Question of the Day

In Italy, why does a box containing twelve 200mg ibuprofen cost €4, or approximately $5.50, but a week and a half worth of antibiotics are free?

Very Big Sorry

I was walking towards the Anonymous statue near Vajdahunyad Castle in City Park when I noticed the guy playing the violin.

The sun was shining on him in his shortsleeved shirt, his blue eyes glinting above his thick blond mustache framed by dimples as he busked.

He’d left the case filled with change a few meters away and was approaching tourists as they touched the statue’s pen, rubbed golden by those before them. Trying to guess where they were from, urging them to take a photo with him while I kept my distance and willed them all out of the way of my shot.

“Where are you from? Spain?” he asked.

“No, no,” I replied, edging away.

“You speak English? Here. You take this,” he said, offering the violin and bow. “Take picture.”

“No, no thank you.”

I tried to walk off, V. stopping as the man chatted him up.

“Here. I take picture of you. Nice photo to remember Budapest.”

I can’t help it. I inevitably imagine the worst. The man taking my camera and holding it hostage for some euros or forints regardless of the fact that I have his violin because it’s not even his, he doesn’t play, he picked it up out of the trash. And I don’t really like having my picture taken. It makes me uncomfortable, trying to pretend the camera’s not there or worse, trying to smile and look like I mean it. I’d like to be different. I’d like to be spontaneous and less cynical.

I do the same thing to the woman who walks around Ascoli asking for cigarettes and the people trying to sell me socks or pirated CDs outside the mall. I’m not so worried about the Cigarette Lady but I do always think the socksellers might take out their frustration on our parked car.

“No thank you,” I called out, hoping V. would start walking away.

He turned to V. and shook his head. “I feel very big sorry for you!”

We laughed about it afterwards but I kept thinking about it. It would’ve been a nice picture to have, me pretending to play while standing in front of the slightly creepy old statue. Maybe I’d have busted into “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, the only song I remember how to play, delighting the man. Only, I didn’t do that. I just walked uncomfortably away.

Last month, we were back in Budapest. High up on Castle Hill, on the Buda side of the river, on the other side of the city from the park, We exited the funicular that whisks you up the hill.  There was the violinist, this time in a trenchcoat, his bushy mustache looking paler in the grayness of the early winter day. He was playing Brahm’s Lullabye, a song my grandmother used to sing to us at bedtime.  He stopped and approached a couple looking over the wall, down across the river.  I flipped a few forints into his open case and walked on.

Budapest Day 3 - Memento Park

Outside of central Budapest, in  the suburbs, in a sweet little neighborhood with  some half-timbered houses with gardens and (strangely) barbed wire-topped fencing is a park filled with statues of the Soviet era.

For a girl brought up on the other side of the Cold War, outside the Iron Curtain who’s only read about Soviet oppression and only seen photos of such statues, the literally giant reminders of the vast reach of the State, the every-day people as hero, the dead-eyed stone soldier, being up close to them is truly awesome. Spread throughout the park are smaller sculptures and plaques, honoring various party “heroes”.

It’s easy to understand how some Hungarians wanted these sometimes-hulking hunks of granite, concrete and steel that had been set about their city to remind them of the power and ubiquity of the Soviet dictatorship to be destroyed but it’s impressive that they weren’t. They were instead set up in what would become a park, a reminder and a tribute to all of the revolutions in Eastern Europe, in Berlin, in Prague, in Poland.

As we got off the bus and headed back toward the park, the silhouette of the reproduction of Stalin’s boots, all that remained of his statue before crowds tore it down during an uprising in 1956 that started out peacefully but ended with tens of thousands sentenced, imprisoned and hundreds killed, a stocky older woman was walking behind us.

I saw the statues in the brick arcades by the park’s entrance at the same time that I heard some old-timey planes high above. As I started to run towards them in hope of getting a shot of a biplane in the background and Lenin’s face in the fore, the woman, white hair pulled back, sturdy stockinged legs carrying her up the road, eyes crinkled in a smile or from the sun, said, “Lenin.” I nodded. She pointed a bit further ahead. “MarxEngels,” in the way that people do, as if they were one person. I smiled and waved as she walked on up the hill, wondering what she’d lived through, what she’d seen and what she thought about it all.

Getting there: http://www.budapest-tourist-guide.com/budapest-statue-park.html

Becoming Italian, Part 4.5

Back in June, I thought it’d be a good idea to check in with Rosalba at the Prefetura. I wanted to know if a) I had all the documents that I needed and b) the translations I did were ok because c) as of the first week of July, I’d be in Italy for two years and could d) apply for citizenship.

Last October, I had gone to the Prefetura to get the skinny on applying for citizenship. Please don’t ask me to explain what a prefetura is. I can’t. I have no idea. I might have at one time, but now, my brain has been made mush by Italian bureaucratic quirks. Suffice it to say, it is some kind of state office that we in the US have no need for. Because we do not do some of the things that they do here.

Back then, the lovely woman gave a cursory glance at my existing documents, asked how long I’d been in the country and handed over the application with its list of more documents needed and sent me on my way.

I needed to get:

- my birth certificate from the State of New York. Long form, with an Apostille

- a report of good conduct from the State of New York, with an Apostille.

- a criminal record/record of no arrest from the FBI. (Say it with me) With an Apostille.

- various weird (to me) documents from the town hall here: an extract of our marriage; a “stato di familia” (kind of like a formal declaration of who makes up our family in our registered domicile; a residence document. Like I said, weird);   a certificate of citizenship for V.

The documents from the US needed to be translated into Italian.

In January, I got my fingerprints to send to New York and to Washington. It took three months to figure out who could do them for me and where to get it done.

So, now, June. Almost two years since I’d entered Italy and applied for my Permesso di Soggiorno, which meant almost time to submit my application for citizenship through marriage. I thought it’d be a good time to check in to see if anything had changed, if I needed any more documents, if the ones I had were ok.

Despite them moving this particular office of the prefetura, not having signs on the actual office door (or even near the office door) explaining that it’d been moved and to where, aside from wasting several euro on parking because we had to get back in the car and drive to the other part of town where they keep the questura, the agenzia entrata, and now the office for citizenship, in the brutal heat of the June morning wearing a dress and shoes instead of cutoffs and flip flops, I got answers. Just not the good kind.

Rosalba seemed pleased as she perused my documents. Until I asked about the translations. First problem? I still don’t know Italian very well. Even though I explained about the man who’s listed as the informational contact on the giant posters tacked up in all the provincial offices (including that one) offering free Italian courses for foreigners having not responded to any of my emails. She just gave the kind of “eh” shrug and tsk-ed. No points for trying.

Second problem? I (and Google) did the translations.

“Who did these?”

“I did. Like I did them for the Italian Consulate in New York before we got married.”

“Tch, tch, tch.” Her head shook back and forth along with her index finger in that way some women here do and that I hate. “You go to the tribunale. You get a translator there and pay. These are no good.”

“But why no good?”

“You need official translator. They stamp them.”

Oy. Can’t even begin to argue that they were good enough to get me married here, that it makes no sense that I have to now pay someone in this country to do them, that I’d like to know if she understands them because at the end of the day, isn’t that all that matters? Not worth it. She wasn’t gonna budge. Someone needed to get paid and I was the one who was going to have to do it at the tribunale, via stamps.

“Ok. Then I can come back and apply?”

“Um. Let me see. You have been resident since January, 2011?”

The sweat started rolling down my spine and soaking the back of my dress as I geared up for a fight I was not prepared to have in a foreign language. “I have been here since July 2010. Look at my permesso.”

Didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter that I entered the country and got my permit to stay in July. It didn’t matter that the first comune wouldn’t register me with just my temporary permesso issued in July and that the Salerno questura took five months to issue the permanent one, that I picked it up at the end of December and had it updated before applying for residency here, which happened in January. I had to wait until January to apply.

I sank back into my chair, defeated.

When we got married, the law stated that I needed to be resident (or was it just married?) for six months before applying. Now, it states two years (three, if living outside of Italy). Please join me in praying that the law doesn’t change in the next two months. 

Budapest, Day 2

After fueling up on sour cream and cheese covered langòs and a spicy Hungarian sausage smothered in pickled vegetables from the Great Market Hall, we spent the rest of the afternoon walking. Across the Liberty Bridge to the Pest side of the Danube, through the majestic Gellèrt bathouse, up the river, across the traffic-free-for-the-day Chain Bridge, through a festival in the square touting alternative energy and transportation plus the engineering feet of a bridge made of spaghetti, stopping for a pastrami sandwich and some lemonade at a repurposed VW bus (walking is hungry-making), we continued up the also closed-to-traffic Andràssy utca. And we encountered the strangest street fair I’d ever seen.

There was performance art. There was a sandbox with toys for kids to play in. there were live models changing poses every thirty seconds while people with sketchpads and charcoal immortalized them. There was a guy on stilts playing drum major to the kilt-clad Budapest Highland Pipe and Drum band. Re-purposed three-wheeled Apes fitted with espresso machines and chimney cake grills, all of which were good but my most favorite thing was Titus.

Titus was running a food and drink stand, a rustic wooden shack with chalkboards and utensils hanging from it, selling pàlinkas and goulash and lecsò and stuff. There were café tables and chairs off to one side and small, tall tables out front. We stopped to try some pàlinka.

The biggest problem in Hungary when trying new things is that if you don’t all ready know what you want and how to say it, you will never deduce from its Hungarian name what it is. Pàlinka is kind of like a brandy, I guess, made from fermented fruit or herbs and water. They come in all kinds of fruit flavors, like apple, pear and plum. But Hungarian is not a Latin or Germanic-based language so “mele” or “apfel” wouldn’t help when searching out the apple one which was irrelevant since I wanted to try plum. Turns out, the Hungarian word for plum is szilva.  Don’t ask me how to pronounce it. Anyway, because of this, ordering pàlinka in the little basement bar full of locals next to our hotel was behind my capability. At a street fair though, I could give it a whirl.

Titus said they had plum, apple, pear, apricot and some of those also with honey but to truly be pàlinka, it is made with fruit only. I wanted the plum and V. asked to try one of the honey ones. Titus made a face. “Those are for pussies.”

V. was undeterred. Titus looked a little suprised.

We took our small plastic cups over and stood at one of the high tables, sipping the clear, fiery liquid and declaring it a far superior drink to Italian grappa, though the honey one did taste a bit more like cough syrup and, really, wasn't that good.

Titus came over to smoke a cigarette and we chatted, commending him on his English as he explained about pàlinka and brought us other flavors to try.

He explained that there was true pàlinka, made from only fruit or herbs and water, as well as the more profitable but less authentic bastardization szeszes ital or “spirit drinks” (pàlinka to which honey has been added).

We asked him about one of the dishes listed on the chalkboard as “tripes with knuckles and nails”.

“You know, the stomachs of beef with the feet and fingers of the pig. We only have one word in Hungarian for both the cow animal and the cow meat. We do have many ways to describe other things that I cannot even translate,” he explained.

“Interesting. Like, in Italian, they have fingers on their hands and fingers of the feet—dita del piede—but in English, we’ve got a separate word for each--fingers and toes. Though with pigs, the toes are the hoof. Of course, if we’re eating them, we just call them feet.” Clearly, I’d reached my Hungarian brandy limit. “You could change your sign to read ‘tripe with pig feet’.”

“Oh, this is good. You help me with my English.”

He had to get back to work but suggested we come back later in the evening, they’d be there ‘til ten or eleven o’clock. Sadly, we didn’t.

Budapest, Day 1

We arrived in Budapest at midnight, got a cab to our hotel, put down our bags, took a walk around the block, went to sleep, woke up, got big paper cups full of American-style coffee and walked for several hours.

Picked up a brand new, tags-on jacket at a second-hand store, dropped my old jacket off at the hotel, got delicious Hungarian food including salad with duck liver, fish and paprika soup, and stew with barley, walked around the Great Market Hall then back towards the hotel and saw a crowd watching a Hungarian Emo band playing in a shop window, replete with lead singer palming the window, angstfully.

Well done, Budapest.

Budapest, Hungary. Hour 1 (Hungarian 1 - Nancy 0)

We arrived in Budapest at 12:05 am. Not the best time to arrive anywhere, but especially not in a city you’ve never been to and that doesn’t have mass transit running outside of the city center after 11 pm.

I’d read about the possibility of taking a night bus from the airport to a bus terminal then another bus to a stop that I thought might be near our hotel but the name of which I couldn’t begin to figure out how to pronounce. At the last minute, I decided the best thing might be to get a taxi from a reputable taxi company.

Turns out, the FöTaxi company has a deal with the airport. They’ve got a booth set up just outside the arrivals door that houses a dispatcher and they offer flat rates to the different zones of the city center. You just have to tell them the name of the street and what district it’s in. Easy. Especially since the Budapest zip codes tell you what district the address is in.

Only, I didn’t know how to pronounce the street name and it was the one address I had that didn’t have a zip code and I hadn’t written the district.

I took a stab at reading the street name which looks like this: Eötvös utca. “Ee-usht-vush oot-sa?”

“What?” the dispatcher asked.

I shoved a piece of paper at him with the address.

“Which district?”

“Um. The fifth or sixth? Maybe the seventh?” Quite the problem, since the districts are arranged in a spiral: the seventh might be closer to the airport than the fifth.  But shouldn’t he have a computer he could plug it into that told him where it was and in which district? 

I pulled out the hotel confirmation thinking that it would surely have the zip code on it. Only it didn’t. I did know that the hotel was near the Oktagon metro stop.

“It’s near Oktagon.”

“Yes, near Oktagon,” he mocked me. I'd later find out that Oktagon, while a Metro stop is also a neighborhood bordering two districts. “It’s ok. It’s ok.” He must’ve figured it out because he handed me a slip of  a receipt with a number on it and the price of the ride in both Hungarian Forints and euros. “Three meters across the street. Ten minutes.”

I looked at the signs all around telling me that my FöTaxi should be right at the curb, not to take a ride from any other cabs anywhere else, that they were not trustworthy.

I walked up to the FöTaxi girl and told her they guy said my taxi should be across the street. “No, no. All taxis here.”

And then the dispatcher came over, looked at the ticket and pointed us at the guy waiting outside his white taxi  across the street. I could hear him thinking “stupid tourists” as he did so.

The cabdriver took our bags, opened the car door and asked where we were going.

“Ee-usht-vush oot-sa?”

He asked to see the ticket. The ticket that everything I’d read about said to not give over, that holding onto it ensured I’d be charged the price printed on it.

“Ay-it-ush ootsa. Not what you said.”

As we pulled out of the airport I said, “Can I have that?”

“Is for me,” was his reply.

He got us safely and soundly to our hotel, took our 4800 forints and handed over a company card with the phone number and a discounted fare back to the airport printed on it.

“How do you say ‘thank you’ in Hungarian?” I asked.

“Koor-se-num.”

“Koooor-si-nuum. And this street?”

“Ay-it-ush ootsa. Not mooshy mooshy,” he smirked and pulled away.

I am massacring languages all over the continent.