Living the past 2

We had quite a few family members visiting us for Christmas, Helen’s nonagenarian aunt from California and her grand-daughter, along with three of our own children and a boyfriend.

Several of them had visited earlier in the year and they were all excited to be back in Budapest, and one afternoon set off for the Great Markethall to do some Christmas shopping, but when they got back they had a somewhat sorry tale to tell. They had taken the No 2 tram to the market and because of it being packed and them not understanding how to operate their ticket machines, they had not validated their tickets properly, even though they had tried to do so. No-one had offered help to show how these older machines work, so when the ticket inspectors swooped they were in trouble.

They had been ordered off the tram, had had to show passports, were threatened with being taken to the police station, and their parents (i.e. me) had been criticised for not explaining how to validate their tickets. They were then fined 12,000 forints (nearly £40).

This will be a familiar tale to people who know Budapest. Instructions on how to validate tickets on trams and buses are non-existent it seems, especially in languages that tourists know, and the machines themselves sometimes do not work properly or are confusing to operate. Allied with a culture that expects authoritarian behaviour, giving people a uniform makes them become little dictators.

This is something of an issue for Budapest’s international image in my opinion. Following the rules is important, but overall the city’s reputation as a tourist destination would benefit if the BKV explained in each conveyance how the system works (in English as a minimum) and its little dictators were to show rather more customer focus and sensitivity to confused (but not necessarily cheating) foreigners.

A small story, but a bigger one caught my ear this morning, when on the BBC’s Today programme they said they were going over to their man in Budapest. This story was about the Hungarian government’s new media control laws: a government body will have oversight over what television and newspapers want to report. The government minister interviewed suggested that as the ruling party had won such a large majority in the elections that it was their duty to do what was necessary to protect the country against misreporting.

To my ears this sounds pretty much like the sort of justifications that dictatorships can use, and indeed several voices in the European Union have questioned its ethicality.

Democracy is new in this part of the world, and its subtle responsibilities do not sit easily with traditions that respect autocracies, whether they be on the No. 2 trams or in central government.

Living the past

Berlin has always been around the top of my list of cities to visit. For many years its weird situation as a divided city fascinated me, but I had never before managed to pay a visit.

The Brandenburg Gate

The Reichstag

Christmas revelries on Unter den Linden

When I finally did I was surprised to see how much its tourist industry plays on World War II and its 40 year epilogue. Most of the postcards on sale and sights to see are about this period: the bombed out city, the burning Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie and Hitler’s Bunker, for example.

Checkpoint Charlie

Perhaps this has been the catharsis that the country needed: the Germans I have met all seem to be forward looking and not outwardly hung up by a period in history that clearly could create some deep psychological issues.

Several places made a deep impression on me. The first was the Holocaust Memorial. Approaching this from a distance it looks like a small area of black stone slabs arranged in a grid pattern on a gentle knoll, but as you walk into the spaces between the slabs you find yourself disappearing down into a subterranean level where you cannot see out, people appear fleetingly and disappear ahead and beside you and the black stones lurch and lean intimidatingly. 

The Holocaust Memorial

I had not read anything about the place before, but I immediately felt a sense of panic as I slid into the cracks, disappearing from the world and not being able to see an easy way to escape.

The second was the Jewish Museum, housed in an astonishing building whose shape and internal layout has been designed to capture the dislocation and uncertainty of Jewish history through the centuries. I know that Britain is not free of anti-semitism, but I was relieved that my people were not directly involved in the terrible story that it told about Germany and other parts of mainland Europe in the 1930-1945 period. However, had we not been able to rely on the English Channel to save us in 1940 I’m not so sure that we would not have also joined in with what happened, so no self-satisfaction here.

It’s a fascinating, compelling but ultimately depressing exhibition, telling a vitally important story, but I left feeling that it did not deal at all with one of the Holocaust’s postscripts, the situation in Israel and Palestine. I guess I’m just hopelessly naïve about people and politics, but would it not have been so much better for the world if this terrible experience had led Israel to steer away from crushing the Palestinians and instead show real humanity in seeking to find ways of sustainable coexistence.

More uplifting was the East Side Gallery.

Lining the River Spree for several hundred metres on the east side of the city, this is the most complete remaining stretch of the old Berlin Wall and is celebrated by artists expressing in a variety of ways what the Wall signifies to them. Great fun.

Freedom means getting Kylie

The medium is still the message

I was lucky enough to spend a few days recently in Berlin at the Online EDUCA conference. This is the biggest conference in Europe looking at the whole subject of using technology to support learning, and I went thinking that I would be meeting some of the smartest people and listening to the biggest, newest ideas in my professional domain. I’d also been invited to make a presentation to a sub-group there, but came away reflecting on the words of Groucho Marx: to paraphrase, “I’d never want to go to a conference that wanted to have me as a speaker.”

Perhaps the subject of my own talk prejudiced me; that for all the exciting talk about the brave new world of computer and mobile device technology, there is still a woeful lack of application of basic educational principles in most technology-delivered learning.  

I was hopeful; I diligently read the synopses in the programme and went along to the sessions that promised to tell me lots of new things, but with one or two exceptions found that what people talked about was only vaguely related to their presentation title, that most people talked in only general terms about things they had done and what that might show, and that there just weren’t that many really new and interesting ideas.

I was also appalled by the general inability to communicate ideas: the PowerPoint slides crammed with indecipherable text or statistics, the lack of structure in delivery and the reluctance to look at the audience when talking. In my funny old way of looking at the world, learning relies on communication and an inability to do this to a roomful of consenting adults does not give me the confidence that it will be done effectively to a bunch of stressed, sceptical or cynical members of staff.

Although the audiences perhaps did not help. In every presentation I attended most people seemed to be dealing with e-mails or updating their Facebook pages on their laptops or tweeting or texting on (the mobile phone of choice) their iPhones. So while there was a whole lot of communicating going on, I’m not sure that many people were paying much attention to the moment.

Which took me back to good old Marshall McLuhan: who cares what you’re saying if you’re saying it on an iPhone?

Fear of flying, Hungarian style

Language is a problem when living in Hungary.

During the years of Russian domination only Hungarian and Russian were taught in schools and so now there is an acute shortage of teacher-aged people who can effectively teach English. So while young people are more likely to speak some English, the general ability level is low and is concentrated in the more tourist-oriented sectors of the economy.

Official EU statistics report that Hungary has one of the lowest levels of second language functionality in the whole of the Union. No prizes for guessing which other country lurks at the bottom. Joke: What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language? English.

Hungarian is also completely unlike any other language in the world. Some linguists claim it is related to Finnish, but even Finns fail to see much similarity. So you can’t get any vague sense of what something means by relating it to a similar looking Romance or Anglo-Saxon word. It works by adding small words expressing simple ideas together to create more complex ideas, and to this word you then add endings that show such things as plurality, possession and any prepositional relationship. This means that Hungarian sentences consist of a small number of extremely long words. You therefore have to constantly think backwards when putting things into Hungarian, which is not easy when you’ve lost the number of brain cells that I have.

All this means that everyday transactions in shops, banks, post offices and official offices can be frustrating. Technological solutions exist: iPhone users can use an app that translates a typed English phrase into Hungarian, and one shopkeeper used Google Translate on his computer to translate his Hungarian into English for me. But such solutions often give ridiculous results due to the complexity of Hungarian grammar and word order, so they are not altogether satisfactory, and fail to help develop much empathy in such interactions.

Sometimes you think things are better than they are. When you call T-Mobile for help, for example, the instructions say “Press 2 for the English language service”. You then press buttons to work your way through the usual hierarchy of options until finally you get a ringing tone and a human being answers. “Beszélsz angolul?” (“Do you speak English?”) you ask. “Nem”, no, they reply.

So Helen and I are trying to learn the language. We’ve made small but significant progress and can now enter entrances and exit exits. We usually know how to avoid unusual parts of pigs on restaurant menus.

And Hungarians appreciate you making the effort. For that reason I decided the other evening when waiting at Budapest Airport with some Hungarian colleagues to impress them with a little local language. The information screen just flashed up that our flight was boarding so I walked back to them and announced enthusiastically, “Beszállás!”, boarding. They both looked at me astonished for a second then burst out laughing. “Do you know what we thought you just said? You told us that you had shit yourself!”

The two words for boarding and pooing one’s pants are beszállás and beszarás, but an untrained English tongue moves around the mouth in a way that makes ‘l’ and the Hungarian ‘r’ similar and loses the distinction between short and long a’s. The joys of language learning.

I shall take more care in future when describing my movements at Hungarian airports, but it won’t deter me from trying to get to grips with this unique but impenetrable language.