Allow me to explain myself….

“A genuine (wo)man goes to the roots. To be radical is no more than that: to go to the roots“- Jose Marti

I was born into rootlessness, the daughter of air force parents who had never really kept tight ties with their own families. We moved every few years hopping from military base to military base; new houses, new schools, new friends, etc. Friends from each place would be shaken off, tethered only by a string of increasingly temporally spaced-out letters until no more arrived in the mailbox (pre-facebook days). By the time the letters dwindled to nothing, I’d already be swimming in a sea of fresh friends.

This way of life has carried over into my adulthood, never staying in the same place for more than four years. For a time it manifested very negatively where I would run FROM a place instead of TO a place and adult friends were quickly out of sight and out of mind as I rapidly made new friends in a more new and exciting town.

But by my late 20s this all began to change. I made the decision to keep in contact with the close friends I had met during my various degree programs…to continue building relationships no matter how far apart: the beginnings of my root-developing adventures.

I’ve had two real ‘aha’ moments in my adult life related to rootedness. The first was in about 2002 when I visited Pier 21 in Halifax, the main entry point for European immigration to Canada throughout the 1900s. My father, as an 11 year old Hungarian child, made the decision to seek refuge in Canada. He has often told the story of how he saw the Canadian propoganda posters in LeHavre, France promoting immigration to Canada for those Hungarians fleeing Hungary during the revolution in 1956 and 57. The poster, he recalls, had a picture of a Mountie on a horse in full regalia. This beacon of Canadian-ness evidently appealed to him.

While touring the Pier 21 museum almost 50 years after my father’s arrival to Canada, I was jolted by the fact that I would never have existed if it weren’t for this 11 year old’s decision; that I only have life due to a series of random decisions made by my ancestors.

The second ‘aha’ moment was around 2012 when I moved to Ottawa to work for the International Development Research Centre. I went to the Ontario Health Services office and ordered up an Ontario Health Care card and the lady asked me: “have you lived in Ontario before?”. “Yes”, I responded. My family had lived in Ottawa for five years when I was an elementary school tyke until 1993. She said that I could still use the same health care number I had way back when. For some reason I was immediately awash in a feeling of “wow! I was here! I existed here! And I’m on record as having existed here!”. This made me feel very warm and fuzzy and rooted.

My fascination with Europe began as a child with our family living room lined with a wide selection of photography and art books showcasing idyllic European cities and pastoral life. Many hours were spent curled up in a rocking chair ogling these images; portals to, what seemed like, another planet. These books, coupled with my father being a European refugee to Canada during the cold war, created in me a strong desire to one day visit these magical places of cobblestones and castles. I have been to Europe a number of times but the dream to stay for an extended time always remained.

So now it is with great excitement AND sorrow that I am not running from something mediocre to something better which was my modus operandi for many years. Rather, I am skipping along from something awesome, a city I love immensely:

…to another something awesome… different awesome, entering into that magical portal of my youth which also happens to be the land of my Magyar patrilineage.

The purpose of this extended (temporary?) visit to Hungary, I’ve decided, can be distilled into three reasons:

1) To start exploring my lost Hungarian roots, armed with the sparse information about my father’s family that my family has in our possession (this is all in fun really….I don’t actually feel I’m missing out on anything in my life);

2) To learn the Hungarian (class starts in two weeks!); and

3) To be in a place that is half the cost of living as Vancouver so I can just write my PhD dissertation in peace without the extra necessary distractions of two or three part time jobs required to maintain my Vancouver quality of life.

Thank you for taking an interest in this journey which will be long and indefinite…Anything is possible right??? For example, I could land a job at the World Health Organisation in Geneva (and absolutely hate every minute of it), or as a professor in a university, or marry a Magyar, or open a vegan food truck specialising in vegan versions of Hungarian food, or turn into a fascist, or buy a vineyard and a puli, or get “taken” by an Albanian sex traffic ring (albeit I am indeed getting a little too old for them to be interested in the likes of me, I suspect)….so stay tuned for more masterful works of blogging literature by yours truly, or not, or whatever.

Viszlát for now!