#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.

Sanislău Side

My first foray into Romania was in 2007 on a little single car commuter train that trundled along (see picture) from Debrecen, Hungary, to Valea Lui Mihai in Romania.  I shared this train with one other woman who began speaking to me in rapid-fire Hungarian, assuming I—like everyone the world over—understood.  Nevertheless, with a bit of English, Russian, German, French and Hungarian, we were able to have a conversation.  I was able to figure out that she was on her way to visit her mother in Romania.  When we arrived at VLM, I caused quite a stir because everyone wanted to figure out why I was here (the border guards took me into their little hut and asked, “Umm, are you OK?  Why are you here?”) and watched my every move, waiting to see what I would do next.  I was a human zoo exhibition to them, and as soon as I approached the ticket window and said the only recognisable city name in Transylvania I had committed to memory, everyone in the station sprung forward and starting screaming their proposed itinerary to get me there.  

If at any point any anthopoligist, linguist, historian, politician, or anyone with a shadow of doubt that Romanians are Latins, I highly recommend a visit to the Valea Lui Mihai train station in the middle of summer.  People were screaming and gesticulating, trying to get my attention and then arguing with each other.  One little old lady, half my height, fought her way through the crowd , grabbed my elbow flab and pulled me towards the Arrivals/Departures board where she then starting shrieking at it with such shrill resolve to—I could only assume—banish it to Hell once and for all.  The station mistress rose and emerged from her window booth and summoned silence with a firm and heavy hand.  Everyone froze in terror and waited with bated breath.  Speaking Romanian with authority and command, she told me exactly what I was going to be doing.  There was no alternative—she was the Margaret Thatcher of my Romanian destiny.  She told me in two hours a train would whisk me away to Cluj; there would be no transfers, no waits, no complex trip planning.  One train, direct.  She returned to her booth and the others came out of hiding and, satisfied with the results, began talking amongst themselves and waiting for the next big thing.  Marta was just getting on her train so she gave me her address in Budapest and told me to visit.

This time, however, I was heading in the opposite direction and going to the village of Sanislau of her mother (also named Marta—Hungarians have about 6 names per gender to choose from).  She was 84 and lived alone in a big house with a garden and orchard.  I arrived in Oradea to the south and assumed that Sanislau would be easy to get to.  The first thing I learned was that not only was it more difficult to get to than I had thought, but no one had any idea where or what Sanislau is.  I assumed that everyone knew exactly where every single village was in the area and could tell me exactly what to do.  It was off the grid for the most part and I was able to get a ride to the nearest village in a Maxi-Taxi and then walked the remaining 4 km into the village in the dark.

I rolled in after dark and Marta had a big pot of stew ready for me with mashed potatoes.  She then led me to the cellar where we got plum preserves and homemade wine from an enormous cask.  We also went and retrieved one bottle of homemade palinka from her ample collection, and then she set about drinking me under the table.  After I conceded defeat, she laughed heartily and showed me to my room.  Her house was a large, square farmhouse with six rooms and no running water.  There was an outhouse in the yard and a well next to the house.  She kept one room heated and did a lot of the cooking on a wood stove.  I chopped some wood for her the next morning and she made me schnitzel sandwiches for the road.  Our conversations primarily consisted of her teaching me the Hungarian and Romanian words for everything, and then giggling when I tried to pronounce them.  We watched the television specials that featured the 161st anniversary of the 1848-9 revolutions (the Ides of March being important for Hungarians as much as Julius Caesar enthusiasts) and then she taught me how to properly make a pörkölt, which is what I suppose us cretins living outside the Lands of the Crown of St. Stephen would refer to foolishly as ‘goulash’:

Pörkölt 

3-4 tbsp oil or lard
1-2 onions, chopped
3-4 tbsp ground sweet paprika
Pork meat, cut into bite sized pieces
Water
Salt n’ Pepa

Heat the oil.
Add the onions and cook until translucent.
Add the paprika and continue frying.
Add the pork, and brown very lightly.
Add a bit of water, salt and pepper, and cover for one hour on low heat.

This is literally all you have to do.  I think it actually helps if you’re an old Hungarian woman.  Apparently just being one of these is the magic secret behind cooking pork because I have no idea how it is possible for them to make it as good as they do.