The second week, for which I had such high hopes for getting back on the work-horse, I met with the next physical challenge: non-stop all-day, all-night allergic reactions to the environment…who knows what. Combined with the heat, the itchy upper sinuses, eyes, throat, leaky stuffy and itchy nose continued to leave me exhausted every day, driving me to the brink of madness. Classical hay-fever pills did next to no good against these new immune system invaders. Alas, allergy tests in the past have informed me of being allergic to the outdoors as well as the indoors under the right conditions; basically I am doomed to wander the planet experiencing unexpected and idiopathic hyperactive immune system responses. Thanks, immune system, you do me real good for the bad stuff but for god’s sake please show a little discretion!
So I barely did any work the second week due to exhaustion. Without a day of rain in sight, which would have provided me some respite, I lapsed into a “Masters of sex” Netflix coma.
I did however manage to finally have a night out with a new American friend, who has been living here for a couple years, at one of Budapest’s first ruin pubs, Potkulcs.
Where I was introduced to a lovely Hungarian black beer, uncium, and the fröccs. The fröccs (pronounced: frooch with a rolling ‘rrrr’) can be ordered in numerous ways and all depend on the ratio of white wine to soda. For example, you can order the “kisfröccs“, (in English, the small fröccs) that consists of a 1 deciliter (dl) of wine to 1 deciliter of soda water. Or if you’re feeling extra thirsty you can order the the “polgármester”, (in English, the “mayor”), at a whopping 6 dl wine to 4 dl soda (1).
And even while in the throes of allergy-madness, I crossed another item off of my bucket list those first couple weeks… I managed to magically come across a Louis CK ticket for his show here in Budapest and I wholeheartedly attended and forgot all about my allergies for a couple humorous hours. Louis Székély is his full name, a very famous Hungarian last name. He began to call himself Louis CK as a young child because, of course, his Hungarian last name got stuck in the throats of everyone who tried to pronounce it.
I also managed a guided tour of the Hungarian Parliament, Országház (literally: house of the nation) currently the biggest building in Hungary and the tallest building in Budapest:FACT (according to Wikipedia):
This building, completed in 1904 after 20 years of construction, is a MUST SEE for visitors here….especially ironic since the architect went BLIND before its completion. It is a magnificent building that reflects the powerful position the Austro-Hungarian empire once held.
You enter into the parliament through the golden staircase. Here begins the ceiling lined with gold leaf that spreads throughout the building. Forty kilograms of gold, to be exact, was used as wallpaper, basically.
Following this, you saunter down red carpet-lined hallways, couches and cigar holders available up and down the hallways at every step.
Then you enter the main stair hall, or the grand foyer, the ceiling of which is held up by massive pillars of Swedish marble all apparently cut from the same piece of rock.
Across from the the main entrance is the dome hall that houses the crown jewels of Hungary. Before oogling the family jewels, we watched the hourly changing of the guard of the crown jewels:
And then were able to get a closer look at the jewels housed under a 27-meter-high dome encircled with statues of all of the kings and the two queens of Hungary since King Stephen, the first King.
The crown jewels consist of the over 1000 year old old Holy Crown of St Stephen, a fancy hat through which god spoke to the divinely ordained rulers:
The orb (symbolises the earth, the land of the nation):
The sword (defense of the country)
…and the 1000 year old sceptre symbolising power and authority of the country.
After this, you are led through the aristocratic lounge, the Old Upper House Lounge, that has a royal blue carpet symbolising the blue blood of the aristocracy. Statues of people engaged in all the different trades decorate the walls to remind the thin-nosed Austro-Hungarian aristocrats of all the “little people” that really made the empire go round….including the wise academics:
And finally, on the tour, you are shown into the House of Magnates, a replica of the House of Representatives on the other side of the building where the peace and tolerance–promoting daily on-goings of the current government continue today.
Once Sunday rolled around at the end of my second week, I finally realised that the combo of the allergies and the heat, both indoors and outdoors, was what was leaving me unable to focus on work. With fierce determination I developed a melange of strategies that would help alleviate the lack of focus. These included: using a room fan pointed directly at me 24 hour per day, stringing scarves across the massive windows of the apartment to limit light entry, steaming out my sinuses three times a day, drinking green tea with lemon and honey three times a day, taking antihistamines AND Sudafed, using allergy eyedrops, yoga breathing exercises, rinsing my hair and body off after every time I went outside, vaselining (new verb!…means to apply vaseline to something) up the inside of my nose…. AND downloading a program called Rescue Time that, in very Big Brother-esque style, monitors your work on the computer, phones and tablets and provides feedback on how productive you are being and whether you are meeting your productivity goals. Me likey.
VOILA! SUCCESS! I managed to have an immensely productive work week the next week. I was also spurred on by finding out that I am actually giving a 30 minute presentation in a few weeks in London. Not looking like a complete fraud among English academics with their intimidatingly academic accents is a pretty big motivation.
Sunday afternoon I sported my new APPROPRIATE running shoes and sauntered over to the Dohány street synagogue, the biggest synagogue in Europe and the second biggest in the world.
This Moorish and gothic revivalist structure, built in 1859, was the sight of tragedy for Hungarian Jews during WWII.
In the last year of the war as Russia had done a number on the German army, Hungary came to its senses and joined the allies. Up until this point, the Hungarian Jews had been ‘relatively’ protected by the Hungarian government (I heard this somewhere in passing). As the final fights ensued in 1944, they were finally rounded up and forced into a ghetto with this synagogue at its center.
When the war was over, after the Russian “liberation” of Hungary, and the liberators went to check out the synagogue, they found that many Jews who had set up camp in the synagogue had died on-site and the inner garden was strewn with the dead. Today, the inner garden is an eerily peaceful garden of the dead, with a number of mass graves.
There is also the famous weeping willow monument gracing the back courtyard, with each metal leaf having the name and internment camp number engraved of the some 400,000 Hungarian Jews killed by the Nazis.
One afternoon a few days later, I came across some ghosts from the past on social media and it made me feel sadness and anxiety. In the same way that even the healed scar from a cesarean section can pose risks for women pregnant with their next child (fetus, in my opinion, but for the sake of being ‘poetic’…), the figurative scars on my heart, pregnant with a kind of hope and excitement, felt as if they were being tugged upon and might begin to tear. In my experience, these kinds of feelings quickly lead to a constricted perspective on life and the world… and my thinking can rapidly revert to small-ness.
To keep focus and get some work done in the midst of this constricting sadness, I ventured to a kávéház (coffee house) ….but this was not just any old coffee shop.
The Alexandra Bookcafe was built in 1894 and is argued to be one of the most beautiful cafes in Europe. Two hours spent here, writing and marveling, and the constricting negativity that had crept over me suddenly just hours before released and the world and I were big again.
Sometimes all it takes is an old-world café, chocolate cake, and a properly-made cappuccino.
(1)http://welovebudapest.com/clubs.and.nightlife.1/froccs.the.summertime.drink.that.s.refreshing.all.year
