VERZIO film festival time

I spent most of last weekend sitting down in a darkened room. It was the eighth annual VERZIO Human Rights Film Festival, sponsored here in Budapest by good old George Soros. It presents a number of interesting and sometimes disturbing films about people's lives, focusing on Eastern Europe.

From a personal point of view one of the most interesting looked at the lives of a few refugees living at Bicske refugee camp, just outside Budapest ("Caught between two worlds"). It looked at how people there, who can only stay six months, were preparing for life outside in Hungary, with the language lessons, cultural orientation and so on. Coming to live here was challenging for me, so I can barely guess at how difficult it would be for someone with a traumatic past and a completely different cultural history.

Another interesting film was "Europolis", which looked at the strange town of Sulina in Romania. As part of the peace treaty at the end of the Crimean War a joint 'European Commission' established a port at the mouth of the Danube in the Black Sea. For 20 years or so it boomed, but with the coming of the railways ships started unloading further upstream and its grandeur slowly withered away. But people continue to live there, eking out a living in the collapsing and abandoned infrastructure. A strange story indeed.

While a film which brought tears to my eyes was "There was once...", which told the story of how a Hungarian history teacher started researching into the Jewish community that had existed in her hometown. It had slowly developed through the 18th century, but had then abruptly disappeared on the night of June 18, 1944, when they were all taken away to Auschwitz. She managed to track down survivors to find out their stories, and had then invited them all back to a celebration in Hungary. Sadly the present day fascists, the Magyar Garda, decided to stage their own demonstration and had attacked this peaceful, joyous gathering of octogenarians and their children. A bittersweet story.

My favourite was "Our school", which told the story of the attempts in a small town in Romania to integrate Roma children into mainstream schools. The European Commission had provided money to rebuild a school the Roma children used, so while it was being rebuilt these children went to the local town school. First they were put in their own classroom, then they were allowed to join the other classes, but always sat in the back row, ignored by the teachers. Finally, because they were seen to be academically behind the 'Romanian' children they were integrated into mainstream education in the local school for the physically and mentally disabled. What was particularly tragic was their awareness of what was happening to them: they enjoyed being with the Romanian kids and making friends, but the system would not let them in. And of course, by the time their original school had been rebuilt, they were all 'mainstreamed', so the new school stayed empty.

A thought-provoking weekend, indeed.

One last ride before the winter arrives

At this time of the year Hungarians apparently often look at the weather forecasts for Moscow: two weeks after snow hits Moscow the winter starts here. So when I saw that Moscow had had its first snow and that its temperature was around 0 deg,  I decided that last Sunday needed to be a day spent on a bicycle.

The 'Danube Bend' in Google Earth (looking west)

So on a beautiful, mild, sunny morning I set off and cycled up over the Pilis Hills to Esztergom. This had been the very first long bicycle ride my made last year, and had not repeated this trip since, so as I pedalled up to the pass I found myself reflecting on how it all now seemed so familiar and then it had seemed so different.

The five-mile descent from the top of the hills down to Esztergom was wonderful, and I then spent a little time sitting on a bench in the November sunshine eating my sandwiches and looking at the river. Then along the cycle path, pausing along the way to pick up and examine a very strange looking fruit, hundreds of which were lying along one stretch of the river bank.

An Osage Orange

 The next day I would discover that it is something called an Osage Orange, and that is very common in the central United States, and, it would seem, a 100 m stretch of the Danube.

I then took a small road inland, into the Duna-Ipoly National Park, and climbed for six or seven miles slowly up into the middle of the hills again, but this time on a narrow tarmac road closed to vehicles. This meant that the road surface was in good condition which made a big difference when I was able to start descending.

For about 15 miles I only saw four or five bicycles and a handful of walkers, and was able to enjoy some beautiful rides through tunnels of yellow and golden trees, and the occasional glorious view over the valleys running down to the river.

Duna-Ipoly National Park towards the river in the north

Perfect cycling country

By now the sun was starting to disappear, and I was keen to get back to Budapest before darkness came, so after the well-earned swoop down through the hills to the river I followed the river bank back into the city. 70 miles, the longest ride I did in 2010, and my legs and bum could confirm that.

Knowing your bal from your jobb

One of the curious idiosyncrasies about Hungarian theatres and cinemas is the seat numbering system.

Rows are simple enough, but in most places the individual seats are numbered starting from each end, so that if there are 30 seats in a row there will be a Left 1 through to 15 and a Right 1 through to 15, with the two 15s being beside each other.

Tricky enough, but of course Hungarian tickets are printed in Hungarian and most foreigners have no idea of the difference between 'bal' and 'jobb' (left and right).

So this evening when I went to the Toldi cinema to see a human rights documentary that attracted a lot of expatriates, the time before the film started was filled with people occupying seats, being challenged by other people about being in the wrong seat, people getting up, getting down, moving in and out, muttering darkly about bal and jobb and left and right.

Apart from the language problem, left and right depends on where you are looking from, and to be honest I have no idea how it works. All I am grateful for is that by chance I parked my bottom in the jobb Row 6, Seat 3. Or at least I think I did.

It has been a long time since I last posted something on the blog. Between April and October I was working on an Open University course, which seemed to swallow up all my spare time. But that has now finished, and I also am expecting to spend rather more time alone here in Budapest than I have been doing since the summer of last year, so blogging may feel like a way of communicating again.

Well, we are well into the autumn. The days are still bright and beautiful but cool and nights are getting chilly, down to a few degrees. But the last few mornings have reminded me why living in Budapest can be so uplifting. The moist air and cold mornings mean that there is a mist hanging over the river each morning, and the low sunlight shining through it creates an amazing beauty. So much so that I took a detour on my bicycle this morning to capture Parliament from Margaret Bridge.

This must be one of the most beautiful scenes in any city in the whole wide world.

Guantánamo Bay in Freedom Square

It's tough being the guardians of freedom and liberty around the world. For a start, you have to protect your embassies in foreign countries from people who cannot see all the good that you are doing. For this reason both the British and United States embassies in Budapest are surrounded by solid fortifications to make it impossible to drive any sort of vehicle bomb close enough to do serious damage.

However, as the United States works to higher standards of personal protection than the Brits, since last summer the corner of Szabadsag Ter where the United States Embassy sits has been a building site, where roads are being dug up, mysterious equipment is buried and enormous fences are erected.

So stepping outside our apartment is now like arriving at the gates of Guantánamo Bay, with a 10 foot high steel fence running the length of (formerly) charming Perczel Mor utca.

Perczel Mor's new street furniture

According to local websites many local residents are extremely unhappy at what is happening, fearing that the presence of this fortified site is going to affect property prices and make the area a lot less pleasant in which to live.

Certainly the steel fence and associated structures now going up around the Embassy do not really fit in with the Art Nouveau and neo-classical buildings that surround the city's most attractive open space. It has been suggested that an altogether more sensible approach would have been to relocate the Embassy to a more suburban area where security installations would have been less obtrusive, but apparently the US government pays the city council $1.8 million a year for the privilege of living where it does.

So the beauty of the city suffers but the money rolls in. In another situation it might be called prostitution.

It was written

One of the benefits of the Internet age for expatriates is being able to tune in to domestic radio stations from anywhere around the world, rather than having to rely on the vagaries of shortwave reception and local FM relays. So here in Budapest I start my working day with BBC Radio 4, "Farming Today" and "Today".

I can also catch other programmes, and occasionally listen to Melvyn Bragg's "In Our Time", always enjoying the experience but often ending up feeling that I have not really quite understood what the intellectuals he lines up have discussed. Such was the case with last week's 500th edition which dealt with free will. The discussion centred around the idea of determinism, that ever since the Big Bang everything that has happened has been determined by the laws of nature, and that we therefore do not make our own decisions at all but that they are made for us, and that free will is, in the words of the 80s disco classic, 'just an illusion'.

If I had known that I would have gone to work last Tuesday better prepared. At midday Helen rang me to say that she had fallen off her bicycle, and when I picked her up discovered that she had been knocked unconscious, needed stitches in her chin, had broken a tooth and a bone in her hand, which meant that instead of flying to India for a three-week yoga retreat she was to spend a week in Szent Janos Hospital here in Budapest.

Now, often the thought of having to stay in a hospital in a foreign country is something of a nightmare, and so it was for us. We had heard stories about the inadequacies of the local healthcare system and feared the worst. And at first sight Szent Janos seemed to meet the descriptions we had heard. Old buildings, run-down facilities, and a sense of slight edge of chaos.

However, once our initial shock at the incident had subsided and Helen had settled into her room, it all seemed much better. Once the staff had gotten over some initial fear of dealing with a foreigner and Helen had expanded her Hungarian vocabulary so that she could describe her feelings and ask for basic needs, things improved considerably. As the days went by it became apparent that the staff worked incredibly hard in very difficult surroundings, and that while the buildings might not be state of the art the staff were extremely competent and caring.

As with any hospital stay, we were glad when it was over, and she is now home recuperating.

Quite what the fates have in store for us next I don't know, but I hope it is something rather more pleasurable than they dealt out last week.

Spring springs up

On Thursday, March 10th, I hurried home, down jacket zipped up to my neck, scarf pulled tight and thermal Buff on my head and still arrived home cold. The nighttime temperature dropped to about zero, which is what it has been since the beginning of December.

On Saturday, March 12th, I went out for a early morning run on Margit Sziget in a T-shirt, and came home sweating. The little line of red alcohol in my landing thermometer showed about 16°.

Spring has come to Budapest, at long last.

Unlike the temperate maritime climate of Britain, where the temperature climbs slowly and hesitantly from about 5° to 20° over the course of many months, in Hungary's land-locked continental climate the temperature suddenly changes and winter gives way to spring almost instantaneously.

After the months of freezing cold and grey skies it feels like such a relief. To be able to go out and not think about thick coats and gloves but to walk along a street and feel the sun on your face is such a liberation.

There may be some chillier, damp weather forecast in the next few days, but we feel like spring has definitely arrived.

Clash of cultures weekend

Last weekend was a cross-cultural weekend.

Tired after a busy week, I fancied slumping in a pub with a few glasses of beer, but 'pubs' are few and far between in Budapest: it may have some great bars, but not many that are like my favourite British pubs. The bars here that target the expatriate market try to create a pub-like feel but usually fail dismally, and I'm also not that keen to seek out expatriate company.

However, the Caledonia in behind the opera house is a bit of an exception. The people running it have really managed to create a pub-like atmosphere and while it has quite a lot of British-type people as clients there are also quite a lot of Hungarians who seem to enjoy what it has to offer. So Helen and I hung out there for a couple of hours on Friday night, listening to the singers, covering David Gray-type songs, and having a few half-litres. And one feature that pubs could introduce, as far as I am concerned, is waiter service. No having to elbow your way through the regulars who consider it their right to block the bar to anyone who does not drink there several times a week would be a definite plus to the pub experience.

So Friday night was imported British culture, but Saturday night was Hungarian. We went to the Budapest Congress and World Trade Centre to see a performance by Ghymes. I had never actually heard any of their music before going, but had seen their CDs in shops, had read good things about them and they were playing in a large venue, so thought, let's go.

After their first two songs I thought I might have made a mistake. The lead singer looked like a poor man's Meat Loaf, and the music sounded like second rate rock, but then it changed into something much more interesting and beautiful. The band apparently has roots in Slovakian Hungarians, so has something of an external take on Hungarian culture. Sometimes it sounded like the Hungarian folk music I have heard elsewhere and sometimes it sounded as if it came from some indistinct point in Eastern Europe or Asia, particularly when their songs drew on the harshly tuned electric violin, saxophone or clarinet. My own favourite was "Tanc a hoban", "Dance in the snow", a duet which brought on stage a dramatically beautiful, tall, blonde female singer.

And the audience clearly loved them. It was a shame that it was a sit down venue, as I would have really liked to have been able to commune with the music in a freer way, but it was not to be. Three encores, and then we all spilled out into the freezing Buda night.

I often find it difficult to answer the question, "What music do you like?", as I just like anything with 'soul'. What that means, I don't know, but I do know Ghymes had it.

The King's Speech heard in Hungary

Last night we went to see "A király beszéde", "The King's Speech" to non-Hungarian speakers.

We hadn't expected it to arrive here for some time yet so it was very exciting to go along to the Odeon Lloyd Mozi to see it. The Odeon Lloyd is a small, old cinema, from the outside like an aparment building where the proscenium is in the roofed courtyard. It has a great little bar and has the best DVD library in the city, so attracts a lot of cinema fans. In fact, it's the closest thing here to Sheffield's Showroom, one of our favourite destinations.

And last night, like at the Showroom, we met someone we knew in the bar, Angela and Jack, American friends made through the North American Women's Association.

And we really enjoyed the film. Great drama, great performances and a fascinating story, the personal struggle set against the developing political struggle in Europe. Most of the audience seemed to be young Hungarians, and they seemed to find much of it quite amusing, especially the 'fucks' and shits' used in the therapy.

Bertie's refusal to give in to his impediment moves along with Britain's refusal to give in to Nazi Germany, and I mused on what the Hungarian audience thought, given the country's role in the Second World War. But perhaps they didn't think about it at all, and that the issue was the result of my own indoctrination, growing up in post-war Britain on a diet of war anniversaries, films and histories.

Sex and the fall of the Ottoman Empire

I hated history at school; the endless dates, treaties and battles were all so meaningless to me growing up in the tail-end of the English countryside. The subject only became interesting when I moved abroad, and started to understand how the interplay of peoples, armies, queens and kings had shaped and continued to shape the world.

History is particularly important in central Europe. Looking out from our apartment I see so many symbols of Hungarian history that knowing something about their significance is an essential.

One of the key dates in the country's history is 1526, when the 'Turkish' army, the Ottoman Empire, crushed the Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohacs. That defeat left the Carpathian basin open and the Turks swept across the country, heading for Vienna.

Anyway, last week we spent the weekend in Istanbul, and in our very limited time explored the big tourist sites, the Blue Mosque, the Hagy Sofya church/mosque/museum and the Topkapi Palace, the home of the Ottoman Sultans.

The Blue Mosque

Hagy Sofya

The interior of Hagy Sofya

 In there we learnt a little about the Turkish expansion from another perspective. The Battle of Mohacs represented the high point of Ottoman expansion into Europe. They were led by Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, a strong and capable leader in all ways but one: he became obsessed by  one of the concubines in his harem, Roxelana. Against all custom and wise counsel he married Roxelana, and influenced by her promptly killed his first son and made Selim, his son by Roxelana, heir. Selim, and in turn his heirs, turned out to be pretty useless and the Ottoman Empire started its slow decline into decadence and collapse. They were pushed back out of Hungary by 1699 and the Empire finally ceased to exist in the 1920s.

A Bosphorus Bridge, Europe to Asia

It was therefore interesting to see the story of the Turks in Hungary from two perspectives. I'm sure it's not the only time in history when its course was changed by one man's inability to control the pressures in his trousers.

Minorities 2 - the Jews

On Sunday the sun shone out of a cloudless sky, and after a late-night at a couple of Budapest clubs we felt the need to get some fresh air. But not having much daylight time available we only made it as far as the old Jewish cemetery on Salgotarjani ut, in District VIII behind the Kerepesi Cemetery, which I visited last spring.

The Jewish cemetery has rather restricted opening hours, as it has been the target for serious vandalism over the years. Indeed, the gate is kept locked and guarded by two very large Alsatians, but after ringing the doorbell the friendly caretaker chained the dogs and allowed us through the entrance.

 Inside it is an astonishing place. Most of the tombs date from the early part of the 20th century, when Jewish people ran much of the city's industry and commerce. So many of the mausoleums are huge affairs, with magnificent stone work in a variety of artistic styles. The whole place is maintained at a very low level, so is quite overgrown and picking your way through bushes that wrap themselves around huge tombs gives quite an uncomfortable feeling.

I also had the sense, which I have never felt before in any of the cemeteries I have visited (and I have seen a few) of stepping back into a chapter in history that had definitively been closed. In most cemeteries you see people walking around, carrying flowers, stopping to look at headstones and generally paying their respects. But not in this one, and it is not because people have lost interest.

Here it is because there are no people around to pay respects as the population was almost wiped out in 1944. According to Bob Dent's fascinating "Budapest: A Cultural and Literary History" about half a million Jews died during that year as the Nazi and fascist grip on the country intensified. For reasons that I cannot comprehend the pace of extermination speeded up madly as the Russian army closed in on the city, with columns of people being marched from the ghetto to the riverbank where they were shot and their bodies pushed into the Danube. Today one of the most moving places in the city is the row of bronze shoes on the embankment just beside Parliament, making a very simple memorial for this awful period in the country's history.

As I often feel when walking around this city, stuff has happened here.

Minorities 1 - the Roma

On Saturday night we went to Budapest's marvellous Godor Klub, where they were having the last night of a festival of world music. The main attraction for us was an appearance by the Roma singer Mitsoura, and she did not disappoint.

Mitsoura at the Godor Klub

Her music really does suit the label 'world', as her band included amongst other instruments a dulcimer player and a tabla drummer, resulting in a set that sounded like jazz, like folk, like drum and bass, like Indian and, well, like Roma music. It was a really great hour's worth of music.

I have really come to enjoy hearing Roma music here, and, like many people here in Budapest, appreciate the richness they add to the cultural scene. One young Hungarian standing next to me, having noticed that I was English, struck up a conversation where he told me how fantastic she was and that she was the greatest Roma singer. And he was clearly a person of some taste: he had lived in Leicester for a year and really missed English beer and stilton cheese.

And yet the Roma people can have a very difficult existence here. They face routine discrimination and often end up being blamed for the country's ills. Some illustrations.

A colleague of mine who was looking to adopt a child told me that there were very few babies available for adoption, "... except Roma babies, nobody wants to adopt Roma babies".

We saw a film called "Vespa" at the excellent Odeon Lloyd a few months ago whose story concerned a Roma boy who wins a scooter in a competition, but who faces all sorts of discrimination when he tries to collect his prize. The director said that she had received death threats for making such a film about Roma people.

And just a few weeks ago three people died in a stampede at the West Balkan nightclub, crushed by a panicking crowd trying to leave an overcrowded venue. As with all such events the initial reports are confused, but one story was that someone jokingly called out that there had been a stabbing, and this had led to the panic. However, the story metamorphosed into a Roma person being responsible for this. There seems to be no evidence at all that anyone was stabbed at all, but somehow Roma are blamed.

Every society seems to feel the need to identify and scapegoat certain minorities. Why do we do this?

Celebration of civilisations

Our New Year visitors were Charles, Helen's brother, and his wife Julia. As well as showing them around the usual sites of Budapest we decided to pay a trip one day to the city of Pécs, right down in the south of Hungary. The guidebooks say that it is the next most beautiful city in the country, after Budapest, and indeed was a European City of Culture in 2010. True to form, we manage to visit it in the first few days of 2011.

The cultural excitement may have faded but the beauty had not, helped by a beautiful crystal-clear blue winter's sky, something we had not seen in Budapest for some weeks.

Pécs has many interesting places, but the one that caught my attention was the Catholic church in the main square that goes under the name of the Gazi Kasim Pasha mosque. Interesting.

The area now occupied by Hungary was actually part of the Ottoman Empire between about 1520 and 1680. Not much evidence of the Islamic period remains, the Austrian 'liberation' having destroyed almost everything of interest. However, the mosque in Pécs remains, albeit now a Catholic church.

Mihrab and cross

But what is interesting is the way in which it celebrates its dual heritage. From the outside it looks very much like a mosque and inside still retains many Islamic features, such as the mihrab and a marble tablet bearing some words from the Koran.

Even the cross on the top sits inside an Islamic crescent

In these days where Christians and Muslims can regard each other with suspicion or hostility it felt comforting to be in a place that celebrated their similarities and connections. Would that we could see this everywhere...

'Europeans' and what they bring

When I started writing my blog at the beginning of 2010 I thought that the only people who would read it would be those die-hards who clicked on the link I provided in "I'm still alive" e-mails. However, after a while I started to realise that other people had come across it as well, people I guess just surfing or searching for some information about Budapest.

Most of the strangers paying their respects to the site have been Hungarians, often keen to help me with my understanding of what I have described, adding extra information or putting me right. But one visitor was Marta, a Hungarian living in Sheffield.

Our role reversal always interested me. Here I was from Sheffield trying to make sense of Hungary, and there was she, making sense of Sheffield. And then she came home.

So we arranged to meet in a cafe one evening. Marta turned out to be a very chirpy character - she had lived in Sheffield for four years, arriving speaking no English but by day working in a factory canteen in Chapeltown and at night studying English by reading textbooks and watching ITV. I realised that she was one of the 'eastern Europeans' that I knew had come to Britain to find work, but about whom I knew little.

Eventually she knew enough English to find a job doing the administration in a scrapyard in Attercliffe. She was the only woman working there, and the only foreigner. She quickly learned how to understand the special language of the scrapyard business, particularly how to swear in a variety of British dialects. She told them about Hungary and even showed them my blogs and its pictures; that a Brit could survive in Hungary seemed to offer her colleagues some reassurance that civilisation had penetrated beyond Doncaster. By the time she left it sounded as if they had taken her to their hearts, and they had even said they might pay a visit.

But after four years she was missing her friends and family too much and has decided to come home. It's not easy; the jobs market here is very competitive, with over a hundred applicants for one job she had just been interviewed for. But she is bright and has a warm personality and I hope that will shine through, so that she can prosper in her homeland. I know from my own experience that an interesting job and good salary do not compensate for separation from friends and family.

Marta is just one of the people from this part of Europe who went to Britain to see what they could find. In doing so she opened up the world for many people in Sheffield and showed them how industrious and capable 'foreigners' can be. Now she has returned and, I think, will spread positive news about the British, despite our funny little ways. Better mutual understanding has to be our way forward I think, and I'm glad that my blog has played some tiny part in helping that.