Rendorseg

The most surreal thing happened to me tonight. I was in my apartment with my roommate Kristen, each of us studying in our bedrooms for our Number Theory midterm tomorrow. Suddenly, our doorbell rang. It was quite a shock since we only vaguely realized that we even had a doorbell (our friends don't use it, let alone knock) and certainly we weren't familiar with the sound it makes. We both (eventually) simultaneously came to the conclusion that our mythological doorbell was being utilized, and since it's a bit easier for me to get to the door from my bedroom than it is for Kristen, I approached the entrance. All I could see was a shapeless shadow outside the door since my own reflection was peering brightly back at me. We lock our door when we're inside, just for safety's sake, and I certainly had no plans on unlocking for a faceless silhouette. Thus, I smashed my face up against the window to try to get a better look, and saw a badge reading, "RENDORSEG" glaring back at me. This translates to "police". I hurriedly made to open the door, but forgot that it was locked and made quite a spectacle of myself tugging and fumbling at the handle. When I finally got the door open, the lady police officer said something I didn't quite catch. Humbly I replied, in Hungarian, "I'm sorry, I don't understand, I'm American" (which is one of the most useful phrases I've learned). She looked at me and repeated herself more slowly, only this time I recognized the word Deutsch. Ah! She wanted to know if I spoke German! I hastily cast my mind about, compiling all the German I knew. The list contained two things: "good day", and "where is the library," both phrases I have learned from my mother's high school German schooling, and also the extent of her German vocabulary to date. Thus, I had to admit that I didn't speak German and tried my luck with Spanish. It didn't work. In any case, the Police woman pointed at me and to my roommate who had peered around the corner by this time, and said, "pizza?" At a loss for any better answer, I said, "no." She repeated, "pizza??" in a more prodding tone. Again I replied with my brilliant answer of "no". She looked over the balcony at a tenant who was peering up at us and spoke in Hungarian, obviously explaining that we had not acknowledged the aforementioned pizza. The police officer turned back to me and said, "ok, very sorry" and left. Now, I don't know if we were being asked if we stole a pizza, if the Hungarian police deliver pizza during their downtime, or if there's a Hungarian phrase that sounds like "pizza" but really means, "excuse me, is this your lost dog?" I guess I'll never know.

Prague and Family

Last weekend I traveled via bus to Prague. It was not a comfortable journey, but it was inexpensive and definitely better than an airplane. Ideally we would have had movies playing, but there was something broken.... or something..... In any case, I got a lot of my combinatorics homework done on the ride. We arrived in Prague around midnight, and by 1:00 we still hadn't found our hostel even though we knew that it was somewhere in a radius of about 3 blocks from us. We called a cab which took us about 30 yards, but successfully got us to our lodging and our beds. In my defense, Prague's streets are not user-friendly. The longest straight line in the city is about a block, then the road curves or bends, or just plain ends. The streets are also cobblestone, so we were really obnoxious dragging our wheelie suitcases through these back roads, sounding as though a group of tap dancers were making their way down the streets in the dead of night.

Exploring Prague was very different from anything I'd seen so far. It reminded me of Disney World. Everything was beautiful and larger than life and expensive. The entire city catered toward the tourist industry. There was no authentic Czech culture, just cookie cutter souveneirs and people dressed in costume to make the atmosphere feel authentic. The view from the city is phenomenal, and the architecture is really grand, yet I felt that I could have gotten the same ambiance from a theme park in America. In fact, I heard more English than I do walking down the streets of my hometown.

However, the very good thing about the city is that I got to meet up with my mom and sister! We met at the famous Prague astronomical clock (which is very pretty, yet very anti-climactic). Some friends and I walked around the city with them and soaked up the "culture." My mom bought me a garnet ring. Garnet is huge in Prague. My ring is a very simple but pretty silver setting, and the stone looks black except when it catches the light, then it flashes bright red. It's amazing.

My favorite part about the city was, ironically enough, a church. It was not a tourist trap, rather it was merely a place of worship that had remained standing and un-rennovated. It was the most gothic structure I have ever seen, or even imagined. It had beautiful stain-glass windows, and statues, cherubs, and gargoyles, and paintings so old that they appeared black. There was a statue that my family found extremely moving. I placed pictures of it (and, in fact, the whole tripm in a different album called "Prague" on my picture website). The statue was part of a larger arrangement of statues featuring the typical Christian display of death. However, there was a lady who was positioned over a book, crying. It looked as though she simply couldn't hold her head up she was so torn with grief. I have never seen a statue portray such human feeling as this one did. On closer inspection, she even had stone tears. Aside from these fantastic sculptures and works of art spread throughout the church, there was a continual theme of triangles with eyes inside of them.... symbol of the Free-Masons. Say what you want about Dan Brown and his "conspiracy theories" and ability to write, but as an avid reader of Angels and Demons, I wanted to send a telegram to Dan Brown right then and there, saying, "You're right!" Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati for a basic explanation of the conspiracy theory involing the freemasons and the Illuminati. The church reeked of history and emotion, and to make the experience even more chilling, the entire time we wandered the space, there was an organist practicing. The organ's pipes spanned a space of about 30 feet, and were almost twice as tall. My mom, as a former organist, hypothesized that there must be 5 or 6 keyboards the musician was using. The organ music made me feel as though I had stepped into some 5th dimension of The Phantom of the Opera, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and The Da Vinci Code. It was really fantastic.

We had beautiful weather, and it was very very very nice to hang out with my family. One of my friends told me that after meeting my mom and sister, I will never be a mystery to her again. True enough, we share a sense of humor that may not be similar to many peoples', but we enjoy each others' company and the laughter it brings. I traveled with them back to Budapest. I hope I was an okay tour guide; unfortunately the approach of midterm exams put a damper on my schedule of free time.

On that note, school is going very well. After doing this semester, I look at courses offered at Gustavus Adolphus, and instead of seeing the course number and title, and thinking, "Oh jeez, that looks so hard and boring," I recognize the concepts discussed and am really mad that I don't have time to take every class offered. Also, after this mathematics program, I will never be intimidated by an upper-level math class again.

Today is the first day of spring. I hope the weather is improving over there in the states! Check out my pictures at http://betsyjane.myphotoalbum.com.

Statue Park and Margit Island

Today I went to Statue Park. Statue Park is one of Hungary's most famous attractions. When all of the tyrannous governments finally fell in Hungary, someone had the bright thought to gather up all the statues and relics of political leaders and tributes to communism, and hide them away for a while so they didn't get destroyed a la The Berlin Wall. When the political realm became calmer, this guy took all these statues and created an outdoor museum open to the publc. For less than five dollars you can climb around on statues of Lenin and Stalin, sit on the feet of huge memorials, and buy CD's of "Hits from Communism". There are lots of red stars everywhere and the statues are laid out mildly helter-skelter. It's quite a process to get to the park as it's located outside of Budapest on the Buda side. We took a round about way and utilized the metro, a tram, and a bus. The bus stops and you step out into a ditch. There is no bus stop or anything defining the place as a public transit line. You traipse through weeds and dirt and emerge at a creepy-looking building. When you go in, all you can see is red stars: watches with red stars, flasks with red stars, post cards with red stars.... This, I found out, is because you actually enter the gift shop before the museum. However, the feeling of unease is heightened by the fact that there are hearty communistic marches being played through the speakers. I posted some new pictures on my picture website of the park. They're much better at explaining the atmosphere than I could ever hope to be.

My other news is that I finally went to Margit Island. This island, named after Saint Margaret, is located in the middle of the Danube, close to the center of the city. It's like a theme park atmosphere! There's a track around the outside which runs around 5 kilometers. Hard-core athletes and social runners alike use this path. Inside the track there's a petting zoo, swimming pools, parks, soccer fields and open areas, little stands that sell hotdogs and mulled wine, and the ruins of the convent where Saint Margaret was sent in the 13th century. The ruins were really cool because they were so authentically old and, well, ruined. I put a couple pictures up of the ruins, as well as of a peacock. In the zoo, there was a large establishment of peacocks, and while most of them had their feathers sedately folded on their backs, there was one zestful male who felt the winds of spring, and thus mating season. He had his plume ravishingly extended. Everytime a female peacock would walk by, he'd shake his feathers until they buzzed and rattled, and sort of arc them around her. It was beautiful, yet a bit silly to watch.

This weekend is a long one for me. There's a holiday on Thursday that is celebrated twice a year here in Hungary, and thus, I don't have school. Unfortunately, last fall when the same holiday was celebrated, the celebrations turned political in nature, and soon turned into riots. It's predicted that the same thing will happen again this time around. Even worse, those riots will be about 4 minutes from me since they're held primarily at Astoria, and I live near there. However, luckily this is the weekend my mom and sister are coming into Prague, so since I have some days off, I'm taking a bus to meet them there! I don't have to be around the riots, thank goodness! In America I might find it interesting to watch a political uproar, but here in Hungary where I really don't know the judicial or legal system, and the only words I recognize are things like, "excuse me," and "apple," it may no be the best idea to become politcally active at this point.

That's about it. Have a great early Daylight Savings Time America!

pictures from poland!

I added new pictures to my picture website. Go to http://betsyjane.myphotoalbum.com and click the album called "Poland".

Krakow

On Thursday evening I took the night train to Krakow, Poland. Krakow has a very long, rich history involving religious strife, war, communism, hardship, all culminating to make a truly amazing city. I don't like Poland as much as I LOVE Budapest. However, it has been a great experience being here.

The night train is really comfortable, provided you get a sleeper car. We had the foresight to pay a bit extra for this amenity and slept many of the hours of the journey away. It is about 10.5 hours via train to Krakow. However, it's fairly inexpensive, and as long as you get to sleep en route, it's a great deal for me. The only hitch in the ordeal was the boarder crossings. I was in a berth with two other girls, happily sleeping in our layered bunks. Someone knocked viciously at the door, and assuming it was our other friends in the berth several doors down, we yelled mildly obscene things regarding their inability to let us sleep in peace. When the knocking didn't desist, and instead became steadily louder, we grumpily flung the door open. Imagine our surprise when in marched several European men in fur hats demanding for our passports! I suppose we should have forseen this mild difficulty, but somehow we didn't think about the fact that we would be passing through Slovakia to get to Poland. Therefore, without this foresight, we were not in an appropriate state of dress for male visitors, and thus followed a series of very awkward encounters, made even more nerve-wracking by the language barrier. To add to the trouble, my sleepy friend tried to be friendly and inquired if we were in Slovenia, which is apparently a far different place than Slovakia and tested the patience of the boarder patrols.

We found our hostel with little difficulty with the help of a cab. Being that we live in Hungary, we're very profficient at sign language and we know to write down words that we'll need and point to them, rather than try to pronounce them. The hostel is called "The Stranger Hostel" and is spectacular. It's sort of like summer camp. Everyone is our age, traveling the world just for the heck of it. The facility was really clean and homey; I would return in a heartbeat. I'm actually currently at the hostel using one of the computers they have available for our use. It's pretty cool.

The first day we were here, we literally explored. We knew nothing of Poland, so we set off into "Old Town" and promptly discovered a fabulous open air market. Everything here is dirt cheap and fantastic. I had a blast shopping and comparing the different stalls. In our explorations, we found or way into a Polish restaurant where I had what seemed to be some sort of potato dumplings in cheese. We explored the castle, which was really cool because it was so old. In fact, that's the neat thing about this entire city. One day we took a guided tour of the city, and when we passed a Synagogue, they said, "the is the newest synagogue, built in the early 19th century." In America, our OLDEST buildings were built around that time. On this guided tour we got to see the Jewish Ghetto and Oskar Schindler's factory. This was really moving at the time, but nothing could prepare me for what I saw today.

We went on a guided tour of Auschwitz and Birkenau, the two most famous concentration camps where over 1.5 million people were murdered. These camps are located about an hour and a half outside of Krakow, and so our hostel arranged a tour for us that included transportation. We started at Auschwitz, which was the original death camp, and the first to employ the use of Cyclone-B, the gas the Nazis sprayed into the gas chambers where all those "unfit for labor" were sent. Those who couldn't handle such work included the elderly, the sick, the crippled, children, and pregnant women. Auschwitz was set up as a bit of a museum, with exhibits in the original barracks. It was astounding. In one of the barracks, there was a display of items confiscated from Jewish prisoners, or taken from the bodies of those put to death. Most of such items were sent to Germany to be sold, and that which remained in the camps, waiting to be shipped, was burned to hide the evidence of the nazi horrors. What remained for us to see was only a tiny fraction of the belongings of prisoners. There were huge rooms stacked with these belongings. There were thousands of toothbrushes, combs, pots and pans, prosthetic limbs, shoes, and eye glasses. There was also a room full of the hair shorn from women. This hair was used to make the blankets given to the Jewish prisoners. Like the rest of the items, the hair was stacked to the ceiling. It gave a horrifying idea of the number of people who died, and suddenly turned anonomous victims into real humans. We were also taken into the one remaining gas chamber and furnace. It was the original chamber made by the nazis. I don't think it takes explaining what that experience was like. We then went to Birkenau, which was made by Auschwitz prisoners because Auschwitz was becoming too small. As far as the eye could see, wooden, uninsulated barrocks lay across the land, or ruins of chimneys standing where barrocks used to be. In the center of this expanse was a rail road where prisoners were unloaded. We stood in the exact place that the Nazi "doctor" stood to make the decision whether each prisoner lived or died.

This was just earlier today that I experienced this, so hopefully I will be able to write another blog more eloquently describing certains horrors and emotions I felt. I wrote an e-mail home, however, and noted that I have an entirely different perspective on history in general, especially the holocaust.

On a happier note, we also toured the church St. Mary's, ate a lot of Polish food, fed really tame pigeons from our hands, experienced the Polish night life, and took loooooots of pictures. As soon as I get back to my computer, I will put these pictures on my picture website. I'm going to make a new album, so therefore these new pictures will not show up on the reel near the top of my blog. You'll have to go to the link on the right side of the page. It will take you directly to the site.

I hope all is well, and I can assure everyone that there is waaaaay too much acordian music in Poland.