SPRING 2010

APRIL 5

This is Easter Monday, a holiday in many European countries, including Hungary.

Not an ideal day weather-wise; we had quite a thunderstorm about 3.00 PM, just as I was about to leave friends' where I had dinner. Fortunately I had both my car and my umbrella. Tomorrow I have the English Club, where we are reading Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca. One of the members obtained a video of the original film, with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. The acting style seems terribly dated at this point, and while Hitchock did not overdraw the character of the young wife as did DuMaurier in her novel, the story does become a bit exasperating at times. It is full of those improbabilities for which films of the time---and especially English films---were noted, beginning with the name of the lead male character, Maximilian DeWinter. Now Winter is a German name, and there is no way you can combine it with a French de to produce DeWinter. For such a strikingly rich family with no noble title, there is no explanation whatever as to how they came by all that money and still escaped corralling even a minor noble title. And on and on. After the English Club I attend a performance at the Conservatory. On Thursday there is a performance of Messiah at the Dom in Szeged, to which we have four tickets. Since Anna is still in New York and will not return until next Wednesday, I shall take our friend Sari and ask other friends if they wish to go. I have not yet decided which friends I shall ask.

The sun has come out. It is only 5.00 PM and I am in my pajamas. We have our national elections this coming Sunday. There is no mystery about who will be the winner. We do not elect our President, who is chosen by Parliament; our elections are for members of Parliament, and the winning party's leader becomes the Prime Minister. That will be Viktor Orban, the President of FIDESZ (FIatal DEmokrata SZovetseg/Alliance of Young Democrats), a Right-wing party, who was PM from 1998-2002, which is expected to win at least 70% of the vote. The big question is how well will Jobbik, an extreme right-wing party entering the national stage for the first time, do. Some express fears they may even exceed the Socialists, the present governing party, but I doubt they will do that well. In any case, even an overwhelming FIDESZ victory may not signal anything about 2014; Hungarian voters are notoriously impatient and fickle. Most will give you 30 days to give them all they want; some will give you 60 days; but after sixty days, even giving them what they want is only marginally better than not having done anything at all. To keep even the few promises they have made FIDESZ will have to propel us headlong toward bankruptcy, so keeping their promises is likely to arouse just as much anger as not keeping them, since the economic effect will drown every household.

MAY 26

Well, a great deal has happened. Politically, Fidesz won 68% of the vote, and Jobbik won 16% of the vote, barely edged out by the Socialists. Today Parliament passed a law granting citizenship to persons residing in former Hungarian lands in neighboring countries if their parents or grandparents were citizens of Hungary. Slovakia immediately countered by stating that anyone who applied for Hungarian citizenship would be stripped of Slovakian citizenship. Because Slovakia is an EU country, they cannot be deported, because citizens of EU countries can live and work in other countries that are EU members. However, without citizenship they would not be eligible for health insurance. True, they could obtain an EU card in Hungary and use it in Slovakia; but Hungary would end up paying for the health care, not Slovakia. And they definitely would not be eligible for free university education.

We have done a great deal of traveling. We spent a week in Nemesnep, at a timeshare on the Slovenian border. I had been there a couple of years ago, but Anna had not. All the places we went to we went to two years ago, but it was very enjoyable. The following weekend we went to Serbia and Croatia. It was a very good trip with quite breathtaking sights. I had been to Subotica, which is just across the border; but Anna, suprisingly, had never been there. Then the following week we went to Austria to a timeshare sort of near Salzburg, on a lake named Grundlsee. It was a strikingly beautiful place in a stunning setting, and we had a fine view of the lake from our room; but it was cold and rained every day to some extent. Fortunately, there was heat. We lucked up and got so-so weather on our drive to Regensburg, a city with a sizeable medieval quarter in southern Germany. It was cool, but we only had occasional sprinkles. We learned that the weather in Hungary had been, if anything, worse than what we experienced in Austria, with a vicious storm in Budapest. Now we have no plans to go anywhere to speak of before late August, when we go to Heviz with a visitor from USA.

JULY 25

I was to Hamburg to visit my bridge-partner in mid-June. We play on the internet but had never actually met, although we have spoken on the telephone several times. She does not actually live in Hamburg, but in a small town outside the city.

Luckily, she works about eight minutes from home. She is the chief chemist at an industrial paint and lacquer company and is originally from East Germany. I found her a thoroughly charming and amiable woman whose company I enjoyed immensely. She planned out a very interesting program that included concerts in Lubeck and in Hamburg. At the end of June I went to Berlin for several days, my first trip there since 2004. Whereas Hamburg was rainy and cool, Berlin was scorching hot. Almost immediately after my return from Berlin we went to Transylvania for several days. that takes care of our travels until the arrival of Barbara the first weekend of August.

Following some heady comments by various government officials, which included a veiled suggestion that Hungary might default on its debt, followed by an insistence that we need not comply with IMF requirements because we do not need IMF or ECB money, we can borrow on the open market at competitive rates, we have witnessed some fluctuations of the forint that are likely to worsen, since Moodys announced that it would down-rate Hungarian bonds to junk status! This is just fine for me, as I receive money in dollars and must pay for everything here in forints, so if the forint falls against the dollar, then that is the same as cutting prices for me. It now stands at 220HUF=$1 and I expect to see it fall to around 233 when banks open Monday morning,, with a further decrease to about 245 by the end of the week.

The heat has finally abated. Until yesterday it was in the mid-90s; today a cold front came through and it is in the low 70s. We attend a performance of Carmen this coming Friday at the Summer Festival in Szeged. I have seen the symphony schedule for the coming season and it is excellent. The Easter performance will be Bach's St.Matthew Passion, which will be a very great treat, it has been many years since I have attended an actual performance of it. In spite of thunder, no rain, and the sun has come out. A guest will come in a few minutes, so I close and post this. the next one will be at the end of the summer.

TRIP TO IRAN OCTOBER 2009

DECEMBER 2009

Whenever we told persons we intended to go to Iran, almost all of them asked, "What on earth would you go there for?" or some variant of this. With me at least it all began many, many years ago, when I was about twelve years old and read Plutarch's Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, in which there is a biography of Alexander the Great and an account of how he burned Persepolis after defeating the armies of Darius. Of course it never occurred to me that I would ever get to really see Persepolis, just as it never occurred to me that I would see any of the other places I read about and was fascinated by. (My great realistic ambition at that time was to one day go to Chicago!) To be sure we had seriously discussed a trip to Syria and perhaps to Jordan; I had even gone so far as to check out the timeshares in Syria---there are only about three---and the availability of an automatic-shift rental car from Hertz, and it was obviously seriously on our mind. How, then, did Iran come up? Well, in the course of our investigating tours to Syria/Jordan, Anna's cousin's daughter, who lives in Vienna, had enrolled us on the e-mailing list of several travel agencies. Periodically they sent us notices of their offerings, most of which I ignored, as they were all written in German, of which I understand absolutely nothing. Just why I looked through one that arrived in late winter will remain forever a mystery; but I did and chanced to see that they offered a trip to Iran, at a time convenient for me to go, going to the places I wanted to go to (plus a great many more I knew nothing about), and at a quite reasonable price. So I sent them an e-mail and received a reply in English with a description of the tour in English. I spoke to Anna about it and she said she would be interested in going, so I wrote back to the agency and told them we would be in Vienna in June and would come into their offices---both Anna and I were quite familiar with their location---and could we make arrangements then. They replied that it would be fine and in mid-June we went in and made the arrangements. There is a bit more to the story, and if you are interested you may read the posted blog before this one for the details.

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We decided to travel with our Hungarian passports, rather than our US passports. We were not trying to fool the Iranians, for they knew we were also US citizens; moreover, the only restriction upon persons traveling on a US passport as against all others is that US citizens must travel in a tour group (which we were doing anyway), whereas there is no such requirement for other nationals. Our reason was to avoid raised eyebrows and possible interrogation when we entered the US on our US passports, which is compulsory for US citizens. To our great surprise we were given the visa in a half-hour, along with maps and descriptive literature.

We flew on Iran Air from Vienna, about 4-3/4 hours. Although we had a long wait until they opened the immigration booth for non-Iranians, we were allowed to go through customs without inspection and without having to go through the X-ray machine. (We were conducted by our guide, who was permitted to meet us in the baggage area after we cleared immigration). We were loaded into our bus, a large Volvo (although we were only eight!) and driven into the city of Tehran. It was about 8.30 Saturday evening. The highways, we saw, were very good, if you think of the Whitestone Expressway or the Van Wyck as being good; unfortunately, they were just as crowded. This, we were to discover, was to be true of all highways everywhere in Iran: quite good, but very, very crowded. All highway signs (and, astonishingly, street signs as well) are in English in addition to the local language. Tehran is a city of about twice the size of NYC in population, and it seemed like all of them were out and about whenever we were. We arrived at our hotel at the north end of the city, which is the best end of town; the quality of the city improves the further north you go. In quality it ranked with a typical 4-star hotel in the US, but geared primarily toward businesspersons.

The next day, Sunday, and also on Monday, we went to museums, ending up at the vault of the National Bank, which contains the Royal Treasury. We also visited some palaces of the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi and his father, usually called Rezashah. (In the Islamic faith it is customary to name the eldest son Mohammed, which is why the last Shah is not a "Junior"). Tuesday morning we left Tehran, having seen relatively little of it; but then, Tehran is not that much of a tourist destination for most tourists, since it does not house any of the great antiquities. It did not become the capital until about the time of US independence, and at the time it was a quite insignificant town. I could get out the itinerary and recite the merits of each of the places we visited----to the extent that I remember them. But I think you would not find such an account especially interesting. So instead I shall relate some general impressions and some impressions of particular places.

First of all, the place is much cleaner and more orderly than you would expect it to be. As an example, in Tehran I saw a man actually cleaning public telephone booths, something I had never seen in my life anywhere else; and at the airport I saw them cleaning the handrail of the escalators abd the vents of the air-conditioning system. People are extremely polite and friendly and remarkably patient, too, for they never complained about being asked to screech to a halt so we could cross the street. From what we saw public transport was frequent and the buses seemed in good condition; we never used public transport ourselves, however. We were regularly approached by persons asking where we were from and expressing surprise and pleasure that we were from USA, for (as you might imagine) few Americans travel to Iran, and my impression from things said to me is that most Iranians do not blame them for not coming. The hotels ranged from very good Holiday Inn types to the quite luxurious, and in all of them you were provided with a complete set of toiletries and slippers. The food was international cuisine. There was no alcoholic beverages, but you could drink alcohol-free beer, something we knew very well here in Hungary, since it is forbidden to drink at all and drive here. Except in the more remote and small towns you will find persons who speak English, especially among the university-age set and professionals.

Distances in Iran can be considerable by European standards---here 200 miles is a great distance. However, conveniences are not hard to find, but if you wish to use the toilet it is best to go to a mosque, since you can be sure of a higher level of cleanliness. The landscape is a mixture of desert and semi-arid land for the most part, with a goodly number of mountains. Archaeological sites abound. Many of them consist of bass reliefs carved into rock and commemorate notable victories over foreign foes or homage being paid by subject princes.

The most remarkable cities are Shiraz, Yazd, Kharmanshah, Eshfahan, and Qom. The latter is the Shia Vatican, which is to say that it is a religious center and therefore likely to be crowded most of the time. The others were either at one time or other capital of the country or major cultural cneters. Persepolis is sort of near Shiraz. I say "sort of" because it is actually about 55 miles distant and there is no reliable way to go there by public transport other than by taxi. We of course went on our tour bus, but we learned that a taxi will take you there and back and wait for you for two hours while you tour the site for about 20,000 rials. I could hardly believe my ears and asked again to make sure I heard correctly; 20,000 rials is, after all, all of $2!

Persepolis is every bit what you imagine. At least what remains of it. Given that what remains is quite extensive in area, two hours is barely enough time to do it if you also wish to inspect the bass-reliefs on the cliffside overlooking the city. I bought a DVD (in English) which shows a re-creation of what it must have looked like in the time of Darius the Great or Ataxerxes, before the coming of Alexander.

Shiraz has a bridge we walked across that was already open to traffic at the time William the Conqueror was mulling over snatching the throne of England from Harold. It also has beautiful gardens and parks, which is something found throughout Iran. Eshfahan has a huge square flanked by mosques and palaces, and adorned with fountains and gardens, with shaded arcades.

To sum up: It was one of the very best trips we ever took, and we would recommend it to anyone with even a slight interest in visiting that part of the world.

AUTUMN 2009

SEPTEMBER 6

I am back from two months in USA. I shall not attempt to recount all that happened during that time, since many of you are a part of that story. But to summarize briefly, I spent time in NY, visited my sister and her family in NC for ten days, stayed overnight at Anna's brother's daughter's in Georgia, and then spent ten days visiting friends in Sarasota, stopping in DC over the weekend on the drive back to NY.

The day following our arrival we attended the annual Crystal Run Village Picnic. It marked the 50th Anniversary of the founding of Crystal Run and afforded us an opportunity to see a large number of colleagues without having to go to a couple of dozen locations. The most noteworthy event of our NY stay was my meeting with Barbara, the daughter of a long-ago acquaintance who is a very famous painter and author. I had not seen her in over 25 years and only once in the past forty years, but had written to her because while in the Metropolitan Museum last year I chanced to see a poster of a painting that I suspected was one of her mother's, and it turned out that it was so, so I bought it and also bought copies of two books written by her older sister, which I read during train rides between here and Debrecen. We met twice, once alone and the next time with Anna. It was a very affecting experience for me, for Barbara is the closest I came to having a daughter, and it was very satisfying to me to find that the relationship between us remains a close one notwithstanding the passage of so many years and the transpiration of so many events.

We also visited--albeit briefly---Anna's niece, Kim, whom I last saw in 1999, when we spent a couple of days with them during our trip around the US before leaving for Hungary. Her two eldest are now in college, and they are all moving from their present home in rural North Georgia to a rural setting outside Ocala, Florida, where they have just purchased a home. I have known Kim for thirty plus years, and we have always been quite close. It is a strange experience, however, to adjust to the fact that someone you knew as a child is a mother of three, two of whom are in college; or, as in Barbara's case, that someone you knew as a teenager is now 57 years old and has three grown daughters.

This Saturday we shall visit an old acquaintance in Serbia. I was last there in 1983 (!), and cannot say that I remember anything about the town, though it is only about 1:45 drive from the frontier. I was going there in 1989, but at the border they insisted that I had to convert $200, even though I intended to return that evening, I was only going to have dinner with friends. What on earth, I asked, could I possibly spend $200 worth of dinar on, since I did not intend to buy a VCR? But they were adamant, so I just got the bus back to Szeged and my friend went on without me and brought me dinner and a bottle of wine back that evening, and the dinner was still warm.

SEPTEMBER 21

The visit to the friends in Serbia was very satisfying. The most difficult part of the drive there was finding the border crossing, as there was no sign----well, there was, but the "sign" consisted only of a very small symbol on a sign that I thought meant that I was going onto the expressway, which was in fact the case, because the only way to reach the crossing point is by going down onto the expressway, which then ends at the crossing-station. The crossing itself took only a few minutes, and the drive was just more than an hour or so. To be honest I remember virtually nothing about my visit there and was pleasantly surprised that everyone remembered me, even the grandson who had been only six years old at the time of my visit. (He is now 29 and has two daughters!) We had a great time, marred only by the fact that for some reason my digital camera, though it showed the photos I took in the memory of the camera, for some reason I am unable to understand did not impress them onto the memory-card, with the result that I have no photographs.

This past Friday we went up to Budapest to the Iranian Embassy and submitted our applications for our visas. the official there checked them over, said everything was in order, and told us to return for them the end of September. I replied that I would come in early October, as we would be in Austria at that time, whereupon he asked me for the passports and told us to take a seat. He returned in about a half-hour and handed us the passports and said, "It is all taken care of, you need not come back." We asked if that meant that we had the visa, and he answered that yes, we did, whereupon we looked inside and saw to our amazement that we had indeed been issued our visa on the same day, when all our information had been that we had to expect it to take at least a week, and probably longer than that, since nothing happens sufficiently often when dealing with the Iranians for one to safely conclude what can be considered "regular". So the result is that we are all set to go to Iran on the 10th of October, as the travel agency has mailed all the information and documents to our relatives in Vienna, whom we shall meet up with this Saturday as we spend a week together in Austria before we leave for Iran. We celebrated by going to a restaurant in Buda and having dinner, as we were to attend a concert in Szeged that evening. I had not been in Budapest since February and was surprised to note numerous changes. For one they built a large office building nesxt door to the railway station. Not in a mere six months, of course; but I had not noticed it before, or that they were constructing it. For another they have closed the Margaret Bridge and are laying some kind of tracks on it---or so it appeared to me. If indeed they are tracks I am confused as to what the purpose might be. There is a tram that runs along the Danube Embankment from the Margaret Bridge on the Pest side clear up beyond the Palace of the Performing Arts, but I cannot imagine what the purpose would be of extending it to cross the Danube to Buda, nor can I imagine where it might go to once it crossed the river.

NOVEMBER 2

Well, as you can see, a great deal of time has passed since my last entry. Since then we went to Schladming,Austria for a week with Anna's cousin's daughter and her husband, and also with our friend, Sari, from here in Hodmezovasarhely. the resort was quite nice and, as it turned out, was part of a chain in which we own a timeshare to which we have never been, which was something I did not know at the time I made the arrangements. We really had a great time. We arrived Saturday. On Sunday we drove to Bad Gastein, a very famous resort to which all of us except Anna had been numerous times. On the way there we came upon a caravan of vehicles participating in the celebration of the Autumn Harvest Festival. The assembly point was in Bad Hofgastein, which is just before you get to Bad Gastein, and it has a brand-new bath to which I went last year with Sandor and Julianna. From there we went to Zell am See, to which--again---everyone except Anna had been numerous times. The following day we went to a waterfall in a national park about 25 miles north of Zell am See. Clemens and Saci had been there before, the rest of us had not. the following day, Tuesday, we drove to a nearby resort to spend the day with Clemens' parents, who were vacationing there and who had invited us to have dinner with them. We spent the day with them, taking in numerous local sights. On Wednesday Saci and Clemens drove to Italy to do some shopping for Clemens, who had just been promoted to head of his department where he works; the rest of us decided to take in the wonders of Schladming, which is certainly a quite picturesque place. Thursday we drove to Salzkammergut, to Aussee, Wolfgangsee, and Mondsee----these sees are lakes, if you did not know---all of which were known to Clemens, but only the latter two to me, and only Wolfgangsee to Sari and Anna. On Friday we drove to Radstadt, about 25km away, and then went up to a place which makes things from pine and also has a very nice restaurant. Saturday we drove home, 700km to Hodme-zovasarhely, in something of a rush as we were to attend a performance of Berlioz' Damnation of Faust that evening in Szeged. It was one we were scheduled to see last season, but we missed it owing to a mixup as to the day of the performance and had to end up giving our tickets to friends. This year we were determined to not miss it, and were rewarded with one of the most spectacular performances we have ever seen anywhere of any opera. Neither of us is a great fan of Berlioz. I had never see his Faust and quite disliked his Benvenuto Cellini that I saw many, many years ago, although I do like Le Troyennes well enough. But this performance was simply breathtaking!

The next week we went to Iran. I shall make that a separate blog and shall only relate the series of events leading up to our departure. To recount what I may have already mentioned, we learned of the trip through a newsletter which I receive via e-mail monthly from a travel agency in Vienna. Since the newsletter is in German (which I do not understand), I usually pay no attention to it; but for some reason I decided to peruse it on this occasion and saw that they had a trip to Iran, at a time suitable for iour travels, and at a quite reasonable price. I spoke to Anna about it and then sent an e-mail to the agency requesting further information. they replied in English, advising me that the guide would likely speak only German. We decicded that that would not be a problem, he would be able to tell us what time we would leave and that kind of information in English, or, if not, there was bound to be someone in the group who could tell us, as English is fairly widely spoken/understood in Austria, especially by younger and educated persons. While in Vienna in June we wnr to their offices and made the arrangements. the xeroxed my Mastercard and said they would charge it in September. Well, September came and nothing happened. Here we were in Schladming and they still had not charged my card, even though they had sent us our flight tickets and all the information for the trip. So I called and they said, "We are old-fashioned, we do not charge your card until you tell us to do so," whereupon I told them to do so! Several days later I got an e-mail saying that the bank had declined my charge! Impossible! I screamed. the card I gave them was a debit card, not a credit card; since I had ample funds in my account to cover the charge, there could not be alogical reason for the bank to refuse to honor it. So I called the bank and, in the course of conversation, learned that they had a limit on the amount a transaction could be; this of course I did not know, for I do not use my debit card to pay transactions, but only to withdraw money. But it would not be a problem, she assured me. Since I know the President of the bank very well, I could call her the next day---she was not in that day---and ask her to have them raise the limit temporarily to the amount I wanted to pay. I did this, and Nancy said, fine, just send me a fax, which I did at the resort where I was staying. But when I called two hours later, she said the fax had not come through yet! So I went down to the post office and sent it, but the woman there said that for some reason the fax would not transmit. So I went into a nearby hotel and asked them to send it, and they did, refusing my offer to pay for it, and told me that it did go through. when I called Nancy she said, Yes, we got your fax twice and it has been arranged that they will pay, just have them re-submit. I notified the agency, which finally submitted and had it accepted only a couple of days before our departure. I asked the agent why she would send us the tickets and other materials when they had not been paid; she said that they felt I would find some way of paying them and were not worried that I would not. Bear in mind that I had never dealt with this agency before and that we are in different countries!

This will be the end of this. The trip to Iran will have a separate blog.