Where can we all meet up?

There is a truly Rocking party on the A38 boat near the venue, it promises to be a party to remember !

There is also a bathing climate action change party, a special event in Széchenyi fürdő, and they hopefully have swimming costumes for sale. :) Open air thermal baths and saunas are open. The event opens at 10 pm, the party runs late and gets only starting after 1 am. Especially suggested for people with jetlag.

Of course the city has new and interesting places, look here for more information

So post your comments and suggestions and hook up !

The Plone conference wireless network is being provided "in house" by Greenfinity with a lot of support from some of the 2009 conference members attending.

Taking into account previous conferences gave us a good understanding of the level of support needed by conference attendees and so we have designed a network that will allow all attendees to connect to the wireless network in all the rooms that talks or training are being held in.

We are supporting all hardware, new and old, including 802.11 a/b/g/n at the conference and after the first day we will adjust the network to take into account the hardware around.

The network will be using the University backbone and has its own set of firewall rules we would appreciate if you read these rules are to protect both ourselves and the University from malicious software and viruses on users equipment.

1: Do not use port scanners (Nmap etc.) as you will be cut off from the network.
2: Do not try to probe other users systems or the firewall, you will be cut off.
3: If a users equipment has a virus that tries to spread itself throughout the network (A broadcast virus for example) or sends spam you will be cut off from the network.

The Wireless network name is PloneConf2009 - password: conference2009

The encryption used is WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK, we have chosen a simple password as the aim is just to stop random people connecting to our network.

In all cases you can contact the network support team by finding one of the conference organizers or calling Spanky™ on +36.70.292.8383 and we will sort out the issue with you and get you back up on the network as soon as possible.

We hope all of you will have a smooth wireless experience at the conference and a great trip to Hungary.

Let's Stop For a Bite

When you're hungry for a bite but don't have time to interpret a three language menu, there are plenty of possibilities beyond the ubiquitous fast-food chains and Gyros places.

OVER THE COUNTER

Behind the Opera, at the front of Hajos utca, you'll notice one of the best Hentesáru (butcher shops) in town on your right. In the daytime, these kind of shops provide true old-school local in-and-out lunches - cheap, fast and tasty. Order a kolbász (sausage), or májas hurka (liver sausage) or véres hurka (blood sausage) and bread and point at one of the pickled salads. Like so:

YOU: Jó napot! [ Good day! ]

BUTCHER (large guy in a white shirt): Jó napot. Parancsoljon! [ Good day, what would you like? ]

Y: Egy kolbászt kérek, káposzta salátával. [ A sausage, please, with cabbage salad. ]

B: Kenyér? [ Bread? ]

Y: Kettőt kérek. És egy kis mustárt, meg tormát is. Mennyi lesz? [ Two (slices), please. And some mustard, and horseradish, too. How much does it come to? ]

B: Hatszázötven lesz. [ That'll be six fifty. ]

Y: Tessék. Köszönöm. [ Here you are. Thank you. ]

B: Egészségedre. [ To your health. ]

Don't forget to order mustard or horseradish. Condiments are luxuries here, and you'll be charged for them, even in fast food chains. Side salads are a must: Alma paprika (a yellow pickled apple pepper) is much milder than a jalapeño and you'll need it to digest the sausage. I love the fresh, white káposzta saláta (cabbage salad), in season now. Csalamádé is similiar, only with carrots and pickles shredded into the mix and sometime a bit spicy (It's also a fun word to say!). Cseresznye paprika ( a little green and red pickled demon of a cherry pepper) is the hot one!

GASTRONOMICAL THEORY

In the butcher's or at food vendor stalls around markets, you might notice some house painters standing around swigging off little bottles of vodka or pálinka with their lunch. They are not social delinquents, nor rogue renovators, they're simply following magyar dietary traditions for good digestion that their parents taught them. A shot of hard alcohol to break up fatty foods keeps them from falling asleep or falling off their ladders. Alcoholism may be a problem the EU would like Hungary to address, but I imagine it will have to include a major overhaul of traditional foods to take in this country.

Let's carry the cardboard squares your food is served on to a stainless chest-high bar on the wall and lean or sit on the high stools to examine your lunch: The bread is white, spongy and full of cals and carbs; the meat is juicy and full of paprika-colored grease; the crisp salad vegetable is soaked in sugar-water and vinegar! These elements on their own could seem dangerous in modern western conceptions of gastronomic health. However, taken together they are not only delicious, they breakdown into instant energy that will keep you warm for a full day of wandering the streets. The meat will be salty, the salad sugary and the bread a palatte clearing companion that is so delicious you'll be tempted to eat it on it's own. Be warned: If you're not willing to go for all three (and hard alcohol is a fourth option), you risk serious indigestion, acid reflux or dozing into your cappuccino the next cafe. You're looking for a happy balanced marriage of extremes.

BTW: Same goes for pastries and cakes. The heavy buttercreams, butter pastries, chocolate and sugars are best taken at leisurely pace, sipping a strong black espresso with a complimentary side of szóda or even while drinking a dry pilseni beer.

FAST BREAK

There are no breakfast places of note here, yet. Breakfast culture just hasn't caught on, though it's made some valiant attempts. In the countryside and for early rising heavy industry workers, there's what's known as a "Pálinkás jó reggelt" (a Pálinka Good Morning) - bread, meat and pálinka.

Pastries are customary morning street fare for city lifestyles. You'll see people on tram, buses and the streets holding a mobile phone by their ear and a paper bag to their mouths.

Try the sweet varieties: túros táska (literally "cheese bag") or mákos rétes (hungarian poppyseed danish). You'll also find kífli (crescent rolls) or horseshoe shaped pastries called bukta filled with díós (walnut) or gesztenyés (chestnut) cream. These make for a great morning snack. The pastry of choice for schoolkids' and English teachers alike is a kakaós csiga (cocoa snail), which is a pastry whorl of cocoa glaze that gets softer and more sugary as you peel away to the heart of it. All of these go great with a kefír or yoghurt cup.

CAMPFIRE FARE

One of my favorite street eats in cold weather is a dinner-plate sized monster of a thing called a lángos (loosely translated as "of the flame"). It basically amounts to fried dough, made like a donut, but its texture is halfway between bread and pizza. When fried and hot, it's crispy on the outside and spongy on the inside. You brush it with garlic 'sauce' and cover it in sour cream and shredded cheese. It's really cheap and really heavy, but when made fresh and crispy, it's scrumptious. I don't know if it was ever made on an open flame, but it surely keeps your furnace burning against a chill. It's usually found near open-air markets when you're lugging a week's groceries around.

PICK ME UP SWEETIE

One of the most famous of hungarian products to remain viable through the transition to hard market capitalism is the Túró Rudi. Túró is a curd cheese used here, perhaps even more than paprika is. Confectioners add sugar and lemon peel then stuff it in pastries. The Túró Rudi is a finger-sized rod of the stuff dipped in chocolate and wrapped in polka dot plastic. You'll find it in one of the fridges in a Non-Stop (convenience store), or in the cheese section of the grocery stores. Allegedly, it was almost banned when Hungary became an EU junior partner because it is all natural - fresh cheese and no real preservatives means it was a health risk (!?). I guess they just didn't realize how fast these things can disappear from the shelves. Now, I've also heard some hard-hearted rumors that it was invented in Russia, but no respectable Hungarian will let you get away with that. Don't leave Hungary without trying one!

TRY THE PUNCH

Word stress is the only kind of stress you will need while in Budapest. It will get your ears close to Hungarians trying to tell you stuff and their brains close to what's coming out of your mouth. Hopefully, good communication will get you to the heart of Budapest faster.

Hungarian words don't have Latin or Saxon roots so all words are stressed or intoned on the first syllable, even those borrowed from other languages later. Contra intuitively, the long and short sounds don't affect word stress.
The words KÚT (a well), KU-tya (a dog), KU-ta-tás (research) all start with a punch and the rest of the sounds bounce to the end like a ball when pronounced. In conversation, it sounds a bit like a horse galloping (perhaps across the Crimean plains?) For poets, that means no iambs, spondees, anapests! In my visual shorthand, these are the nonos: aSLEEP, WELL-COOKt, iNEbriAtion.

This isn't as technical as it sounds. In fact, it's quite useful since you always know when one word finishes and another starts. Just keep it in the back of your mind, you will recognize it when you need it. In 1990, I learned stress from name of the main avenue of the city, then still marked "The Avenue of the People's Republic" - I walked past its shop windows on my way to teach, sat in its cafes and restaurants and there on the side of the buildings was that sign "NÉPköztársaság ÚTja", reminding me to stress the first syllable. Thankfully, it soon got its turn of the century name back: ANdrássy ÚT.

EXCEPTIONAL ANDRÁSSY

Pronounced (AUN-drash-she) Yes, this y is a vowel, and an exception to my pronunciation rules but it's the name of a noble family which couldn't be 'corrected' after the language was modernized.

Mark this locale down as a stress-reducing landmark. Often referred to as the Champs-Élysées of Budapest, Andrássy is not nearly as monumental, a much more lively avenue than it's Parisian cousin, and just a few blocks away on both sides, you can find some of the best parts of the city. At the intersection called Oktogon, it crosses the 4/6 tramline on the NAGYkörút (big ringroad) - your lifeline to the conference center. The M1 Földalatti (the oldest still-running underground train on the continent) runs the length of it and leads you to all the way out to the city park. Andrássy is a great jumping point to explore from. If you miss this, you've missed Pest. 

TO HAJOS UTCA

From the center of town, going outwards on Andrássy, past a number of high-end designer name brand shops, you'll find the MA-gyar ÁL-lami O-peraház. For opera fans, I don't think you can slip the septuagenarian ushers a large coin for the unoccupied balcony seats anymore, but it is reputed to be extremely cheap and good quality compared to other opera houses in Europe. This is my 'gateway' to Hajós utca, (Ship St.) a cool little pedestrian zone, with cafes and a few boutiques. A new smoky jazz joint opened down here called 'Most' (which means "Now") on Zichy Jenő utca where you might accidentally find a contemporary gypsy jazz jam in the back room any night of the week.

OR TO NAGYMEZŐ UTCA

Two blocks from the opera is Nagymező utca, a half-pedestrian zone (?) famed for its' theater. The Mai Mano cafe in front of the Photography Museum is nice for a coffee, tea, beer or wine. There's very cheap traditional eats next door at the Főzelék Faló, which serves hot 'stews' of a number of vegetables with thick slabs of spongy white bread and your choice of sides. Across Andrássy in the other direction is the Ernst Museum and the Két Szerecsen (Two Saracens) - a high-end but nice salad-with-your-lunch kind of place.

OR TO LISZT FERENC TÉR

Continue up Andrássy a little more and you'll come to Liszt Ferenc tér (Franz Liszt Square). The Irók Boltja (Shop of Writers) is a famous bookstore on the corner. Past it is a row of upscale, touristy cafes and restaurants whose main attraction is sitting beneath the huge plane trees running down the middle in spring and fall, watching the passing tourists run into the wait staff. As It looks like we got no fall this year, it's too cold there for me, in all senses of the word, but if you need a fancy dinner at western prices, check it out. Some cafes are cocktail lounges at night, popular with the Scandinavian vet students and German med students, so you're bound to find English-speakers here.

Walk to the end of the tér and you'll come to the gorgeous, gold-inlaid Liszt Academy. If the classical music doesn't draw you in, a glimpse into the foyer at the hand-made inlaid ceramics and marble might be a great excuse to warm your fingers and see one of Budapest's wonders. They used to give tours of the building and concerts are world-class and cheap.

OR TO KIRÁLY UTCA

Look back toward the center of town from there and you're on Király utca (King street), a funky street of bars, boutiques and restaurants sprouting from the remains of what was literally the Budapest Ghetto. The extremes of architecture in this area are astounding - Some buildings renovated into contemporary art galleries or hotels stand in stark contrast beside forgotten szoc-reál style police stations, Austro-Hungarian facades, neo-classicist colonnades. Király utca itself was renovated hardly ten years ago in a typically eccentric Budapest style from the 90s that you might find in a labyrinthine video game. Residents were glad to see it finished at least, until the cement mixers from nearby development projects crushed the corners off the sidewalks and rutted the new cobblestones and paving trying to navigate medieval width streets. Lots of little bars and cafes around pumping the cheap beer and food until big money figures out a way to renovate their crumbling buildings. (Notables: Sirály, Kuplung, Ellátó, Kőleves, Mumus, Szóda and the collegiate institution Szimpla Kéet). Wander farther into the district over to Dob utca and Wesselényi utca past the hidden entrances to a number of synagogues striving to fill themselves after the Holocaust. Since the city is radial, all these streets funnel down, past the Dohány Street Synagogue to Deák tér, the metro center crossing point for all three lines. 

 OR TO THE END

The best place to go on or near Andrássy to relieve stress or practice it, is the Városliget (City Park). Facing the monumental Hősök Tere (Square of Heroes) are the Szépművészeti Múzeum (Fine Arts Museum) and the Műcsarnok (Arts Hall, or Kunsthalle). Behind the Műcsarnok across the lake/icerink is what's known as the OTHER Vajdahunyadi Vár. Behind the Szépművészeti Múzeum is the Széchenyi Fűrdő, a spa and bath house worth seeing even if you don't need a swim, dry sauna, wet sauna, hot tub or massage.

TUNE UP

One trick to getting your Hungarian off to a good start is good pronunciation of vowels. It's easy to do, once you get your mind around it... and your mouth. Like with the western choice of pentatonic scale in music, (where middle A  on a piano is 440hz) it's really an arbitrary starting point. So in indian and arab music scales, the system is based on other places to tune your tone to. This is your new “language scale” for hungarian vowel sounds:

a á e é i í o ó u ú ö ő ü ű

(notice: y is not a vowel and doesn't ever work as one).

Yes, there are a couple that don't appear in English but I have ways to learn them easily. Yes, there are fourteen of them written but they each have only one sound attached. In spelling, there are no silent 'e's at the end of words, no combinations of ea or ei or eu or eigh. E is e and so are all the other vowels. Hungarian is phonetic.

THE EASY ONES ARE THE EXCEPTIONS

Be warned, the markings on the letters do not suggest sentence stress or syllable intonation. They are simply and mercilessly different sounds. Actually, only the first two Hungarian vowels are in truly different places in your mouth. The others simply lengthen the original sound.

The short a is close to "aw" as in "law" (but don't slide down to the 'w' at the end). No moving your mouth until the sound is over! Keep all sounds unmixed with the previous and following ones. Try the US pronunciation of “sought”, or "caught", similar to the British pronunciation of "hot", and now look at this Hungarian word: hat ...it means 6.

Try matt (check-mate) and say both 't's!

or ba (into) which usually comes at the end of words like a kocsmába (into the bar)

or the exclamation Na!  which is roughly “What are we waiting for? Let's move into the bar!”

DIGRESSION: the english indefinite article "a" is the exact opposite in hungarian, taking the definite article's job. So a kocsmába means "into the bar". This is one of the pesky opposites that were most difficult for me to get used to hearing and using when I started. It can be done, but only by physically practicing it. If you've been making a list of new words from this blog like SERIOUS students, go back and put a in front of the nouns and practice them aloud.

BACK TO VOWELS: The long á is open, like what you say at the ear nose throat doctor. Open and say “ah”. This sound will come to your mouth unintentionally when you try your first Hungarian "pálinka". If you remember the stuff from previous Plone conferences which Balázs attended, you can remember the sound. If not, put that "ah" sound into the previous short a example and you get:

hát ...which means the back of something. Fáj a hátam - my back hurts.

I also use hát to fill time while I'm deciding what to say, like the English word “Well...”. You'll hear this on the streets a lot, and when you ask service personnel if something can be done. Usually followed by nem tudom - meaning "I don't know."

The short 'e' sound is like the 'e' in “get”. It's always like that. Just e . It's very common in Hungarian words. “Le!” means down, and works to get a dog off the couch. My condolences to French speakers, just practice it.

The word eke like the German ecke means plow in Hungarian. TWO syllables, both e's pronounced the same.

The long é is pronounced about halfway up from “hey” to “he.” Smile when you say it. It's farther back up in your throat.

lé - slang for money now, originally means juice or broth; éber - awake; egészséges - healthy; béna - lame; kész - I'm done.

THE REGULAR ONES

The letter i denotes a quick “ee” sound, so "fit" would sound like a fast “feet”. Like the Spanish i sound. The long í sound is more like “feet” at regular speed in English. No worries! This difference is difficult for some Hungarians, and nobody can really tell the difference when speaking. So hít (pronounced "heat") means belief; sit (pronounced "sheet") means construction rubble; itt - here; megabit is said "megabeat"; segítség - help; indítas - start up of an engine.

The short o sound is like our long o as in hope. Try három (three) or telefon or szoba (a room).

The long ó is just a bit deeper in your throat with your mouth tightened to make a 'w' sound. Try szóda (soda water), or jó which means “good”, or kóla (a coke).

The short u most often comes in the middle of words like in kutatás (research) or futni (to run). The long ú is used for út (a big road) but the short u is found in the diminutive version utca. kutya - dog; szuper- super; One of my favorite new magyar slang acquisitions from english is lúzer - meaning loser! If they were all so easy...

NOT FOUND IN ENGLISH

German speakers will have no problem with the ö sound. It's an English short i sound like in kit BUT with your mouth closed like you're saying an “oo” sound as in “boot”. Make the “oo” sound. Hold your mouth there. Say a bunch of words that rhyme with "kit".

köt means “to tie”; löncshús means “canned meat”; szörp – a syrup used to make a kool-aid like refreshment out of elderberries or raspberries; röplabda – volleyball; flört – people to find in bars; döf means “jab or stab something into something”.

[By the way, in parts of south-central hungary, they pronounce the short e sounds with a short ö, so the town of Szeged is actually pronounced (but not spelled) “Szögöd”.]

The long version ő shows up at the end of words or word roots or begins a word. This will help you break up compound words and separate the suffixes and prefixes. Consider this compound word for example: rendőr (policeman)

Logically, I want to ask my friend what a ren is and what a dőr is. But when I learned that rend means order and őr means guardian or guard, I understood why my friends laughed at my question, and also about where to expect these long vowel sounds.

Look at: kettő (the number 2); mező (meadow or field); előtt (in front or before); bőr (skin), bő (plenty); nagybőgő (stand-up double bass), főzelék (traditional stewed food that nobody can explain)

Now for the ü sound. Say “cute” but don't say the 'y' sound in it. If you're like I was before I started teaching English, you probably never noticed there's an unwritten 'y' in "cyute". Now that you know this, you're not far from pronouncing the hungarian ü sound. Try pouting up an “oo” sound again with your lips, hold the pout, and say a long 'e' sound in English. So “eel” + (pout) becomes ül (to sit) and “measly” + (pout) becomes müzli (breakfast cereal). The same works for the long version it's just... uh, longer.

So feet + (pout) becomes the hungarian fűt (to heat a house). Easy, huh! Now try: műterem (studio workshop), művész (artist), betű (alphabet letter), tűz (fire).

Those are all the sounds! It's been slow going but these basics are important. If you want further study, check the wikipedia article on hungarian phonology. For practice, open any site with a .hu in the URL. I'll be giving you numbers and basic expressions in the next article.

STEP ONE STEP

I started learning Hungarian 19 years ago in a small bordertown called Gyula from my friend Laci, or rather from his mother. The day before I arrived to visit Laci, he was called to start his civil service, a full-time job in a hospital. I was stuck for a week in their kitchen with a Berlitz Hungarian for Travellers pocketbook and Laci's mother, who couldn't speak a word of English but insisted on plying me with keksz (a dry round disk that tastes like animal crackers) and black kávé (coffee) of the espresso variety. When Laci came home, we rode these collapsible kemping bicycles out to the local pubs for a round of red-wine-and-cokes. But all the day long, I was on my own.

I decided to kill time by writing and saying the numbers in Hungarian. By the second afternoon, I made it to a million counting by twos and fives and fours and tens. Soon, I could do it without the book. By the third day, on the way to the pubs, I miraculously began to catch bits of conversation around me. Words, mostly numbers, began to pop out of everybody's mouth. I recommend this strategy if you're serious about picking up some language here, as numbers give you a head start in situations requiring both time and money.

GET IN CHARACTER

Before beginning studies, I recommend you get into character to do the pronunciation. In my trials with the language, I learned quickly that Hungarians use all the muscles in their mouths, many more than my loose and lazy american mouth had even known existed. My theory is that Hungarian developed from a thousand years of chatting on horseback in a wide-open windy steppe somewhere in the Crimea. Enunciation, which was functional then has become aesthetically pleasing today. So start by imagining yourself as Bela Lugosi's Dracula or the Count on Sesame Street.

“I vawnt to sawk your blawd” or “Ev-er-i ting iz go-ing tu bee all right.” Roll your 'R's!

Can you feel the precision? The edges of your mouth stretching? Your throat opening in back? That's what it feels like to speak Hungarian.

CONSONANTS

Since numbers are an important part of life and generally helpful for getting around, I'll start you with this example:

Egy = 1 = one.

Egy is tricky - it's only one syllable but there's a lot to learn here. The gy consonant cluster is pronounced like the combination of a 'd' and a soft 'y' at the same time. As in: “D'ya thinkya can handle it?” Egy. It's close to “edge” but with a little more edge to the 'dy'. Egy.

A Hungarian refers to him or herself as a Magyar. (MAW-dyawr) That's also got our sound in it. The language is called Magyarul (MAW-dyaw-rool). The country is called Magyarország (MAW-dyaw-roar-sag).

Other tricky consonant clusters:

sz is the english 's' sound as in busz (say “boose” and it means: bus or coach).

s is the english 'sh' sound so bús (say “boosh” and it means: sad or cheerless.)

ny is also one sound, even at the end of the word,( i.e. fény means light and is one syllable pronounced roughly “fain” closing off with a small 'y' sound at the end.)

Ly as in lyuk (meaning: hole) is also one syllable and can be pronounced like the first syllable of 'ukulele'. Király is a common word with this cluster in it. It means king and refers to one of the coolest streets in town - Király utca.  Say "KEY-rye". Roll your R!

Cs is the same as Ch in english, so csók (kiss) is pronounced “choke”.

Zs is said like the french Gi as in Gillette and used for words of a slippery nature: zsír means lard, zseton is a casino chip, zsé is gangster slang for money. Rezsi is your utility bills.

There's also the triple consonant cluster dzs, one of my favorites, as in dzsem which is pronounced “gem” but means jam. This leaves the J to take up the job of the english 'Y' sound, as in the color jello... I mean, yellow.

There are a couple clusters that occur in family names of the old aristocracy but have been replaced by modern versions during a 'language renewal'. You will only notice them on memorial plaques and street signs.

Most of the consonant sounds are the same as English, although there's "no spit" in the Hungarian pronunciation of t and not as much air in the s sound (they're not aspirated).

Keep in mind that:

Hungarian is phonetic.

There is one letter for every sound and only one sound per letter. The c sound is only spoken hard, like the 'c' in “except”. Same goes for g, only pronounced hard no matter what vowels might follow.

There are a couple things that Hungarian hasn't got, namely, the 'th' sound and the 'w' sound. The 'th' degrades to a 't' in speech. The 'w', however, gets a little flakey. It is called the 'dupla v' when it appears in foreign root words, but most people say it like a single 'v'. The oddest anomaly of Hungarian to me is that the W.C. sign you will see on toilets here is pronounced “vey-tsey”. I sometimes ask the wait staff for the “dupla V.C.” just for yuks.

Situated at the crossroads of north and south Europe, between the Alps and the Carpathians, between the east and the west, Hungarians have seen a lot of peoples come through here (not to mention that most of the last 500 years they spent under foreign rulers of sorts). I can't stress enough how far good pronunciation will get you into the hearts of this nation of ten or so millions, who've been fighting to keep their language alive for millenia.

As you should have noticed by now, there are a lot of Hungarian words that are close to English ones. The language is an evolutionary survivor. It has picked up and fully assimilated many words from German, some Turkish, French and Italian words, many with Slavic roots and some Romani (gypsy) words, too.

I hope these examples can work as rules or mnemonic devices to help you explore the strange signs you'll see and sounds you'll hear while at the conference. Next I'll introduce you to the wonderful world of wowel sounds!

Velkom tu HUngari!

Hello, Plone People, my name is Mark Richards. My friend Balazs asked me to be your city guide and resident resource for PloneConference2009 on the topic of Budapest.

For those coming to the conference, I hope to make these posts into external libraries of insight, so you can get in the mood for this great town, to help you get to the heart of things in what time you have outside of the conference, and to make your stay in Hungary more memorable, enjoyable and worthwhile.

My relationship with this town started in the summer of 1989 in a cafe in Washington, DC. I was boasting about my first trip to Europe to a young Hungarian guy who'd been sent to the US from a refugee camp in Austria, instead of Australia like he wanted. Since then the the iron curtain was opened and the Berlin Wall had come down. He now had credit card bills, but he said I could easily travel to Budapest... only he said “Budapesht”. I had no idea it was in Europe at that time, but just the sound of it conjured a vision of minarets and elephants in the streets. When I hitchhiked into town at the end of that summer, I was pleasantly surprised at how fantastically wrong my expectations had been.

I found an english teaching job, some life-long friends and for the next nineteen years, that same feeling hit me regularly as I watched this city change, passing out of the stoic grand greyness of the ex-Soviet bloc and into the shiny new European Union. It's still struggling with its identity. The only stable point of life here is the constant flux. Let transition be your watchword, and the artifacts of history with reveal itself and the beauty of this city will extend its welcoming arms to you. That said, let me give you some geographical context and historical background specifics.

A Tough Broad

Budapest is Vienna's sister city, both raised in the boom years of the Austro-Hungarian empire before the world wars. But unlike her beautiful and sometimes haughty sister, Budapest was bombed during WWII and got some quick, cheap plastic surgery from Stalin's Red Army in the reconstruction. The downtown area on the Pest side is surrounded by towering 'blocks of flats', concrete mesas set in rows around large intersections some of which soon became new city districts and were built to last for nearly a half a century. Well, a half century is nearly up. The short ride from the airport should tell you all you'll want to know and be able to grasp about this side of town in the time you're here.

For all that, Budapest wears her scars proudly, determined to make the best of what she's got. Assimilating 40 odd years of Communist Rule into a present day image isn't easy business. Budapest also got Turkish baths and Hapsburg spas,  the northernmost islamic holysite, the second largest synagogue, and the largest number of shopping malls per capita than anywhere in Europe. For me, Budapest is the down-to-earth and honest sister, no-nonsense and real. People come here to live, not just to look. The city is still a tool of progress not just a showcase or memorial of it.

Boulevard of Broken Pavement

The ringroads are the main life arteries of Budapest, the kiskörút (Little Ringroad) which was once a moat around the medieval town, and the nagykörút (Big Ringroad), track of the the essential 4 and 6 tram lines, which are now under reconstruction. [BTW: I'll give you some shortcuts to pronunciation of this language soon.] For general orientation, just remember these ringroads connect the three cities that officially joined up to become Budapest in 1873: Buda, Pest and Óbuda (or Old Buda).

Pest is on the eastern flat side of the Danube River and the other two are in the hills on the west side. For scale, you should know there is a third ringroad called the Hungaria körút, a kind of beltway around them all and through the suburbs, that you would need a car to enjoy. It suffices to say, that through nineteen years of life here, I've hardly been out to the Hungaria körút, and at the rate this town changes, what I know is most likely outdated. There's enough to see in the heart of town.

This may seem odd coming from "your guide and resident expert" but it is indicative of a couple facts that even Hungarians don't consider enough: One, centripetal force sucks - the city's radial design fosters the misconception that if you're central, you've made it! Everything worth seeing is downtown, so I don't need to go anywhere else. However, the most tourist-oriented area is in the center (on both sides of the river). The conference will be held just at the edge of the big ring road, so you'll have the opportunity to resist its pull, but in moments of indecision catapult yourself outward. I'll be giving you a few anchor points to keep you in a good orbit.

The other underestimated fact: Budapest is not Hungary. That usually puts my friends from the nation's smaller towns on the defensive, but as the only city larger than a million people strong, and as it comprises about 20% of the country's population of 11 million, Budapest is the natural place to search for opportunity. The same brain-drain-to-the-west phenomenon the nation as a whole suffers from, brings many of the brightest lights out of the smaller cities and countryside. If they don't make it their springboard to the nagyvilág (big world), they soon get acclimated to its lively pace and spend a lot of time spreading myths about Budapest to foreign visitors. Especially myths about how hard their language is... ha! I'll give you some insider tips on that in my next post.