The Ökö Debrief

Always

leave

a note.

As it turns out, Sally did go to Ököritófülpös but was two hours behind me.  This is because I was one hour ahead, and forgot to change my clocks back, and (possibly as a result of this) she ended up having to sleep in a train station in Nyíregyháza while I went to a barn party in Debrecen (evidently Hungarians have learned nothing from Ököritófülpös’s historical lessons).  Sally learned that I left at least one note, and I learned that I should have time-stamped it (and the other two).  Either way, the other two notes have probably ended up as case studies in English class in the local school.

Our default was to regroup in Budapest if Ököritófülpös did not work out.  In a way, it still worked out for us, and we got to enjoy Ököritófülpös independently and on our own terms.  If we could do it all again, I don’t think we/I would change a thing.  I think sleeping in a train station in Nyíregyhaza and being forced to look at 90s pornographic magazines by homeless old men who refused to believe she didn’t speak fluent Hungarian was a bit more than Sally was willing to take.  But whatever, every Hungarian assumes that everyone is fluent in its language, so we’ve all been in that situation before.*

We decided to spend a whole week in the Pest, where Sally employed her feminine wiles and well-honed flirting skills to secure us a double room at the dorm rate.  We then proceeded to “get er done” the only way we know how: Bacardi Breezers in the park by day, and atrociously sweet half-litres of fröccs for $1 by night.  It also provided me the perfect base from which to plan my next move.  And perhaps now is a good time to bring everyone up to speed, as I realise I mainly type for an audience of one—me—and I sometimes forget we’re not all, unfortunately, on the same page with my thought process.  
 

At this point, Baku had become my ultimate destination.  Maybe it’s because I have always wanted to see the Caspian Sea, maybe it’s because I have an almost fanatical obsession with the former Soviet Union, and maybe, just maybe, it’s because I have a brother who lives there, but for some reason, I was set.  If I died on my way back, that was fine, but all I cared about was not dying on the way there, which I think is a healthy attitude towards life.  Following in this vein, I had decided to not take the two-day (or two-week.  I’m not sure.  I think it is somewhere between two days and two weeks and you have to pack food accordingly) ferry from Odessa to Poti, Georgia (some outrageous Australian man in Kiev told me is was a “total shithole” and, not yet having been, I was horrified and angry at his fouling of its good name) and instead catch it on the way back.  I instead focused on Albania again, because everyone knows it’s the place to be in the summer.  Everyone!  In fact, I had about three friends in Albania, and potential for more.

One such friend was actually an American (actually all of them are) who was living in Albania by choice.  Perhaps I mentioned him when I was in Albania in February, or perhaps I didn’t, but that’s not important.  What is important is that he was going to be in Ljubljana for May Day, to celebrate the workers’ struggle.  We decided that if there was ever a chance that I was going to go back to Albania, it would be if he personally chauffeured me, so I decided the time was nigh to rush post-haste to Ljubljana and pre-empt this intrepid young scholar.  So after a hectic crunkfest in Budapest with the Sallz, I bought my bus ticket to Nagykanizsa (literally, “big Kanizsa.”  Who or what a Kanizsa is perhaps we’ll never know.  Whatever it may be was certainly not big enough to warrant comment) and we had a tearful goodbye at the Kálvin Tér metro station in Budapest

*As a side note, however, if you’re aware of how outrageous the Hungarian language and alphabet are, then you’ll no doubt remark on the sheer stroke of luck they had in making a capital out of Budapest, while such contenders as Ököritófülpös and Hódmezővásárhely ended up in a respectable second and third place.

Serf's Up

You may have noticed that I have recently discovered the joys of hyperlinking.  I have actually known about hyperlinks for a long time, since at least 1998 when my computer-savvy grade 7 teacher commissioned us to do internet projects on the history of Grand Forks.  My poorly-researched and ill-formatted page on early settlers went offline sometime in the mid-2000s, but my knowledge of hyperlinking has only temporarily evaded me.  As such, all this wallowing in eastern Europe and romancing the countryside has reminded me of an article I read a couple of years ago that regularly gets me fired up when the subject of the eastern European peasantry comes up (more often than not if I have my way in a conversation).

I recently had a European couchsurfer who was offended by the apparent classism in some of my remarks—specifically the use of “peasant” to describe one from a village engaged in agriculture.  My need to classify this couchsurfer as “European” stems from the fact that in North America we romanticise the peasant and with good reason.  I could have classified this couchsurfer as a German male but gender and ethnicity bear much less relevance to this than what can be perceived as a general European attitude towards class.  

For starters, if you’re a North American then you’re probably of hardy peasant stock.  Sure, life has gotten soft for a lot of us and we’ve all gotten a bit portly in subsequent generations, but if CBC Heritage Minutes have taught me anything it’s that everyone in Canada has descended from a sturdy, enterprising peasantry that lived in sod houses on the Prairies and survived -40 winters.  This is still my image of Canadian immigration, and part of me thinks living in a sod house for one calendar year should not only be mandatory for new arrivals to Canada today, but also for the rather soft and doughy youth we’re rearing today as some sort of intro-to-Canada boot-camp.  

Next, it’s no secret that North America has perfected the idea of taking something from another culture and making it standardised, internalised, and available for mass consumption.  Then things like cottage cheese, Hungarian salami, etc. get churned out and shipped all around the continent with promises of “Old World” taste and quality and available to everyone everywhere, to the point where we have fully forgotten what inspired these types of foods in the first place.  So when I see homemade sausages, cheese, and jars of artisanal jams for sale by people who actually know how to make them, I lose my shit. 

Let’s face it, the reason my ancestors left Austria-Hungary is because they didn’t have the opportunity to sit at bohemian cafés in Budapest reading classic literature and discussing theoretical linguistics.  And I know that when my great-grandmother boarded that train for Hamburg from Bukovina with the ultimate destination of Thunder Bay, all she was thinking about and hoping for her issue was that they may one day pay 3 euros for a latte in a smokey café while reading Kundera after a hard day of slaving over Excel spreadsheets.  I’m just living up to family expectations.  

So you’ll be pleased to know that I turned the tables on my couchsurfer and denounced him as classist for inferring that I was implying that a self-sufficient and hardworking person was somehow beneath me.  This, if anything, exposed the kind of endemic, elitist bias on his part that resulted in such mass outmigration in centuries past of enterprising individuals whose descendents are now frequenting the cafés of Budapest and Europe en masse; buying handicrafts and specialty food items from people with whom they share a common lineage; and finally, supporting the European economy through tourist dollars spent trying to enjoy an elevated and cultured lifestyle not available in North American society due to it being nurtured and built by a underclass never allowed to enjoy it in Europe.  

And that, kids, is why “peasant” is not a pejorative, and why taking offense at the term is inherently classist.  So eat it.

#Winning in the Winnipeg of Eastern Europe

Ököritófülpös or Bűst!

If seeing is believing, then seeing Ököritófülpös was entirely necessary to believe what the chemical fertilizer truck driver and several others in passing had been trying to tell me: Ököritófülpös is not a transit hub.  I assume that is what they were telling me.  Even the villagers in Ököritófülpös tried to convince me that walking to the train station was not worth the 20 minute diversion.  When I at last reached the train station on the appointed hour, I was expecting a cloud of steam from an approaching train and to see Sally disembarking with a steamer trunk and the help of a kindly porter.  Instead, I saw a group of men fishing in the tiny river, and a sign announcing Ököritófülpös without a station to accompany it.  I asked when the next train was coming, and while they didn’t understand me, they were almost certainly trying to indicate to me that no train would come, or has come in a long time.  Slowly, the pieces were starting to come together: maybe Ököritófülpös wasn’t the Winnipeg of Eastern Europe.  My assumption-based world was being torn asunder.

Hol van a Ököritófülpös Vásútállomás??? Nem van!

Disorientation is one of the worst feelings when travelling.  This is why I don’t like arriving in a new city at night, and why I need some sort of breadcrumb trail of sorts to ground myself.  Naturally, I left a note for Sally and decided to conduct a bit of reconnaissance of the village in anticipation of Sally’s arrival.  After all, we had a whole day of activities planned: we were going to look at the monument to the barn fire, and then we were going to just wing it.  The problem became readily apparent: so much emotional energy had been spent on the logistics of getting to Ököritófülpös that we never even paused to think about what to do when we got there.  

Did you know you cannot rotate pictures once they are in Blogger?

If we got there.  After waiting by the monument, I left another note indicating I would be at the (only) café soaking up the local scene.  Shocking the conservative small towners with my brash and urbane ways, I brought my barstool out onto the sidewalk so I could enjoy the sunshine and the ample people-watching opportunities afforded by this central location in the DT-Ö.  Instead, people watched me and mutter “tourist” to each other.  The town is about 80% Roma, so I got more than a few hollers from the local children, and an old man brought me a shot of the local plum brandy on the house to sharpen my senses.  The whole village was out and about, tilling soil, painting fences and preparing Ököritófülpös for what was bound to be a bustling and fruitful summer season.  Classic Ököritófülpös.

Scraping rust off of a wrought iron fence can only mean one thing: this pensioner is getting ready for a wild summer in the ÖK.

After a few hours, and several buses that arrived sans Sally, I began to lose hope and had to focus on finding a place to sleep for the night.  I left a third note at the café, bid adieu to my friends, and set off on the lonely road to Mateszalka.  Spring was in full bloom in eastern Hungary, vis-à-vis Romania and Moldova, with every tree full of cherry blossoms, and every yard full of red and yellow tulips.  I stopped to take a picture of one house and a old lady popped out from her porch and started hollering.  Worried I had offended her, I shouted one of the 10 words I knew in Hungarian, “Nagyon szep!” (“very beautiful”)  As it turned out, she was thrilled that someone had finally sat up and taken notice of what a kick-ass gardener she was and, assuming I spoke fluent Hungarian, trundled over to the fence to engage me in a long dialogue about her tulips. Instead, she had a long monologue about her tulips.

Getting told by the tulip lady.

The first thing I noticed once being back on the open road in Hungary is that not all Hungarians are fertilizer truck drivers, and consequently not all of them are keen on hitchhikers.  In fact, I would go as far as to say anyone who is “new money” and drives any sort of SUV, is a complete asshole.  As such, wasting a Sharpie and several pages of paper on signs to Debrecen, Mátészálka and even—a desperate attempt—Nyiregyhaza occupied a good 45 minutes of my time sitting on the side of the road.  As I was reflecting on how remarkably simple it was to get into Ököritófülpös but unnecessarily difficult to leave, I began to wonder if perhaps it was my destiny to remain there.  Just as I thought about turning myself around and going back to the charming café and negotiating a price on one of the many farmhouses for sale, a bus stopped to pick me up, and I paid 320 HUF to take me to Mateszalka, a bustling town on the Great Hungarian Plain that does have a Chinese food restaurant (in addition to rail connection and functioning infrastructure).  I trained to Debrecen, a metropolis rivaling the fair Ököritófülpös as Hungary’s second city in the east.  From here I was a mere stone’s throw from Budapest, arguably another reason to visit Hungary. 

A Full Push to Ököritófülpös

You’re probably just as surprised as I was to find myself back in Romania.  Being in Iasi ran counter-current to everything I had planned, specifically more QT time with the Ukraine.  In Crimea I faced a particularly acute quarter-life crisis and wondered what on earth I was attempting to accomplish with my life.  I sent a panicked email from an internet café in Simferopol with two possible itineraries, both heavily factoring in the Ukraine in attaining my next set of goals (see maps below).  I figured that yes, I needed to go to Caucasus, and yes, I needed to revisit Albania, and absolutely yes, I needed to see L’viv, but something else was itching at me—a growing desire to visit a seemingly insignificant village on the Great Hungarian Plain: Ököritófülpös.

It had all started out simply enough.  Sometimes you just graduate from university during a recession and the natural choice is to go to Europe with absolutely no purpose or direction except to cross off every country that qualifies as “Eastern Europe” on a list which years of American geopolitical hegemony has subtly etched into your mind (that includes you, Czecho-Slovenia.  “Central Europe” is like saying “Shopping Centre” when we all know it’s a mall.  And besides, which direction from the West is the centre?  East.)  So sometimes you’re in Skopje, Macedonia, and you think to yourself, “What am I doing here?  Where I am going?  What minor historical events in obscure European locales are celebrating major anniversaries in 2010?” and that’s when you happen upon little nuggets like Ököritófülpös and reflect fondly not only on the possibilities of visiting this quaint hamlet on the Great Hungarian Plain, but also on the underlying and nevertheless important fact that someone decided to write and include a link to the Ököritófülpös Barn Fire of 1910 in Wikipedia, in English.  

While I’m certain you paused to look up this barn fire, I will also provide a quick recap: there was a barn fire in Ököritófülpös in 1910.  I conducted a bit of historical sleuthing and it turns out that 368 people perished in this barn fire, seriously reducing the size of this village.  Most of Ököritófülpös’s identity stems from this barn fire, in fact.  While people in Budapest (and most of/all of Hungary) claim to have never heard of it, every so often you meet a Hungarian who still holds a candle for Ököritófülpös, either in memory of the barn fire, or because it has an absolutely silly and unnecessary name.  Perhaps this is just conjecture, but I’m fairly confident that it has something to do with an ox-bow lake.  Anyway, by the time I had arrived in Crimea, Sally was in Turkey.  We had planned to meet up for one last hurrah before she headed back to Canada, and Ököritófülpös seemed like the natural meeting point—the Winnipeg of eastern Europe.  

Nothing could have gone easier for me in getting to Ököritófülpös.  I spent the day in Iasi touring the palace of culture and searching for Chinese food and ultimately buying a pizza (ham and mushroom, obvs) which was 33% off, plus a 10% discount for taking it emporter.  Had I not discovered this little nugget of information only when paying (the total coming to a little over $2), I would have loaded up on another ‘za or two.   Then, with pizza, beer and a train cabin shared with a billowing old babushka, the night train set off through the Carpathians and to Satu Mare on the Hungarian border.  I brought along a couple of beers to prepare me for this night ride, which featured a two hour layover in Dej Calatori, one of my favourite places to be stranded at 3am.  While the train was late by over an hour, the station was freezing cold, and I ran out of pizza (and have been cursing myself to this very day for not getting a second), there was a hot chocolate machine.  The only disturbance on the connecting train was the conductor waking me up abruptly bellowing “Baia Mare! BAIA MARE!” and poking me.  Evidently my response was offputting enough that he did not wake me up when we reached Satu Mare and I woke up on an empty train in the station yards.  

Getting from Satu Mare to the border was easy: it’s literally right on the border and there is a bus.  And while it’s not Schengen, it’s still EU and it’s possible to walk across.  I spent a bit of time at the border eating and drinking coffee for cheap before plunging into the notoriously expensive Hungarian state.  I also fashioned a sign for my destination, in the unlikely chance that there wasn’t an “Ököritófülpös Expressz” bus or group taxi on the other side of the border waiting to whisk me and several others away.  To my surprise, there wasn’t, and I hadn’t even held the sign out before a chemical fertilizer truck abruptly stopped and hollered, “I am going to Ököritófülpös!” and insisted that there was no reason why I needed to as well.  He said I would do better to go to Mateszalka, where a train station actually existed.  I don’t know if you have ever tried to explain to a monolingual Hungarian truck driver why you want to go to Ököritófülpös, but it becomes increasingly difficult to articulate oneself when appreciation for irony isn’t an intrinsic or valued national characteristic.  Nevertheless, he dropped me off in the Big Ö and presumably wished me luck, love, and happiness.

UR Ung Up

One thing that is not only not a good idea, nor at all feasible, is fording* the Prut.  And if you take the 3pm train from Chișinău to Ungheni, then you’re going to miss the once-a-day Ungheni—Iași Express which crosses the train bridge.  If you’re thinking that this ain’t no thang and you can probably make the connection by running through the door with the “DO NOT ENTER” (purposely suppressing any knowledge of French and denying any plausible connections between the Moldovan “Interdis” with the French “Interdit”) sign on it, up the stairs and into a room full of border guards exclaiming, “PLEASE LET ME OUT OF MOLDOVA!” then you can just stop right there, because I can save you the effort and let you know what the result will be: they will tell you no, you cannot do this.  They will, however, be really nice to you and they will appreciate your can-do, go-getter attitude.  But they will also ask you to please leave their office. 

Anyway, all this sort of left me feeling a bit defeated, but it was still early enough in the day, the weather was getting warmer, and the border guards gave me a hot tip that the only crossing for me was 10km north of town.  No buses or marshrutkas seemed to be around, and I reflected on whether this is my fault or Moldova’s, and began dictating a terse-but-friendly letter in my head**.  I decided to walk to the border, thinking that 10km in Moldovan was, like, 2km in Canadian.  I found the main road and hadn’t gone very far into the countryside when I met a policeman who was standing at the side of the road.  We chatted, talked about hockey (I hadn’t the heart to tell him that the Quebec Nordiques aren’t as “nordique” as they used to be), and he told me to wait.  I assumed he was indicating a bus was coming.  But no, even better: a police car.  Full of more policemen.  As voluntarily getting into unmarked police cars in the former Soviet Union is one of my passions, I assumed absolutely nothing could go wrong and I gladly went along with them.

And thank goodness I did.  They drove me straight to the border and gave me priority boarding.  Pyotr/Pietr, the veteran border guard who I had been speaking with before, put the Soviet general’s hat (given to me as a parting gift from Transnistria) on my head and led me to the front of the long, long line of cars trying to get through the border.  He introduced me to the whole gang, and one of the smokin’ hot border babes*** in charge of interrogation and fear-mongering arranged for me a seat with a Romanian family who lived in Iași.  I bid adieu to the ol’ gang and set off for Romania and was dropped off at the train station by a seriously concerned family (though not serious enough to offer me lodging).

*If you’re not familiar with this word, I suggest you go back to grade 2 and play Oregon Trail on a Mac Classic.  

**On a bus in Chisinau an advertisement caught my eye and while I cannot quite ascertain what it was about, I think it was hinting that public feedback was welcome by posting something like Moldovan.Transport.Ministry@gmail.com at the bottom.  Looks like someone has finally gotten off the Hotmail bandwagon.

***Seriously, these women are unreasonably attractive.  It’s like the market for Moldovan supermodels is flooded so they have to find regular jobs.

Chisinau's Last Straw

So as you can guess, I went to the Moldovan National History Museum and loved it.  I woke up with a start one morning and, barely conscious, exclaimed, “I need to get out of Moldova.”  I’m not sure on what prompted the urgency.  In fact, I had gotten comfortable in Moldova.  Maybe a little too comfortable.  I had started a blog, filed my tax return, was complimented on my English by some med students from Palestine*, and I dined on homemade perogies stuffed with wild mushrooms and served in a mushroom-and-sour-cream sauce; and I was growing as a person and learning new things about myself.

One of the things I learned about myself in this time is that I can walk much faster than a 45-year-old Iranian-British woman.  These are the kinds of things one learns by opening up and experiencing the world.  Or, in some cases, having the world invite itself to the Moldovan National Museum with you and expect you to translate everything into English (from MOLDOVAN), loudly take pictures in the museum that cause the museum staff to speak sternly to you and then get targeted by some old curatress with a thirst for American dollars who follows you around and offers to tell you “secrets” about the museum in exchange for a handsome tip—“nothing compared to what you earn in America.”

Actually, I’m not quite sure why I said I loved my visit to the Moldovan National History Museum.  It was one of the most stressful and uncomfortable trips I have ever made.  Normally I am left alone and can wander for three-to-six hours, taking covert pictures of industrial products from the former Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic, and the agricultural bounty afforded by its almost-Mediterranean position.  But this time it was not to be, and I instead found myself voluntarily leaving a museum for the first time (instead of being told to leave half an hour before closing by a woman who just wants to go home where she can continue to sit and presumably finish her Sudoku).  

After, I opted for coffee and postcard-writing, articulating this in a way that unambiguously hinted at a desire for "me time."  Nevertheless she joined me, and spent most of the time expressing disbelief at how tragic it was that these beautiful Moldovan girls, who dressed so smartly, had only ugly Moldovan men to choose from.  I said that this was probably an unfair generalisation (here I was telling someone else that they were making unfair generalisations!  The world had turned on its head!) but she had a PhD in Sociology, or Psychology, or Physics, or in something which of course trumped anything I knew.  We also encountered a Pole who was protesting outside the Russian Embassy due to the Kaczynski Affair.  He only spoke French and I had to play translator again until finally I exclaimed, "Stop it!  Stop taking advantage of the languages I only pretend to know!  I am an Anglo-Saxon—'fluency' means being able to order beer."

As such, the following morning I awoke with a jolt and realised it was time to GTFO.  I packed my things and bid adieu to the people I had grown fond of, and headed towards the bus depot.  It was around this time that I realised it was harder to get out of Moldova than I ever could have thought.  There were no buses going in quite the direction I wanted, and none leaving at acceptable hours.  I tried for the train station and only found one going to the Ukrainian border.  The ticket was affordable—in the $1-$1.50 range so I splurged on coach and was horrified to discover we were to be packed in like cattle on the only train running on the only track in all of Moldova.  At this point I thought maybe disguising myself as a mail-order bride would speed up the process of getting out.

The train creaked and trundled along, and we gradually lost most of the people, allowing me to grab a real seat and attract a bit of attention when I got yelled at by the conductor for having the bag on the seat next to me instead of safely stowed overhead.  One woman asked why I was travelling alone, and I told her that, believe it or not, Moldova was a hard sell for my friends.  Suddenly, the Prut River was in sight and across it Romania—Europe, the EU, roads, freedom, America!  I decided to absorb the cost of the train ticket that would have deposited me on the Ukrainian border at 11 pm and de-trained at Ungheni to make a mad dash for the border.

*They told me, “Your English is really good, not like the other Moldovans.”  I thanked them heartily and went on my way.  It made my day.