Bilingual Stirrings

Paula is starting, slowly, one word at a time, to speak. She has had one or two words for a while now - one of her first words, for example, was to point very firmly at something which caught her eye and say “Né!”. This is the Hungarian word for “Look!” and sounds not unlike “Ni” - thus for a while she was very much the “baby who says ni”. But anyway, I digress.

So, post né! and a long drawn out, occasionally whiny A-ny-u-ka, she was being quite slow to utter things. This apparently is quite common in bilingual babies who are getting input in more than one language - they take longer to start using the words. She was up to speed with all the other developmental milestones which parenting websites offer up, but speaking was (and is) lagging a tad. But recently the words have started to come - there’s now a very definite “köszi” (thanks), and something which sounds like “this” but is very likely “tessek” (among other things, “here you are”), and a few others. But a couple of days ago we were standing (or I was standing, she was in my arms) at the kitchen window looking for dogs outside (She loves dogs. And pigeons. All animals probably, it’s just that in downtown Csikszereda, dogs and pigeons are broadly speaking the only obvious non human options). As we stood and looked, there round the corner came a dog. Quick as a flash, her arm extended, and her finger pointed quivering at this sight. “Look!” she cried excitedly. In English. Not only had she come up with her first recognisable English word, but she had correctly surmised that she needed to use it with me, and nobody else, and had managed to do that all in the split second of intense excitement at seeing yet another scruffy mongrel. The human brain is an amazing thing.

I’m not sure how long it will be before she learns that an English speaking cockerel goes “Cock-a-doodle-do”, since at present they very definitely say “Kukuriku”, which is what those odd magyar cocks say. (More animal noises in different languages can be found here).

Wednesday weak

I have nothing much to post, except to pass on this great link to a piece about searching for painted eggs among the Ukrainian community of Romanian Bucovina. And to report on the frozen saints (as mentioned a couple of days ago), who must have been on holiday this year. It turned out to be the hottest three or four days of the year so far - reaching 30 degrees at times, which for Csikszereda is August temperatures, not May. We're all doomed I tell you.

Random links, tags, and swearing

While I think about all the things I should write about (the Basescu suspension, more on Autonomy, the Rosia Montana gold mine, blah blah etc etc and so on and so forth), I instead will fill in the morning with a couple of unrelated and trivial observations and links

Firstly, from this weekend's Guardian, a piece about tourism in the Saxon area of Transylvania, and more specifically the village of Viscri. It's actually the second article in two years about Viscri (here's the first) so someone in that small village must have some kind of hotline to the paper. It's all a bit suspicious if you ask me.

Ages ago I was tagged to write something about a favourite computer game. Since I rarely have time for computer games - the other day I managed to spend the day watching a DVD in small bite sized pieces while Paula slep fitfully in my arms, the first DVD/video/film I've watched for ages, such is the lack of actual time to do these things - I can't really comment on anything very modern, but I do remember playing Football Manager on the ZX Spectrum for hours and hours back in the day, and playing it on that link brought back one or two vague flashbacks of those far off days. You try telling kids today that computer games used to be issued on cassette and they won't believe you. Before that I remember that magazines used to print the BASIC code for you to type in your own games. None of this DVD stuck to the front cover nonsense. (Thanks to 200 percent for the link)

Romania got creamed in this weekend's Eurovision song contest, which I didn't watch, and I haven't heard the entry (of anyone I think) so god only knows if it was deserved or not.

And finally, for today, a great language resource - The Alternative Hungarian Dictionary, from which you, the non-Hungarian speaker, can learn useful expressions which will either endear you to Hungarians, or earn you a smack in the face. I am familiar with quite a few of them, including all of the ones which involve equine genitalia (a very popular swearing device in Hungarian, for some reason), and some which are not included at all, but quite a few were entirely new to me. My favourite, I think, being Paksi mogyoró, which literally means "hazelnut from the town of Paks", but idiomatically would best be translated in English as "clingon". The site suffers somewhat from not rendering accents well (the Romanian dictionary from the same site is almost unreadable, so poorly does it deal with diacritical marks).

Frozen Saints

It was cold yesterday, much colder than it has been for ages. I went out for a bike ride in the afternoon, and actually needed to work harder just to stave off the chill. Then Erika mentioned that she thought that it was one of the frozen saints' fault.

The frozen saints "Fagyos szentek" are Pongrác, Szervác, and Bonifác (and possibly Orban). I'm still trying to work out what those names translate as in English, without much success, but since they're Saints, they must have equivalents - Bonifác is, I believe, "Boniface" and Orban "Urban" but I have never heard of anyone actually called these names, so probably Pongrác and Szervác are even more obscure.

Their relevance to the weather is that in May there are 3 or 4 days which are (according to folk wisdom) always cold - and in fact it is advised that you don't put your crops/plants that could be damaged by frost out until after the last of them has been and gone. These days are the saints days of Pongrác, Szervác, Bonifác, and Orban. But having done a bit of checking it seems like the first three are actually May 12th, 13th and 14th (ie not yesterday but this weekend). More details (in Hungarian). Orban is on the 25th.

So now you know. If tomorrow is cold it's the fault of that bloody St. Pongrác. Who, having done a bit more googling, seems like he might actually be St. Pancras. One of those saints (perhaps the only one) who is more commonly known as the name of a railway station. In fact, until that moment I hadn't stopped to consider that there was someone around once who was called Pancras. Amazing what appears when you start aimlessly looking stuff up.

The UDMR

I'm in the middle of writing a long (long) post about nationality and nationalism and identity and all that stuff for my extremely occasional series about Szekely Autonomy, and hope to have it done soon, but in the meantime, I was thinking about the UDMR (political party representing ethnic Hungarians in Romania), and what their purpose is.

You see, in broad terms, I don't really get it. I can see one or two benefits in their existence (which I'll get to in a minute or two) but in general I think they can act (on a national level) against the interests of the Hungarian community rather than for it.

Let me try and explain. Locally, they hold a fair amount of power - county and city authorities in Harghita and Covasna and probably elsewhere are typically run by the UDMR with a virtual lock on power. But why? The Hungarian electorate will tell you that they need to stick together in order to ensure that local government is not taken over by Romanians with a Bucharest agenda. Which, to en extent, makes sense. But as a single issue party (yes, they have economic policies, and so on, and are technically not single issue, but people vote for them not because of their policies on investment or what have you, they vote for them because they are the UDMR and "we have to stick together"), it's a little bit odd to have them in power for years and years.

[At this point I have to say that I think it's quite impressive and amazing that the UDMR has managed to position itself as the sole representative of the entirety of all 1.6 million (ish) Hungarians in Romania, with no major internal political ructions. I mean if I were Hungarian Romanian, who would I vote for? The UDMR is basically centre-right on most things, and I'm not really a big fan of what economic policies they do have - and the fact that they are aligned with the UK Tory party in the "European People's Party–European Democrats" grouping in the European Parliament is all I need to know about their political leanings outside of the national question]

On a national level, I think (aside from one crucial element) their role is even less clear. Their existence actually ensures that the bigger Romanian parties need say or do nothing to appeal to Hungarians. There's no votes in reaching out to the Hungarian population so why bother doing it? If the UDMR ceased to be, or ceased to play on the national stage, presumably the bigger parties would want those votes - 7-8% of the population is a huge voting block, and would represent something that would hugely benefit whichever party could best attract them. Look at the work that parties in the US do, for example, at attracting the various ethnic minorities. Likewise they (the UDMR) don't actually have to achieve anything for people to continue voting for them. They are, in effect, acting against democracy to some degree.

The only way that it does actually work is the way they put forward a candidacy for the presidency, who (obviously) picks up the statutory 5 or 6 % of the vote in the first round and then those votes can be "sold" to whichever of the runoff candidates promises more to Hungarians. (Though once elected there is nothing to ensure that the president will actually do anything for that community)

The exception, the positive side to their existence mentioned above, is presumably unintended. That is, that by controlling the balance of power, they can ensure that the odious PRM are not part of the government. That at least appears to have been the primary function of the (national) UDMR over the past ten years. They become part of the coalition, the coalition does nothing particularly to support or promote the rights of Hungarians, but at least the government doesn't actively target them (as it presumably would if ever Vadim Tudor or Becali or any of those other vile wankers ever got a sniff of power). So, yes, they do have a function, and an important one, but is that all there is to it?

I'd be grateful if anyone out there more clued in than I could offer any suggestions as to what the real purpose of the party is, and what they actually achieve on a national level (other than the above "not being the PRM" acheivement)

Someday a real rain will come

So, the title of most famous living Hungarian, vacant since Puskas died last year, has now been won by Nicolas Sarkozy. I know that Sarkozy is Hungarian in name only (and even that should really be Sárközy), but since he thinks of immigrants as scum I think one should constantly remind him that he is one himself (even if he was the son of an aristocrat, and not some poor marginalised Algerian in the banlieues). Though I can't help thinking that before long, there won't be a Hungarian in the world who wants to be linked in any way to him. He promises to make the Bush presidency look like a model of enlightened decency and respect for human and civil rights.

While we're on the subject, how come much of the English language press refers to him as "centre right"? I know the centre has moved to the right, but surely not as much as to allow some hard-line right winger who actively courts Le Pen's supporters and openly wishes that the immigrant scum be washed off the streets of Paris with a high pressure hose to be considered "centre right"? He's a French Travis Bickle. Except rather than trying to kill the president he tried to be one - and succeeded.

Chicken Varicella

Varicella is not, as you may have thought, a type of pasta. It is in fact more commonly known (in English at least) as chicken pox. Varicella is just the official name of the virus. Although to be more accurate the virus is actually known as "Varicella-Zoster" which sounds less like a pasta and more like a ski resort in Switzerland. Interestingly (or not), in Hungarian it is known as Bárányhimlő which means "lamb-pox". The reason it's called chicken pox in English is nothing to with chickens, just that it was perceived as a small and decidedly un-deadly version of smallpox, and the humble chicken seemed to fit the bill. I'm assuming it got named after a cuddly little fluffy lamb in Hungarian for the same reason. I'm afraid I have no idea as to what it is called in Romanian. Perhaps hamsterpox or something.

Anyway, cuddly and fluffy it may be by name, but cuddly and fluffy it isn't necessarily by nature. Paula has had it since Thursday and this weekend has been extremely unpleasant for all of us (her particularly). Not only does she have a raging fever, but she is covered from head to toe in itchy spots which are driving her mad (and, indirectly, us too). In my investigative reading of anything I can find on the internet which might suggest ways of reducing her irritation, I have discovered that there now exists a vaccination for Varicella, which she could have had from 9 months old. I bloody wish she had, and that we'd known about it. Let this post be a strong piece of advice for all parents to go ahead and get your child vaccinated. Even if it's not offered as a semi-compulsory jab in your state health system, it must be possible to buy the vaccine and have a nurse administer it. Do it. Believe me. It cannot be worth watching your own child attempt to tear her hair out in anger and frustration and exhaustion (did I mention she hasn't slept either?), and to actually wonder, in all seriousness, whether it is possible to buy a baby sized straightjacket to stop her scratching.

One of the more intriguing things about using the internet as your primary resource for health tips is that it throws up all sorts of contradictions - especially across languages. For example, all English language websites I have found recommend a cool bath as a way to ease the itching. Whereas Hungarian ones say you shouldn't have baths, only showers. We've noticed this before, but it seems particularly pronounced in the case of chicken/lamb pox. The most baffling thing is that apparently calamine lotion, which is used worldwide for the treatment of chicken pox sores (and many other dermatological needs), is actually banned in Hungary. There's something about it causing infection - even though everywhere else in the world people are slathering it all over their pus-y and blistered children. It's quite quite bizarre. (Fortunately it is not banned in Romania, so while Erika is nervous about putting it on - having read all this anti-calamine propaganda - we have managed to get some and are using it)

Out and about in Karachi

Most of my time in Karachi was spent cooped up in the 5 star Pearl Continental Hotel which was all very well, but I got a bit stir crazy at times. However we did get out on one or two evenings to see some of the sights and sounds of the city (traffic jams mostly). One evening, for example, after a very nice dinner at a kind of stylised "village house" (I think the place may have been called "The Village") next to the sea, we stopped off at the beach on the way back to the hotel. Even though it was 10pm-ish the place was still very lively, with stalls selling food, people with balloons, camel rides etc. It was all very upbeat. Then, to my surprise, our group was approached by a heavily made up bloke in a dress who started imploring us in Urdu (I'm not sure what we were being implored to do, not speaking Urdu, but we were certainly being implored). He/she was quickly joined by a couple of others, who carried on with the coy flirty looks and gravelly voiced begging. It was all quite odd. I mean not that transvestitism is odd as such, but that it was there in Pakistan, in this fairly Islamic country, which is currently undergoing a lot of division between Islamic fundamentalism and the rest. It seemed like a precarious existence being a "eunuch" which appeared to be the word used. (Here is a short article about the Hijras, and a longer site all about the history etc)

The other big trip was to go out on a boat in the harbour. We had to get permission from the navy or someone, as we would be sailing past their ships, and we were told we could not bring cameras (though I kind of wished I had, since nobody checked), and then we were bussed off to the docks to start bargaining (not that I was involved in bargaining, that was the role of the course participants who'd organised this whole maritime shindig). This took a while, and involved us sitting in the back of a car, with our very worried host. Before travelling to Pakistan, my colleague and I had to fill out a form called a "Risk Assessment" which basically involved signing a piece of paper saying that we understood that Pakistan was possibly dangerous and that we could get killed or kidnapped or something. Our local contact, who was coming with us on the trip, began to get very concerned that this boat trip wasn't covered by the risk assessment we had signed, and that we were possibly taking too big a gamble by putting ourselves in the hands of some nefarious looking boat captain and sailing on a rickety wooden boat into the middle of the bay. By this time, though, it was too late to back out, and we all boarded and set off, watching the sun set over the rusting hulks of metal common to most harbour areas, while the Muezzin drifted across the water. It was all very enjoyable - and to cap off a fine evening, we were not kidnapped, murdered, sunk, boarded by pirates, or any of the other dire possibilities that we faced. Though I did get a severe case of diarrhea from something we consumed while on that boat. I strongly suspect an Al Quaida (bacterial) cell.

A short but harrowing tale

A small story with a happy ending (followed by a bit of liberal hand-wringing and analysis - well you didn't think I'd skip an opportunity to be self-absorbed did you?)

On Saturday 14th April, I arrived at London Gatwick Airport, after a 10-ish hour flight from Karachi via Dubai. I was, as the vernacular would have it, buggered. My luggage arrived, I loaded it all onto the trolley and headed off to the Gatwick railway station from where I would be heading to my parents' house near Cambridge. I had one massive and very heavy suitcase (since I was on a 4 week trip all told), a couple of small bags courtesy of duty free and a Pakistani carpet neatly wrapped into a hessian holdall, and my laptop, which I hung on that little hook on the back of the cart. When I arrived at the station, via the formerly cutting-edge little monorail thing that connects the two termini at Gatwick, the next train for London was due to leave in three minutes. I hurriedly bought a ticket, grabbed my bags off the trolley, went down the escalator to the platform and jumped (or lumbered) onto the train, breathing a sigh of relief. I deposited the big suitcase in the relevant place and sat down with the rest. Within seconds we had pulled away from the station and I could sit back and relax for half an hour until pulling into Victoria.

After a couple of minutes, having recovered from my exertions, I decided to retrieve my book from my laptop bag. It was then that I discovered the awful truth. I had omitted to pick that bag up from the back of the trolley when I had left it at the top of the stairs. I think I actually said the words "Oh, FUCK" out loud, as I buried my head in my hands (I had thought burying ones head in ones hands was a figure of speech, but I have now discovered that it isn't).

With the Gatwick Express being a non-stop hermetically sealed service, I had 30 minutes to come up with a plan - there was no way of jumping off at the next stop and heading back down with a vague hope in my mind. I first called ahead to my folks, and asked if they could call the station, just on the off chance. Then I set about convincing myself that (a) it would be handed in; and (b) even if it wasn't the world would still turn and I would survive somehow - I could buy a new laptop, and while I'd have lost a certain amount of valuable data, I could probably piece it together somehow. For (a) I worked out a complex percentages system (this mental activity being preferable to self flagellation or just outright despair). 95% of people upon finding a laptop would hand it in, I convinced myself. This didn't of course mean that there was a 95% chance of it being handed in, because while the 5% who would see it as an opportunity would probably be on the look out for such an opportunity or would certainly pick it up if they noticed it, the 95% would consist mainly of people who wouldn't notice the bag, or if they did would figure that they didn't have time to find someone to report it to, and possibly be forced to fill out a form. 20% of those 95% would actually notice it, pick it up and hand it in, I reasoned, without the slightest shred of scientific or even anecdotal evidence to back up this statistic. This still left me looking at a better than 70% chance of getting my bag back. (Thankfully, I hadn't at this point factored in the fact that at airports especially, rogue bags tend to be blown up in controlled explosions just in case)

The upshot of all this desperate mental arithmetic was that by the time I arrived at Victoria station I was feeling quite sanguine about the whole thing, despite the fact that by now I had talked to my mum and heard that it being a Saturday night, all the offices at the station had proven to be closed. It was then, just as I was detraining (or whatever the new word would be), that I realised that not only was my laptop in that bag, but also my money, my tickets and more or less everything I needed for the next week or so excepting my passport. Once again, I was more or less physically winded by the realisation, actually stopping in my tracks as I walked down the platform. Could I have been any more cack-handed?

I located the lost property office, and (without much hope) asked if I could fill out a form. This entailed a lot of explanation as the guy tried to insist that I needed to report it to the Gatwick Express company, while I kept telling him that I had lost it at the station, not on the train, and thus it would be to his office that I should report it (The privatisation of the railways in Britain has pretty much been an unmitigated disaster, and this lack of coordination between different private companies is just one very small part of the wider chaos). Eventually he relented and let me have one of his precious forms to fill in, which I was doing when my phone rang. It was my mum to tell me that they'd got a call from a security bloke at Gatwick who'd come into possession of my bag and had found their phone number in it. I called him straight away, my voice possibly cracking with emotion, as he told me he had my bag and had looked through it with a colleague and found the money and stuff, and would I like to come back and pick it up.

The upshot, obviously, is that I went back down to Gatwick (for free as he spoke to the ticket collector on my behalf), got my bag, gave him a hefty tip (which was as a drop in the ocean compared to what I had been on the verge of losing), and once again resumed my journey - even more tired, but now oddly, extremely awake. I didn't get "home" until getting on for 1am, but after that I really didn't care.

Upon relating this story here, I have been told by everyone that it would be absolutely impossible to imagine that I'd ever have got it back in Romania. And, despite myself, I have to concur with that opinion. I know the chances that I'd ever have seen it again would have been practically nil here. So why is that? (I asked myself). After all, I sincerely don't believe that Romanians are any more or less honest/dishonest than Brits.

Here are a number of possible explanations: (1) Romanians are an awful lot poorer than Brits (on average) - the temptation to see what monetary advantage could be gleaned would be much greater; (2) Romanians tend to assume that most people in positions of authority are corrupt (for fairly good reason) - in such circumstances, handing in a found laptop would not likely guarantee that it would get back to its owner, more that it would be siphoned off by the person who received it; (3)Years of privation and hardship (in the 80s particularly) have left many people very conscious of opportunity and seizing the moment. I mean I don't regard the number of apartments which have balconies that have been enclosed using stolen train carriage windows as being indicative of a general national propensity to thievery - more of a general national intense poverty and desperation which existed here in those spectacularly lean years. I reckon that's a hard habit to break. And finally (4), I realised that I wasn't mentally comparing like with like. I couldn't reasonably compare what would happen at Gatwick Airport station to what would happen at Gara de Nord in Bucharest. Aside from having railway platforms, there's very little that the two places have in common. In fact there are no Romanian railway stations that would be a fair comparison in the possible-light-fingered stakes to Gatwick, at which station, the only people getting on and off are people who have been to the airport, which tends to be relatively well off demographic. Thinking about it, I realised that the closest comparison in terms of wealth and general well-being of potential finders within Romania, would be if I had left it at Otopeni Airport in the departure lounge. And if I had done that (and it hadn't been treated as a suspicious package and detonated), I reckon I'd have got it back.

I'm not about to test this theory out though. Not if I can help it.

Why not, prey?

The sky over Karachi is thick with birds. There’s nothing so odd about that, obviously, since many cities have flocks of starlings or sparrows or pigeons or what have you looping about the skyline. In Karachi, however, they are kites (Or maybe eagles - opinion seemed divided). Large birds of prey circling, hovering, and swooping round the city – in whichever direction you look you can see them there. A picture, not taken by me, of what I'm talking about.

At first I was a bit taken aback by this – after all it is something I don’t recall seeing before – but later when I thought about it, I realised that it wasn’t actually that odd. A city must be a great place to hang out as a bird of prey, since it plays host to a vast quantity of rats and mice. What’s odd, I realised, is that it is unusual. Why is it that other cities are not so similarly blessed with an airborne rodent control system? Have the birds just not sussed out that cities are a rich source of scuttling mammal-food? Or have they been dissuaded from hovering over the cities by some other factor?

Carrion and rubbish eaters you often see in towns – crows, seagulls, marabou storks (if you’ve never seen a marabou stork, you have missed nothing. They are quite the most repulsive bird on the planet – a fact not helped by their reliance on garbage as a food source), but rarely out and out predators. Foxes have apparently colonised London, and closer to home, bears are often found in Brasov and Tusnad (though again I think they rely on rooting through rubbish), but why are there not more eagles, hawks and other birds of prey in cities? There must be a reason.

Meanwhile, here for your visual pleasure is a picture of a gorgeous looking marabou stork, looking uncannily like Tony Greig (Possibly only people who have recently been exposed to Indian TV cricket coverage will get this comparison, but trust me)