Bartók

Performance at the city hall chamber last night. Two violins, one mezzo. Plus a narrator. Who spoke Hungarian in machine-gun paragraphs. At one point I decided to count the number of phrases she was using in each sentence.. something like twelve. I could tell because her voice would rise at the end of each phrase, she would catch a little breath and then dive back in. Acoustics were not suitable for rapid-fire speech, so much of what she said was just a blur to me, but I did understand that at least part of the audio that was going to be played out of the laptop that the violinists had brought a long derived from a radio program out of Kolozsvár (Cluj), a major Transylvanian city off to the east of Debrecen. They were tinny and scratchy, but authentic enough, and it gave you a sense of what the real music was, like listening to the recordings of Appalachian songs on archival records. Either that, or the mezzo sang a few verses of the particular song.

Hungarian music is just—different. I looked up on Wikipedia to see what there was to be found, which was primarily that Bartok and Kodály had determined that the typical Hungarian folk song uses a pentatonic scale and that notes are almost always the same length. Well, I am not sure of the pentatonicity of these songs, they sounded like mixolydian mode to me, with maybe a couple of extra half tones thrown in for amusement. I kept saying to myself, but there is no MELODY there. And yet the mezzo always seemed to know exactly what she was doing, her voice seemed every once in a while to hit on a key note that somehow resounded like a trombone blast. As she sang, he body would dip and sway a bit, and I could see how the Sitz im Leben of the songs was a public sing-dance event, probably with lead singer in the center of a circle of village girls dancing around her in a circle and joining her on alternating verses.

Off into the Wild West....

 my first genuine laptop.   well, now i have a new toy. have to learn how to use it.  lenovo g500.  i am hndaving problems with the keyboard, probably because i keep hitting arrow keys by mistake. sending the cursor all over the place.

big adventure, buying this

now i can play civilization again.

so yesterday (Sunday) did big offroad trip with zita, her husband Barni and Donci, their son, as well as Gizi, Zita's mom and Dönci's grandmom.  German army jeep, serious, mercedes benz engine, we must have done about 15 miles of genuine cross country i mean no road or if it was a road then it was known only to horses and pedestrians.  Another 15 miles was dirt road, another 5 or so was so rocky and bumpy that you had to hand onto stuff in order not to be shaken out of your seat.  Barni drove, Gizi sat in front with him, the rear of the vehicle is benches that sit parallel to the road, so there was little to no back support.  We were gone a total of about 6 hours, probably 4 of them driving.  Total distance covered was about 45 miles, but when you are going only about 5 or 10 mph, you dont get there very fast.


The country was wide open, steep hills, brooks, springs, patches of dense deciduous forest, occasional stands of firs, lots of open meadow pasture land, absolutely no farming or crops.  We passed umpteen piles of freshly felled trees, there is serious logging going on.  I felt like I was somewhere in Montana.  No really high mountains, but off in the distance we could see the Hargita, which is about 1600 meters. right at 5000 feet, still with snow on top.  We were mostly on a ridge top that was 3000 ft

I did take a couple of photos, so will post them when i figure out how to do it.  we did three lookout points, visited the village where Zita was born (today's population approximately 15), and also wound up having a bit of dinner with Barni's parents who live in Zetalaka, a village of about 2000 located some 12-15 km northeast of here.

today is april 2, the trip was on march 31, I will keep adding detail as I come back to the blog.


This is Dönci (sounds a little like   done-tsee), the foto is of his maternal great grandparents (I think)

This is the route we took, starting left center from Udvarhely about 7 miles to the first horizontal slash mark.
From then on it was all cross country to the lookout statue (about 70 feet tall). Here is a foto from the internet.  The construction of the stature was an act of private piety by a local family who is big in the dairy business. The location is on a high point overlooking one of the valleys, elevation bout 3100 ft.

The dark side of the Jesus statue....

I did not climb all the way to the top, access was by narrow steep steel ladder, and my knees were not at their strongest. Also the day was a bit hazy, so distant objects appear a bit blurred....

 We continued to a second lookout, a more conventional wooden tower that overlooked a valley to the East. On the map it is the second horizontal line.  I took a short hike and snapped a few pics of the forest....

The trip continued for about two more hours, mostly at speeds of 5 to 10 (at best) mph.  Much of the ground was muddy from recent rains. We reached Szent Csed, a village of about 4 houses, the place where Dönci's mom, Zita, was born.  From there a road led downhill toward the river that also flows through Udvarhely... the Kiküllő, which at a about 25 miles upstream from the city is really just a brook.  The road reminded me of  a stretch of the Oregon Trail that we saw on one of our trips to California (I think it was in NW Nebraska), where you could see how much deeper the trail was than the surrounding terrain.  The road from Szent Csed must have been a couple hundred years old, it resembled more of a streambed than a road, with large rocks and an occasional boulder making passage by normal auto totally inadvisable.

After we reached the river, the terrain leveled out and we were able to travel much more normally.  We continued downstream toward Várság, perhaps the largest village in Romania, Zita claiming that the village limits were more extensive than that of Bucharest.  Not sure about that, but a Wikipedia article says it is 76 sq kilometers, so 8 km by 9 km, roughly, which means a square about 5 miles on each side, so she may be right.

Downstream from Várság is Zetelaka, a largish village of about 3000, where Barni comes from and where his folks still live.  We did another hill climb up to the hunting cabin.  All of these hills lie at about 3000 feet, and the valleys are generally at about 1500, so  it is a pretty steep climb any time you do it.  Again, nearly all of this was cross-country.

Bear poop, no shit. The brown stuff at center bottom of the pic.   This was out near the hunting cottage that Barni built out on a ridge about 2 km from his home village of Zetalaka.  There are a few others in a group that uses the place for hunting... deer, wild boar, sometime bear.  We found scat from deer as well.... The guys have rigged up a barrel that hangs from one of the trees, and it is set up to distribute corn once or twice a day, so as to attract the game to the area.

Afterwards Barni got a call from his folks insisting that we go to their place for a visit.  Ordinary family house, comfortable, reminded me a bit of my grandparents'  homes. Dinner was soup (both a fruit soup and a meat broth, I chose the former which was apple and sour cherry, wonderfully sweet and flavorful), then breaded-sautéed turkey cutlets with mashed potatoes.  Apparently turkey is a delicacy here and is expensive--something on the order of veal in the US.


We got back to Udvarhely around 6 pm.  I decided to rest, fell asleep at 7 and was out till midnight.  I got up, made some coffee, did some vocab stuff and a little reading till about 3 am, then went back to sleep till 6 am, my normal getup time.

Up and running again

About a week after smashing my Nexus tablet (rip) i am back with a Lenovo laptop that I bought from the local equivalent of Best Buy.  It works fine, but I really dont like the keyboard, i dont like any laptop keyboard, it just feels all wrong and I dont know where the keys are, not really.  Also I cant really use a laptop built-in mouse.  So yesterday I went back to the store and for another 25 dollars picked up a wired mouse and a standalone keyboard, now I am , as the title says, up and running.

Continuing to plough ahead with the Hungarian. Went to a bookstore to get something else to read that was not too expensive, just a simple paperback, asked for "young adult" literature, wound up with something really heavy out of the 1930s, dense prose.  ESTI LORNÉL, written by Kostolányi Dezső.   I knew I was in trouble when i ran into a paragraph that took up about a page.   The narrator describes a former friend....

The way he presented himself was unrefined and unfashionable--broad open collar, narrow yellow tie, and  rumpled green puns.  

It took me a long time to make sure that the word really was "pun" and that the description was of the way he clothed himself with them, along with the narrow yellow ties.

Some of this stuff I can handle without too much difficulty, once I get started with the particular vocabulary.  For example, I have been reading a book by a local author, Wass Albert, which is a set of somewhat modernized "fairy tales" of the Transylvanian forests.  So I have to learn the words for elf, fairy, types of birds and plants, moss, dew, brook, snail, badger, fox, and the like.  Once I get them down, the rest pretty much flows, so that I get about 80 percent without having to look words up.  And the really hard book I mentioned, Esti Kornél, does settle down a bit.  Chapter two describes the experience of a six year old heading off to school for the first time .. the setting is a town in Eastern Hungary around 1890, I read that during breakfast today, about 15 pages, again hitting around 75 percent, enough to know what was going on with him, his mother, the other kids in the class, and the teacher.

I am meeting up with either of two students  (Balázs and Tomi, both Juniors) daily for about an hour after school.  The Harmonia coffee shop has a no-smoking section, so we sit there for an hour, I always have tea and something to eat, the students will sometimes accept a coke or some juice, and we review understanding and pronunciation.

Finally I am getting some control over the food situation.  Breakfast had been heavy, way too much salami and cheese, finally I have got them to come down to a half portion of stuff for me along with a generous serving of fresh vegetables.  So breakfast is almost like an american lunch-- sandwich and salad.  I will have a sandwich or a pastry with my tea when I do the lesson around 2 or 3.  Then in the evening I do a bowl of soup and a fresh salad in the dining room, afterwards I do some yogurt and fruit or nuts back in my room.

All in all I am doing about 5 hours of Hungarian a day, maybe more.  Not really speaking a lot of it, because I am not really living in an environment where I have to speak all the time.

Máté has invited me to go to his family's house after the graduation ceremony and meet all the relatives who will be there.  It will run late, he says I am welcome to spend the night, so I will do that.  He has apparently done pretty well so far in the national biology competition, coming in at Nr. 11 in round one and then Nr. 4 in round two.  Third round is the final one, sometime later this month in Budapest.

Not sure what I will do around Easter. Was thinking of heading south to mountains and renting a car, but the new computer set me back financially, so may forgo that.

Hiatus

Dropped my nexus tablet

Smashed

Cant compose very well on ipod

Am in mourning.

Or withdrawal

too much of a good thing?

Maybe it was coming down with a virus plus persistent cough, maybe it was just exhausting the resources of the local town, but about ten days ago I felt that I had hit a wall.  I wasnt and still am not making much progress with my Hungarian... constantly the same problems with misplaced accents and double consonants and mixing up A versus Á, somewhat like saying shit instead of sheet  I am reasonably ok when dealing with new concrete vocabulary..objects, colors, tzpes of motion..something that i can put into a mental video... But abstract vocab is particularly elusive.. virtue, honor, justice, and the like.  i have been trying to learn the equivalent for VIRTUE for about two weeks now... it just took me about 6 full seconds to bring it to the surface.  My mnemonic for the word is a KEY... i know the word for key, which is KULCS.  The word for virtue is ERKÖLCS, so my mental process is three steps-- remember the key, change the vowel, put the ER in front.  But if it takes me 6 seconds to bring up a word in conversation, I am doomed.

In a somewhat typical day I am doing abbout 4 or 5 hours of Hungarian.  At breakfast time I read and do vocabb for abouut 1.5 hrs.  I head downtown on my bike, get coffee and a snack at aa café, then over the next several hours I am either at one of the schools or at the library.  If library, then I read for abbout an hour.  Latest reading pleasure--the last two months of the local paper for 1989.. the paper was the organ of the regional communist party.. like a mini Pravda.  Up through 20 Dec the main articles are all about Ceaucescu..His trip to Berlin, visitors from Iran, His speech to a party congress, his visit to a factory.  Any trip he takes includes the hour and minute of departure, the hour and minute of arrival, the names of people on the trip with him, who greeted him, etc.  So he takes this trip to Berrlin around 15 October 1989, meets Honneker, gives a speech, etc etc, all is reported faithfully.  I scan the papers for the next severral weeks...absolutely no mention of anything happening in Germany..nothing about the wall, the collapse of goverrnment, nothing.  Instead Nicolai is off to another event, greeting the workers at factory X, encouraging greater production of wheat or whatever.  On 17 December there were protests in Timisoara, medium sized town close to Hungarian border.  News in the paper a couple of days later consists of a transcript of a TV-Radio address bz Nicolai, warningg about foreign agitators and subversive elements, with special mention of Hungarians as the nasty guuzs (Hungary having precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall during the previous summerr when it effectively stopped blocking people from travel

frustration

with persistent cough --though it is slowly disappearing--
with the hotel--food is salty and generally too heavy, last several nights the staff did not turn the heat back on in the evening, so around 3 am i wake up and have to readjust sleep situation to account for cold room.  last night i was smart enough to check things out before going to sleep, tested the radiators.. no heat.  fortunately i had spotted a portable electric radiator down the hall, so rolled it in and set it on medium.. did the job.  but still, i should not have to do it.  i have pretty much exhausted the variety offered by the town.. went to the local museum, the library, that,s about it.

I have hit a wall with Hungarian.. vocab that is down is mostly concrete things, objects, colors, action verbs..  things that i can visualize.  but moving into abstract territory is hard.  VIRTUE,
JEALOUSY, GREED... Hard to pin down the equivalents .  I was tring to remember the Hungarian for VIRTUE.  My mnemonic is an image of a key, because i know the word for key, whichh is KULCS, and the word for VIRTUE is ERKÖLCS.   But it took me about five seconds just now to bring ERKÖLCS to the surface, which is just waaay too slow.

Even so I am spending about 4-5 hours a day strictly on Hungarian.  Computer vocab drills, about two hours. Reading, another two.  then an hour with either Tomás or Balázs at a local cafá going over stuff I have been working on, plus the two hours a week i spend onn skype with Ákos.  Certain things I can read it all depends on the vocab in question.  For example a recent newspaper article was all about the return of the storks to their summer nesting areas.  I am fine until the article goes off into the economic significance of storks, or environmental implications, and then I just grind to a halt.

While fighting the local variety of virus last week I started to watch game of thrones.  have exhausted that, and now am doing the latest season of sherlock.  i did binge when i was just out of energy and kept moping about, but now it is no more than one episode per day, generally around 9 pm, after I have  done a good faith effort in hungarian during the day.

Somewhat steady state

  During th last couple of weeks I have made a few appearances at the Benedek Elek school, doing conversation exercises, trying to help some of the students prepare for oral exams coming up soon.  It makes such a difference whether I meet with students who really are interested and those who are there just because it is a class.  Yesterday, talking with Julia"s group, it was like slogging through honey. But I could see myself getting through to about 4 out of the 20.   Later that afternoon I went over to the Reformatus gimnázium just next door to chat with about 8 of Melinda"s students.  Izabella, Bence, Tomás, Balázs, Istvan, Helga, József, and...... the tall one, the one who is playing semi-pro basketball already.   Balázs and Tomi were quite engaging, witty, a bit edgy.  József is very serious, he thinks he wants to go to seminary for training as a Calvinist pastor.
I found out that they can apply for Hungarian citizenship if they wish....the ballplayer has only a Hungarian passport.

Took a bus trip to Korond last saturday, checked out a couple of stores selling traditional pottery, carvings, fabrics.  In many respects it reminded me of the market in Nuevo Laredo, the town right across the Rio Grande.  Overall this quality was higher, toys were solid wood, fabric was finished, the pottery is much like it has been made for over 100 years.  I maz be able to buy some nice plates and have them shipped to me in BP so I can give them to Tata friends as gifts.  But ran into a hiccup on return.  The bike lock refused to open.  Just simply would not.  Correct combination, I am sure sure sure sure sure, it just simply would not open.  Took taxi back to Gizi -- i had gone to the store and had bought milk and fruit--explained my woes, and about an hour later a colleague of Gizi"s son shows up with a power carbide saw which hacks through the cable in about 5 seconds.  So at least I am mobile again.  I bought a decent bottle of wine yest, gave it to Zita, who will make sure it gets to her brother and to his colleague.

Looking ahead, I have planned everything from 22 April to 1 May, when I return to Hungary.  But I am thinking of a trip to Brasov and then renting a small car to go into the mountains, which you just cant do unless you have a car.  Or are willing to hike which with my  knees I am not.