When with the Roma, do as they do

With Helen not being here this weekend it was up to me to get on my bike and find out a little bit more about the city. Well, that was the plan, but massive amounts of snow across central Europe put paid to the bike so exploration has been very much on foot.


On Friday evening I decided to check out another one of the kert bars, and worked my way down a narrow, dark and empty street trusting that the address I had written down was correct. Eventually I arrived at the Szimpla kert, which was pretty obvious when I arrived because there was a stream of taxis outside emptying their contents and three security guys on the door. This particular bar is centred around a courtyard, roofed in fortunately, and it spreads out over quite a large area, with many different side rooms and bar areas. Furnishing is random, and all around are paintings, artistic lamps, graffiti, tea lights and a few screens showing bizarre videos. The one that caught my eye in the place where I found a perch was a 1980s black and white video showing Microsoft advertising Windows 1. A real period piece.

It was packed, and the contrast between that and its general wackiness and the emptiness outside made it all feel extremely surreal. It felt a bit like a bar at a festival, and sitting watching the general goings-on was very entertaining.


Then, on Saturday evening I had decided to go to a Balkan Beats event at the Godor Klub, where I had been earlier in the week for the winter cycling fashion show. This is actually a really interesting venue, and puts on lots of eclectic events, intellectual discussion groups, exhibitions and alternative/underground music. It also has an interesting history, as in the early 1990s the mayor of Budapest decided that this would be the site of a new National Theatre, so they dug a huge hole in the ground for its foundations but then the national government stopped the project. The hole stayed for quite a few years, becoming known as the 'National Hole', before acquiring a glass roof and being turned into this arts venue.

This event is apparently a regular, and on the bill were two Roma bands, Romano Drom and Parno Graszt. Romano Drom have been around for about 10 years, and are a more conventional band, with a contemporary take on traditional gypsy music. I really liked them, and everyone around in the packed venue also seem to be getting down on it as well. I recommend having a listen to them, for those of you who share an interest in such things.

When the second act, Parno Graszt came on I wasn't initially quite sure what to make of them. About six guys and two women stood in an arc on the stage with I think just a double bass and a small lute-like instrument. When they started playing I realised that they had a more traditional sound, one that I didn't initially quite take to as much, but then realised that around me the whole place had gone slightly crazy. Everyone it seemed had started doing the traditional dancing associated with the music, with their arms raised up, clicking their fingers, circling more or less gently, but some of the more enthusiastic men were slapping their thighs and shoes. Of course, it meant that it became quite a physical event, and I seemed to move around quite a lot as different sections of the audience became more or less animated. At one point someone got a bit upset because of the pushing and took a swing at someone else, so I wondered if things were going to kick off, but it all calmed down very quickly.

Going to a gig is much more anonymous than going to a bar as you can get lost in the crowd, and I thought I would just be disappearing into the general melee, but halfway through the set someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked, "Where are you from?" Clearly, my dancing style had marked me out as an alien. Anyway, saying I was English seemed to elicit some interest and the information was relayed around a small group of people. One of the women then caught hold my hands and started to show me how to dance Roma-style, so I managed to stumble through that for half a song. Then later on somebody else nearby slapped me enthusiastically on my shoulder, gave me a big thumbs-up and a mighty grin indicating that this was a pretty good gig.

Apart from the sheer magic of the music and the dancing, I was also interested in what it said about the people there and their culture. Most of the people were young, and they seemed to be as caught up by the music as the more mature types there. In fact, several of the more energetic and stylish traditional dancers in the crowd must have been in their early 20s. I reflected on my own English culture, and struggled to think of anything like this that linked the generations. The Scots and the Irish certainly have it, but what about my own people? Anyway, as I watched what was going on I felt as if I was looking into a box that I had never seen before, and in some strange way felt proud to be part of a European culture that could produce such energy.

It was after midnight when the bands stopped playing, and I picked up my coat and set off into the snowy streets to walk home. People were coming out of bars and restaurants and having snowball fights as they walked along. It felt like a good place to be.

It's a small world

This blogging is something new to me. I've known for some time that quite a few people in the world are doing it, but not wishing to let the computer take over any more of my life I had never investigated it until now. I'd really just thought of it as being like having an on-line diary, a sophisticated version of the paper record that I kept for 10 years between 1977 and 1987.

However, having started this up and tinkered with the technology I am starting to appreciate what the differences are. Excuse my technically literate readers for a description of the (to them) extremely obvious. As well as my verbal ramblings I can also include photographs taken literally just a few minutes previously: one bit of software transfers them from the camera to my computer and then puts them up somewhere in cyberspace so that another piece of software can take them and create a slideshow on my blog. I can find some other information on the intranet and link to that. I can put a link in my blog to a website where you can all listen to the music of the band that I have just come home from watching.

Then again, during this afternoon I had several free crystal-clear Skype conversations with friends in France and Britain, and could have used my web cam to show them my luxury apartment. (Note to non-Skype users: please install Skype and get a headset so that you can call me, talk for free and see my apartment). While that was happening I was watching the text updates of this afternoon's Sheffield Wednesday game, live from Hillsborough.

Having all of this communication technology makes living in Budapest somehow not quite so distant. I remember that when I went to live in the Sudan in 1977 that it would take at least a week (and probably two or three) for a letter to get from the UK to my small town. And as for phoning home, completely impossible. The thought of that was as in the realms of science fiction.

As I wander around the city during the day and night I am also struck by the number of non-Hungarian young people around, British, French, American and the rest. I think quite a few come here to study in one of the city's universities, and again, that is something that very few of my contemporaries would have thought about doing back in the 1970s. Technology, cheap air fares and the European Union are some of the things that we can thank for that.

So what does all this mean? People of my generation grew up in a quite insular society, and not very many people travelled extensively, and even fewer lived abroad, taking the opportunity to learn something about another culture. Nowadays the world is so much smaller, we all know so much more about other people and perhaps to some extent we are less divided. But will this generation take that sense of integration onwards with them so that we do have a 'global village' by the middle of this century?

Or will inertia stop them? After all, my generation sang about peace and love and yet we seem to have made a pretty good job of screwing things up.

Cool winter cycling

For a long time cycling has been one of my passions, and I was determined to keep this up here in Budapest. It's always interesting to see how different cultures interact with this activity, so I've been trying to get some understanding about what it means here. One thing it means is being slightly lunatic - the thermometer I pass each morning said -10deg today, and there is ice forming on the river (visible in this early morning photograph).



Before I came I heard terrible things about cycling in Budapest; drivers don't pay attention to bikes, the roads are terrible, there are few dedicated cycling lanes. That's Budapest? More like Sheffield or any one of many other UK cities. In fact, so far it seems to me that cycling provision is actually not bad. There are cycle lanes around much of the city, including the wonderful one along the Danube that I use every morning (which gets its own bike-sized snow plough).


And, at this time of the year at least, there's not that much traffic compared to UK cities. But, the drivers are worse, and do drive at high speed where they can. More traffic would actually slow them down...

But actually here it seems as if cycling is something slightly subversive. Helen told me that according to the RyanAir in-flight magazine that the Budapest cycling scene is "hip and cool". Hey, that's me. And various other things I'd seen had already made me wonder that - like the coolest bars seem to have cycle racks, and that sort of thing.

And also the weird fact that cyclists here seem loathe to wear anything other than dark grungy clothing, even at night. Before coming I bought myself a new very yellow thickish cycling jacket, as some means of defence against the crazy traffic I was going to have to deal with. But in several weeks now I haven't seen another person looking like me. (OK, they're hip and cool, I'm not). This had come home to me last night when I went to an event organised by a local cycling association that was using this week to promote city cycling in the winter. Part of this was a 'fashion show' where people wandered up and down demonstrating good cycle gear for the winter. The commentary was in Hungarian so I might have missed the finer points, but the emphasis seemed to be on funkiness and being multicoloured rather than on visibility - with 50+ cyclists there, guess how many people had hi-viz jackets? You got it.

Then as I walked up from the cycle racks in the basement this morning someone who works here stopped me to ask where I had got my jacket. He said he couldn't find anything suitable in the shops here, so I recommended he try mail order from a country where cyclists are less cool (and possibly less suicidal).

Perhaps I'm starting a new fashion, perhaps I'm going to be the Coco Chanel of Budapest cycling, and hi-viz yellow will be the new black?

Getting the pace

Another week has gone by and slowly Budapest seems to be coming a little more familiar. This has been helped by things starting to fall more into place, such as by Helen coming out for the weekend and my finally managing to get a decent Internet connection so that I can contact people more reliably.

The Internet connection has been a frustrating story. My neighbour said that she could use her wireless network, but I found that I was just too far away to get a reliable connection, so sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. The best option was therefore to get a USB mobile broadband stick, but when I went to the local T-Mobile shop I was told that I could not get such a device unless I had a Hungarian identity card. I tried this twice, each time with no luck, so asked one of my HR administration people if I could have some sort of official letter that would impress them. So this evening I went back, queued again for 30 minutes and, crossing my fingers, went to see the sales assistant when my number was called. As usual, his English was limited, but I showed him my official letter (in Hungarian and English) and waited while he emotionlessly read it. Eventually he turned to me and said, "Life of Brian. Vurry fanny film. You?" Of course, I had to say yes, grinning foolishly. So, possibly thanks to Monty Python I managed to get my USB broadband stick and reliable contact with the outside world.

As I said, Helen came for the weekend and was able to take a look at my apartment and current lifestyle. Both seemed to pass. Although our current intensely cold weather continued the sun shone everyday and we had a great time exploring the city. Helen dressed up like an enigmatic east European film star, we walked up and down the river bank and sat in coffee houses trying to have radical thoughts, just as people have traditionally done in the city for centuries. We probably failed on that.

I did however bring up a subject that has intrigued me since I arrived which is about the prevalence of coat stands. I've noticed that whenever you go to a bar or a restaurant in the city there are coat stands or hooks on a wall, which people actually use. So you might walk into a bar, hang your coat up and go off and find somewhere to sit down. On the train out to the airport all of the hooks beside the seats had coats hanging on them. My recollection is that when we Brits go to a bar we put our coats on the seat beside us or stuff them into the luggage rack. So what's that all about? Do we assume that if we put coats on a coat stand that someone will steal them? Are coats on seats a useful way of making sure that no strangers will come and sit anywhere near us? Before coming out I had wondered what it might be like living in a country that regularly had really cold weather and how it might change lifestyles, but I had never thought about coat stands.

Anyway, apart from thinking radically about coat stands we did some interesting things. Like going to the Hungarian State Opera. This is in a most beautiful building, and is one of the institutions that people here are most proud of. Ticket prices are obviously subsidised, as they are a fraction of the price of going to somewhere like Covent Garden and it does mean that you get a wide range of people going. On the night we went they were showing Don Carlos. Now, I have never really listened much to classical music and opera is an art form whose attraction has escaped me, so I thought that Don Carlos was a Jamaican reggae singer who played with Black Uhuru, but it turns out that he was the son of a Spanish king way back in the 16th century. We only discovered this when buying a programme (£1.50 unbelievably) at the end of Act 4, having spent the three hours up until that time being completely baffled by hundreds of people in fantastic costumes on amazing sets moving backwards and forwards, singing in Italian and having their words translated into Hungarian in the surtitles. What also threw us was that after every solo or a scene change the main cast members came to the front of the stage, took a bow and the audience clapped enthusiastically, first randomly but then slipping into synchronised clapping. They clapped so loudly at the end of Act 3 that we, being completely baffled by what was going on, thought that it had all ended and tried to get our coats back from the cloakroom. Fortunately, they stopped us and sent us back in so that we could enjoy the the inevitable classical opera denouement of the doomed lovers going off to meet their respective fates.

On Monday afternoon, before Helen flew home, we paid a visit to the Szechenyi Baths. Budapest is famous for its thermal waters, and all over the city are public baths and summing pools supplied with geothermally heated water. The attraction of Szechenyi are large outdoor pools with water at up to 38°. That sounds fantastic but the air between the changing rooms and the water is -3°. So once you have changed and gone through the doors you have to somehow elegantly skip across to the hot water, which lies under a blanket of steam. Of course, once in it is absolutely wonderful, lying in the hot water, with the late afternoon winter sun playing on the beautiful architecture, the old chaps playing chess in the middle of the pool and people's heads drifting in and out of the clouds of steam. There are also a number of different types of indoor pool, most of which have a slightly unpleasant sulphurous smell but which is apparently very good for most bodily problems. I must admit that I felt wonderfully relaxed for the rest of the day, and think that the thermal baths are a definite plus for the city.

Week 4 of work has started. Helen gave me little sympathy when I explained how difficult I find it to work in a 9-to-5 job. For 12 years I have been used to starting when I wanted, finishing when I wanted and going out to do my shopping when I wanted. All of a sudden I have to be in one place during certain hours and running the rest of my life is something that has to be squeezed in in outside hours. This does not feel very organic. I guess that as the months go by I may become more domesticated, but in the meantime I do feel that I am doing a lot of scrabbling around just trying to get essentials organised. We shall see if things improve...

Launching the Budapest blog

Before I set off for Budapest I decided that I would try to maintain a blog about what happens on this unexpected adventure. I know that being in foreign lands throws up all sorts of new experiences that challenge assumptions, and that this might provide me with some sort of creative stimulus. So here we go.

Today, Sunday the 17th, marks two weeks here. Time has gone by both very quickly and very slowly as sometimes it feels that I have been here for a very long time but that things have also happened rapidly. I have started work in my new office, met my new colleagues and moved into a new apartment. Lots of new's.

It feels as if my life has been divided up into two new and mysterious elements. One element is having a proper job. I've been self-employed for so long that I've found the practice of going into an office five days a week and having a regular set of colleagues very strange but also exciting. There are 35 of us, most of whom started work here in June of last year, so everyone is in the position of trying to work out what they are supposed to do. I am in a unit of nine people, and our responsibility is to provide support of different types to the others, who all have specific areas of operational responsibility. I have a little sub-unit of three people including myself, and we provide advice on training design and delivery. I am the head of this little group and have line management responsibility for one of them, and have suddenly found out that by the end of January I need to have completed their performance appraisals. Good grief. How do you do that? I haven't done that since the last century, when I had two underlings back in my ACT days. Mind you, Janet and Julia both seems to have turned out okay and were not permanently damaged by my management style...

Most of the staff, and mainly the younger, less senior people are Hungarian. The rest are a mix, a few Americans, some Canadians, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Togolese, Palestinian and me, the token Brit. The first half-hour every day in an international office is a fascinating aural melange of greetings as everyone seems to go around saying hello in different languages, shaking hands and kissing. I did use to stroke my cat when I first walked into my office, but Harry was never much of a conversationalist in the morning, so this is all quite new.

As I half expected, nobody really knew what to do with me when I arrived, as the head of the Centre was still on holiday. So I decided that the best thing to do was to get to know everybody and have been working around the offices inviting people down to our cafeteria for coffee and conversation, finding out about where they come from, what they do, what they have done and the like. When I was working as a consultant and was being paid by the day I never had the chance to do any of this 'teambuilding' and socialising, as I had to be performing from Hour 1, so just sitting around drinking lattes and talking about what we've done and where we've been seems really strange. However, several of my colleagues have said that this has been exactly the right thing to do. Corporate life. Teambuilding activities also include building snowmen and snowball fighting in the back garden of the office after one night of heavy snow.

It's been particularly interesting talking to the Hungarian staff and learning something about their culture and lives. Most of them are in their early 30s, I guess, so they were still children before 1989. But clearly the lives they are leading are vastly different to those their parents led. They say how when they were children their lives were very simple, they had very few clothes and everyone dressed in the same way. However, life had a stability and predictability and they knew that, for example, they would have some holiday because their parents' state employers would give them something. Lots of factory workers all went off to Lake Balaton to stay in state-provided accommodation where they would enjoy their holiday, and they knew that this would happen each year. But since 1989 things have not been so clear. Certainly they have more political freedoms and can travel abroad if they wish, but the uncertainties of the capitalist economy have meant that nothing is a given any more, and I sense that there is quite a lot of ambivalence about whether or not things are 'better' now. They say how pre-1989 there were never any homeless people, and I have noticed how every evening that I walk around the streets in the city centre there are lots of people huddled up in doorways under blankets trying to get some shelter from the freezing nights. I read just last week how as northern Europe froze how hundreds of homeless people were dying in Poland, where nighttime temperatures were dropping down to the minus 30s.

Coming from a country that has had centuries of political stability, and where regime change does not really mean a great deal in terms of political alignments (particularly at the moment) it's hard to grasp what it means where accepted orthodoxies can change so dramatically as the years go by. I've been fascinated by a book I am reading about Budapest's cultural history, where in one chapter the author talks about one of the city's main attractions, Heroes' Square, a vast public space containing lots of different monumental statues. The problem for Hungary has been deciding who are the current heroes. In the early part of the 19th century the Austrian King was the big banana so had an appropriately gigantic statue, but in the second half of the century he was distinctly out of favour and so was remodelled so that he didn't look like a king. Then during the fascist years between the wars heroes with social consciences were taken down, only to be replaced during the post-war iron curtain years. Of course, they were replaced by the social realist likes of Marx, Trotsky, Stalin, etc. But since 1989 they are now out of favour and so have been dispatched to what sounds like a fascinating place to visit on the outskirts of the city called Memento Park, which contains lots of the enormous statues dedicated to the workers and the Red Army. I guess I should visit that before they come back in favour and are shipped back to Heroes' Square...

Another reason for the last two weeks feeling busy was that I spent quite a few afternoons travelling around the city with Daniella, a delightful estate agent (there are some) who showed me quite a few different apartments. I eventually decided on one in a street just off the square where the Houses of Parliament are located. It's a bit like having an apartment on Whitehall in London, as it is right in the heart of the government district, yet there are ordinary residential properties here. One of the photographs shows the exterior of the building, and another shows the view from my roof terrace.

It was being a top floor property with plenty of windows and light that sold it to me. I'm not sure if I will have much opportunity to enjoy the roof terrace as I will only be here until the end of April, at which point Helen will have joined me and we will be looking for somewhere a bit larger. However, it is good to be able to go out, breathe in the freezing air and take photographs of the dome of the parliament building. It's also only 100 yards or so to the river, and on Friday morning, my first day here, I really enjoyed the walk along the river embankment to my office, about 20 minutes. It's a truly beautiful city from this angle, and I felt very blessed to be able to enjoy this as a daily commute.

The other element is about having a life outside of work. Living on your own in a strange city and country brings challenges. I've never felt very comfortable about going out and walking into bars or going to the cinema on my own, as my own insecurities make me feel that this is the sign of a sad individual. But here, where I don't know anyone and haven't really got any social life going my choice is either to stay at home all the time and be a sad individual or go out on my own and look like a sad individual. So last night I chose to go out, reassuring myself that while I might look sad I am not really and do have friends. I looked in various listings magazines to see where might be suitable places for someone like myself and ended up heading for a bar in District VI, arundown but rather 'hip' part of the city.

One of the things that Budapest is famous for are its 'kert' bars, which are establishments that have been set up in semi-derelict properties that are awaiting refurbishment (of which there are quite a few). The one that enjoyed my presence last night was the Potkulcs, which is only known by an address and does not have any visible sign outside suggesting that there is a bar within. It was snowing gently as I walked down this dark, narrow, empty and somewhat forbidding street looking for 65, and as described there was a rusting iron gate. I walked backwards and forwards wondering whether or not this was a good move but decided that I needed to be less sad and pushing the gate open walked in. Somewhere down the end of a dark courtyard I could see lights and when I opened the door to that I suddenly found myself in this bustling, smoky, noisy bar, full of mainly twentysomethings, a bit hippyish, bohemian (whatever that means) and the like. I ordered a beer and found myself a seat, looking extremely sad, as everyone else was in groups and chatting animatedly or playing table football. However, it all proved very entertaining, as someone was enjoying a birthday party there and was serenaded karaoke-style by a friend singing "Can't take my eyes off of you" in a mixture of English and Hungarian. So I sat there for a little while enjoying the subsequent wacky blend of soul, Gypsy folk and Euro-rock music until a couple came up to ask me what I was doing there on my own. They had noticed that I was sitting and looking around watching what was going on and not talking to anyone, and were just curious to meet me. So we had a chat and I explained that I had just come to live in the city, didn't know anyone or where to go and was just enjoying the atmosphere. Anyway, they exhorted me to stay so I hung on a little while longer before making my apologies and leaving.

In fact, this was the second time that this had happened since my arrival. Last week I went walkabout one evening and ended up in a bar near my hotel. This was a more sober place, again comfortably full of people sitting chatting while I sat there with my Hungarian phrasebook trying to work out what was on the menu. Eventually a bloke sitting next to me with his girlfriend leaned over and asked me if I was English and how I was enjoying Budapest. He worked for a graphic design company here and was very keen to make sure that I liked the city. He gave me his business card and said that I should contact him once he gets back from a business trip so that we can meet and he can tell me about Budapest life. As that was the first time it had happened, my cynical English mind made me wonder what his ulterior motives might be, even though I really wanted to think that he was just being friendly and welcoming. Now that it has happened a second time I realise that it might be true: people here are really just friendly! Wow.

Contradictions. Dark empty streets and warm friendly bars. Fascist villains and Communist heroes (or is it the other way around today?) Dereliction and astonishingly beautiful Art Nouveau buildings. Muffled people hurrying through the freezing streets but smiles and laughter. Dolce & Gabbana shops with people sleeping in their doorways. Will I ever make sense of it all? Perhaps you might like to join my attempts to do so within this blog?