7 October 2008: Pecs, Hungary

I woke up at 8:30 and made a cup of tea for Beata, since it was the day before her birthday and I had told her the night before that I would make her a birthday breakfast. All I could come up with was tea.

I went into the bathroom to take a shower, and Beata's flatmate walked in on me right before I took off my boxers. I mean, three seconds before. What a nice-to-meet-you that would have been.

And that's one of the two problems about Hungarian bathrooms. They all have two doors, and so unless you make it known to the people on the other side of both that you are in there, you're liable to be walked in on. And I could have sworn the flatmate was still asleep.

(The other problem is that most Hungarian showers don't have curtains. Other than the fact that it's weird to shower without a curtain, it also makes me feel like an absolute slob when I take a shower after someone else and the floor is as dry as could be, and then when I leave the bathroom I have to practically roll up my pant legs in order to avoid them getting soaked.)

Now, I meant to go to Orfü today but Beata, who said she would show me where the bus station was, was late leaving the flat and I missed the bus. So instead I was on my way to Sellye, on a bus that cost 340ft.

Before going to Sellye, I had been told that it was 90% Gypsie and the poorest part of Hungary. Everyone said it wasn't worth a trip, precisely for those reasons, but that only made me more intrigued. I wanted to see this other side of the country, the side that was light-years from the capital, the Mediterranean-esque college town, and the wine region.

When I got to Sellye the bus dropped me off along the main street. The houses on both sides were small and not well-kept, but they were hardly unlivable and looked pretty cozy.

I headed to one of the town churches, then, and was walking around outside when the pastor came out of his house next door to talk to me. He asked if I wanted to go inside the church, and I said definitely. So he got the key and showed me around.

The church was nice but not really spectacular, and then he asked if I wanted to go with him to the next town over to see another church that he said was famous in all of Hungary. This seemed a little more promising, so I said yes and he told me he'd meet me in a park in half an hour and we'd go.

So we drove to Drávaivány, the pastor got the church from the church lady, and we went inside. This church, built back in 1767, was definitely was more impressive than the one in Sellye, with beautiful paintings on the walls and ceiling. It was a real classic, right down to the "organ," as the pastor called it, which was an electronic Casio keyboard. A real fine machine.

On the drive back to Sellye the pastor told me that Drávaivány, not Sellye, is where most of the Gypsies live in the area. I honestly didn't feel like Sellye was all that different from Villány, so I walked 4km back to Drávaivány to give it another look.

And this time I really noticed the town. There was only the one church and one shop, and a bunch of dilapidated, worn-down houses. This was what I had come to Sellye to see.

I walked down the main street of houses and waved to a family that was sitting on the porch, peeling potatos. The man waved back and came to the gate, where we exchanged "szia" and shook hands. And the conversation went no farther.

All I wanted was to sit with them and help peel potatos, and just get an experience of their day-to-day life, and so I made a motion of peeling. The man, however, presumably didn't get this because he started speaking very fast and pointing to the church. I kept making the peeling motion, and I tried to somehow convey to him that I had already seen the church that day, but of course it didn't work.

The man called over to a young boy, who led me down the street to a group of adults sitting on a stoop. They started talking to me also, alternating between what sounded like complete nonsense, the occasional "church"-- which must have been the only word they knew in English-- and making a steeple with their arms over their heads. I again tried to tell them that I had already been to the church that day, and that all I wanted was to sit with them, but they instead pointed me to a house across the way, which I recognized as the church lady's house.

I walked over to the gate and the church lady herself came out and handed me the keys to the church. I mean, if I had wanted to see the church, I would have been set. I could have practically lived there, I bet, if only I made the international sign for sleeping.

A young girl came out and asked me "Church?" I shook my head no, and she held her hands together as though she were praying, and I shook my head no. So they called over the English expert, who was a 12-year old boy, and I told him I wasn't interested in seeing the church again, I just wanted to experience the town. The English expert said something to the church lady and took off. A bunch of help he was, I tell you.

The church lady tried "Church?" one more time, and again I shook my head. If ever there were a fool who needed an errand, this was it. This was, without question, the biggest fool's errand a fool has ever embarked on.

Another woman came over, and it was now her, the church lady, and the church lady's daughter all trying to make some sense of what I was doing in Drávaivány. Eventually they understood that I had come from Pécs, which was an improvement.

But now "Pécs" had overtaken "Church" as the English-word-of-the-moment, and at a rate of what could have been 100 words per second, with the three of them talking at the same time, I had "Pécs" coming at me from all sides with not a syllable else that I could understand. After a while, the church lady made the international sign for sleeping, and I shook my head no. Then she made the international sign for eating. And I nodded.

The church lady motioned for me to come inside, and she took out a big bowl of roast chicken, some beans, a few peppers, a slice of bread, and a glass of water, and as she set each item on the table she said the name of it-- or what I'm guessing was the name of it. I took a bite of the chicken and made the international sign for delicious, and the church lady said "finchi."

So now I just sat there feasting on the food in front of me, and every three seconds or so I would point to any one of the foods and say the name of it or I would say "finchi" and rub my belly. And every time I would say something the church lady would just laugh and laugh and laugh.

I was living like a real Gypsie King, I'll tell you.

Towards the end of the meal the church lady got up and went into the other room, but before she left she patted me on the head. When she came back she pointed to the bones and chicken skin on my plate and then pointed to the dog outside. I went out and fed the dog the rest, and after each bite I would rub its ears.

If you want the indication that I had made it, that was it. It takes a wordly dude to pet a gypsie dog, it really does.

After eating the church lady made coffee and we went into the other room to watch television. Every so often she would point at me or herself or her daughter or the television and say something, and I would smile huge and repeat it. And she would just laugh and laugh and laugh.

At one point the daughter asked me what my favorite color was, and as I was wearing my Michigan hockey jersey I pointed to the blue and said "blue" and then I pointed to the yellow and said "maize." This little move on my part almost had terrible consequences, though. The daughter got this real worried look on her face and came over, and in a terribly concerned voice she asked "Yellow?" I reassured her quickly that, yes, it IS yellow. Phew. I almost turned that girl off English for life with that one.

I asked her what her favorite color was, and she pointed to her shirt and said "Red." So that was it; we had finally found common ground. The colors of the rainbow.

I must have sat in that room for two hours, and I didn't say a single word the entire time besides this conversation with the daughter and the random words that I repeated. Didn't say one single word, and I didn't understand a word on the television, but we were just laughing and having a real gypsie ball.

At this point, you have to realize that I had no idea what could possibly happen. Not only that, but there was no way for them to even tell me what could possibly happen. The entire village probably knew a combined dozen words in English, and when you consider that ROYGBIV probably wasn't going to do me much good, we were done to five.

(That was a physics joke. Boy am I good.)

Finally I got called outside, and now it was a congregation of me and six gypsies. They kept asking me questions in Hungarian, but the only word I could understand was Pécs. I assumed they were asking about how I was going to get back, but the church lady, as always, was just laughing and laughing and laughing because of the complete absurdity of the situation and the absolute incompetence of our dialogue, and I was having fun. So I just played dumb.

Eventually I followed the group to another house, where someone handed me a phone. It was the wife of the pastor from Sellye, who told me "It would be a good idea to leave there before dark." Yes, well...

At any rate, the gig was up. And I said farewell to the church lady and her daughter.

I walked back to Sellye and went to the train station, but I passed a devastatingly abandoned building on the way. All the windows were broken, and I looked into one just to see if anything was visible. Something was.

Inside the first window, which was about 85% broken, there was a second window, which was maybe half broken. And on that second window, right above the break line, someone had drawn a smiley face. It was small, but drawn in white, and against the surrounding oblivion it was perfectly visible.

I thought it was brilliant, if not beautiful.

The church lady's house consisted of two rooms-- a kitchen and a second room with a long bed, a short bed, two chairs, and a television. That was the entire house. And since it was the church lady's house, it was probably loads nicer than most of the others.

But even though it was small and impossibly simple, all the church lady could do was laugh and laugh and laugh. Just like the face on the window, all she could do was laugh and smile even while surrounded by squallor.

The smiley face reminded me of the church lady, and is my lasting image of Sellye.

The train, which cost 645ft, wasn't for a couple hours, and about 10 minutes after I bought my ticket the ticket-lady left and turned the lights off. It was an ideal time for a nap, except for the thousands of gypsie dogs. Since everyone knows a gypsie dog just won't stop yapping unless you kill it. And what kind of maniac would kill a gypsie dog?

When I got back to Pécs, Beata was at the bar celebrating the birthdays of her and two friends, since they were all around the same day, and by the time I got there it was just a big ol' drunk-fest.

And it was OK, I guess, but it was very much a birthday-affair and I wasn't really feeling it. Unfortunately, everything else was closed when I left the bar at 1:00, and by an hour later, when I had come back, the original bar was beginning to wind down. The problem is that, at 2:00 on a Tuesday night in a country where you don't speak the language, not only is everything closed, but everyone you were with is now too drunk to bother with speaking English. So you're basically shit out of luck.

I was supposed to crash at Beata's place that night, but at 3:30 I was REALLY not feeling it. I asked a guy for a couch and he said no, which I thought was unbelievable because we had been talking for hours-- and he had been singing, for Christ's sake, and I complimented his singing-- and, though no one has to give me a couch, if we've been talking for hours and it's 3:30 in the morning, how are you not going to hook me up?

I was honestly pretty shocked, but eventually another dude, Csaba, stepped up and offered me a couch. Interestingly or not interestingly, though, Csaba happened to be the guy with the annoying girl. That guy, if you will.

The annoying girl with the incessant picture-taking. So that girl, if you will. The one who has her phone open and set to camera function the entire time so that she can take a picture at a moment's notice. And the thing I realized at the bar this night is that I could never in a million years date a "picture-taker." Not only is a picture-taker, in my opinion, annoying as hell-- she literally took a picture of me 12 times over the course of the night, with various people, and I don't even know her name-- but, more importantly, it's not just me. No one likes a picture-taker.

At one point this dude did something good, I guess, and he raised his arms in victorious celebration. The picture-taker quickly snatched up her camera and was ready to shoot, but the guy put his arms down. She asked him to put his arms back up in fake victorious celebration, and he just looked at her like she was an idiot and went back to talking to his friends. And THAT is why I could never date a picture-taker-- for my own popularity's sake.

Anyway, when Csabe first offered me his couch I assumed he was dating the girl he was with, and so I told him "I don't want to intrude if you're dating her." He said NO they're not dating-- and I can't make those letters any more capital, so you'll have to just imagine they are-- and I figured that was good enough for me.

(Also, I was spot-on about not wanting to go back to Beata's place. I made that call at 3:30, and by 4:00 she was passed out. Then, at 4:30, she woke up and tried to get up, but did one of those fall-on-her-ass, oops-I-thought-there-was-a-chair-there numbers. She was a mess.)

Eventually, Csaba and the picture-taker and I left, and although the picture-taker went back to Csaba's place too, and although I went to sleep on a chair that was no more than two meters from the futon Csaba and the picture-taker were on, they were both asleep within minutes. So I didn't feel so bad.

***************************

A few notes from the bar:

1) At one point, 9 out of 13 people at the table were smoking. And the point of that is to show that, at least in Hungary, there really is just no way to avoid smoking. I mean, developing a habit of smoking. It's sort of like politics-- I can't really hate you if you're a Republican, or even if you're an idiot Republican, because it's more than likely simply a product of your environment, of where you happened to be born and who you happened to be born to. Similarly, if you happen to be a smoker, it's just because you happened to start smoking when you were young, whereas I managed to avoid lighting that first cigarette. And if you are Hungarian, well, there's really no way to avoid smoking.

2) Hungarians LOVE American songs. Absolutely love them. I feel like most Europeans do, but especially Hungarians. On this particular night, the bar was playing loads of them-- Bon Jovi, Vanilla Ice, etc.-- and everyone in the bar would freak out and start singing along, but after the first verse no one knew any more of the words and they just mumbled along to the tune. It's hilarious. It's like if every bar in America played nothing but "Jump Around" on repeat, yet no one ever learned the words past "battle me it's a sin."

3) Beata might actually be a lesbian. And I say that based on nothing more than two pieces of evidence: first, she wore a bandana, and second, she wore loose jeans with no underwear. Oh, and she was hardly talking to any guys the entire night.