hungary by two-thirds. later hungary would lose significant proportions of its population during the holocaust, including estimates of two-thirds to three-fourths of its jewish population (600,000-700,000 people), and perhaps a large part of the perhaps 200,000 roma who were killed.

the Hungarian Empire used to occupy a land size stretching into Romania, Austria, encompassing Bratislava and Vienna-- borh of which are still regerred to by their Hungarian names-- Poszony and Becs.

the Duna has seen all of this.

vii.

so... visited the Budapest Parade 2005, a giant rave-like party in Hero's Square last weekend. Tour of city, including the Parliament, its many bridges, the Duna (Danube), the largest Synagogue in Europe...

such a beautiful city, i can't stand to be on the computer. going to walk around.