Jutka called me this morning, the receptionist at the embassy is off sick this week, so that'll pay this month's rent :)


I saw film called Hallam Foe yesterday, a not very light Scottish film. It was enjoyable though and occupied my mind for an hour or so, and oh those visions and memories of Edinburgh! there has been so much beauty.


B met me afterwards and we were civil, or rather I mean that we didn't broach the topic of the day, so I didn't ask him how his day was and he didn't ask about mine. It was only mentioned when he said there would be a hiking trip on 19th did I want to go, and I said after today's shenanigans, and if the organisation is the same then I think not. We didn't mention it again, though neither of us slept until about 2am.


There is sunshine today, and I've started my week's work (am going to the embassy after lunch) so I shouldn't have too many late nights this week.
Also, I'm toying with the idea of taking mum to Paris again this year. As much for her as for me. In Szekesfehervar I had a dream that we were back there and for a couple of days it was so alive in me.

Earth hour: Balint and I realised ten minutes later, but we kept lights and machines off till 9.15. We lay in bed by a flickering candle, and I tried to remember all the verses to the Ballad of the Drover. It was an interesting, quiet time, because as we talked, and something came up that we didn't know, we didn't just 'go and google it'....goodness, what did we do before the internet?
But I'm glad we did it, and I'm glad lots of people around the world did it. Pictures of the Harbour Bridge, and of the Golden Gate are truly heartwarming.

wattle

well, no life coach. as my grandfather has famously said (and perhaps he wasn't the first?) everyone fucks up their life in their own way. too true.
balint sprang it on me at literally the last minute (i was in coat and boots) that i'd have to pay but he didn't know how much. of course i had anticipated some kind of financial deal, but it made me feel like he was going to go off with his old flattie, learning to conquer the universe or whatever their deal is because one is never really told; there are hints, and they are confusing, shady and therefore sinister.
so i said, no life coach. i thought mate if you want to go with your mate that's cool but don't palm me on off someone for money and call it help. we didn't even talk about it beforehand.

when he left i cried and smoked shaky cigarettes. and then i found an english speaking counsellor, right here in izabella utca. i'm calling him tomorrow.

the day was crap. sad and heavy and thick with sunshine that should have made me happy. i bought a pair of timberland shoes, very hot! and a big rubber gymnastic ball that will surely give me a six pack?!

am now off to see a film, and then bedsleepmonday

now there is sunshine, but there is also short-of-breath panic feeling and a desire to be not alone. I don't know if my dreams of late are symbolic of anything or if I've been eating too much cheese before bed, but they've involved quite a bit of Australia.

I had a really nice day with mum yesterday, we went to the Academy to see the Magyar Orokseg award ceremony, and when they sang the national anthem, beautifully, as one voice in that cavernous gold tinted room, i thought why the hell can't that be mine, too?
And then B sent a message that said simply I love you, and I felt my edges crumbling.

Afterwards, the three of us met at mum's and had lunch, then B went home and I told mum about how I felt on Friday, and also yesterday, and as it happens, how I'm feeling today.
B is taking me to Pilis something where his old flat mate lives, with a woman who is a life coach, who apparently does wonders. I wonder.
But the way I'm feeling now, it's worth a shot.

He said on Friday that I too often remind him that he is the reason I came back, that he is the reason I'm staying. He said he knows it's shitty here, but i don't need to go on about it. Scary because I hadn't realised that I did that.

Daunted. that's how i feel i think.

Coriander

Today in the gathering spring afternoon I bought fresh coriander, yellow mustard seeds, coconut milk, ground cardamom and turmeric. The chickpeas are on the boil and I'm a little lost in these familiar smells.

Damn Winterson for writing:
"It's never easy, this life, this love. But only the impossible is worth the effort."
And damn me for believing in it voraciously.

Last night we went to Szimpla Kert, a cavernous-monstrous old building converted into a rather funky pub/bar type place with horrendous music but a good feel. After a couple of beers with B, the night was lovely and shiny only to end in the none too pleasant realisation at 2.30am that the code for the gate had been removed and our one remaining key was upstairs. I did a little damage to the gate, while B rang a series of bells we didn't know, bells that no one answered. Eventually, a sleepy English voice buzzed us up, but by that time for me the night (and as it turns out, the day) was well and truly ruined.

My sozzled brain took the being locked out of home beyond the realm of apartments and transposed it to continents, and then homesickness struck with familiar and unwelcome force.
It's times like these one needs the no-bullshit words of Andrew to make me stop feeling sorry for myself. Self pity must be one of the most unattractive traits ever.

Yet it comes like a wave that either I can't be bothered swimming against, or that I'm simply too small to swim against. And no matter how many times I repeat the Rilke quote about loving the questions, as if it were my mantra to hang on to, it seems to have lost its magic power. I do want to know the answers now. I'm over loving the questions because there are just so many they've run off the page.

Yet for now, as the chickpea concoction bubbles away on the stove and we're nearing dinner time I take comfort in the thought that Timea is in Freo, possibly even on Monument Hill with a bottle or two of Little Creatures, watching the cranes wink drunkenly in the night.

Fresh

Considering my fluctuating relationship with Budapest of late, it was truly wonderful curving over the Petofi bridge yesterday. It felt good to be 'home'.
We both had work to finish, but not before we revelled in the luxury of having each other to each other in our own space, and no outside frustrations to interfere. Silly as it sounds, I still feel giddy when I see his fist curled under his chin as he sleeps...

In the evening we started watching There Will Be Blood, but it's a long and slow film, and I couldn't stop myself from hearing noises in the night, thinking it was someone at the door or something. There is a huge dent in my feeling of safety here, and it's a horrible feeling.
I slept fitfully and not too much, but when I woke at 6 to get ready to meet Gabor at 6.30 I was in great spirits.

Our two hours at his offices at HP were productive, it is obvious that with these conversation çlasses' he is gaining confidence in speaking English. And afterwards I had a very chilly walk along the Korut from Blaha to the market, buying chick peas and sesame seeds, as well as Rowse Australian honey, hibiscus tea and a bottle of shiny red nail polish!

I'm just finishing up the last of my work for this week, and then cooking lunch - honey and lemon chicken with a big salad - ... and a thin sunshine is seeping through my curtains as I squint at the screen, and I'm feeling good :)

Easter?

The sky in Szekesfehervar is resplendent in unlikely candy colours; smeared pink and purple and pale blue, a few minutes before sunset, and just after an unseasonal snowstorm.
The arms of naked trees, now trussed in ice crystals are silhouetted against this cliched sky, and the wind has died down to a whisper.

It has been a difficult Easter to say the least.
My Saturday at home was joyous. Busy, full of music, but happy. However I expected the rest of the long weekend to continue in the same vein, the same lighthearted, love-centred frivolous colourful time-passing. But no...
There has been so much shouting, so much arguing and forced smiles and deliberate tradition-keeping that all fun was taken out of it. I've been waiting 8 years to experience a Hungarian Easter again, with locsolas and all that comes with it. Balint managed one line of verse, and a mug full of cold water, and a couple of neighbours came by with putrid perfume, but because neither B's mum nor sister were enthusiastic about the practice, not to mention B, the atmosphere was sizzling with pent up frustration.

By the evening I had the beginnings of what must have been a migraine, because it's a headache the likes of which I've never experienced before.

The way B's dad shouts at his sister makes my guts bunch up. She might be insolent but surely the parents have a part in that too? It could have been so easy to take the Easter days one day at a time, and not worry about convention or anything like that.
The happiest moments have been watching Amigo, the gorgeous terrier play in the kitchen and try to dig up the linoleum tiles.

I am contorted on the floor, doing work now, and thinking how good it will be to be back in Bp, in our little burrow, in a comfy chair at a desk...

The sky is turning dark grey now, smeared with a more serious pink, and I can see the reflection of the satellite dish in a puddle by the door.

There are few things in the world as beautiful, as satisfying, as Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto!
I am without music, because all my tunes were on the old laptop, and something is missing from this new one so I can't get radio national to work, so I scouted around you tube, and found some Pjotr Ilych... and then sliding around on my hands and knees, washing the floor, the stereo roaring, I suddenly felt like as long as there is music like this, then not everything can be shit.
Bad things happen everywhere, unfortunately, and they alway seem to be in bold lettering, yet when good things happen, they meld in with the rest of the text of our lives and we take too little notice.
Yesterday, when B and I went for a really difficult run in the Varosliget I noticed trees budding, and I tried to remind myself to look and appreciate and be grateful, even though I felt like my lungs were bursting.
I don't know if it's the day of solitude I've enjoyed, with the spot of shopping, or the lovely clean apartment, or the fact that it's Easter, or that I saw Jutka again (she's another one of those friends with whom half an hour is enough to put colour and sprite in my day), but I'm feeling fabulous. I got an email from Sah, a long one, and that alone made me feel less alone, made the world feel a little bit smaller.
Eggs are painted, carrot cake is ready to go in the oven, I've got a couple of dvds to watch and my nails to paint.

Ain't life grand?

gone

Last night while B and I slept the sleep of the innocent (and it was innocent, the only thing I dreamed was that I got an email from GGS about our 10 year reunion- which I did in reality too)...someone found our door unlocked (yet we always always lock it) and took my laptop, a stack of cash from my wallet, including all my change, yet leaving my credit card, took B's bass guitar, his jacket with his wallet and keys inside, and a pair of his Levi's with a pair of his dirty underpants scrunched up inside.

It's been a shitty day. Naturally, no insurance and of course the police can't do a thing. They were very polite, and patient but there's nothing they can do. The locksmith charged us 30 thousand forint, and my new laptop, which is beautiful cost 330,000.

Aside from financial loss, and not to mention the photos on the laptop, including the nudie ones which certainly no thief deserves to see, it's the invasion of privacy. Someone coming into our home, while we're in the next room, and touches and takes our things. I''m not happy tonight.

All our friends and mum have been lovely, rallying around and offering any kind of support possible, plus Livia, her sister Emese and I had our first English conversation class and it went rather well. But now I have all of this week's work to make up in a day, but then it's Easter and we're going to Szekesfehervar and the world will turn right again.

Perhaps I should be feeling lucky that I had this money set aside, and was able to buy a laptop. Feel lucky that nothing happened to us. And in the morning it will all be better.

Master of Surprises

Balint is.
Last night, mum came over for a cup of tea and to have a look at the wonderful framed paintings we've put up around the house. Before she arrived, B put on nice pants and a shirt and I said 'what are you getting all dressed up for my mother for?" he asked if I wasn't going to do the same... so I did, especially because now I fit into the size ten whistles shirt I got from Claudia years ago...
Mum came, we had hibiscus tea and a lovely chat when rather suddenly she says she's going to toodle off... and then B says, we're just going to see your mum home.
What's this?
A surprise, he says...

After mum got off at her stop and we kept going I asked if we were going to pick up my chair from Ivan...and he said yes. So we get to Ivan's front gate but it's not Ivan or the chair, it's Mob and Orsi and Szabi and Livia and we went to the Darshan Udvar restaurant.
A surprise, he said.

It was really lovely. I've been getting to know Livia much better, and it was good seeing Mob again, but the best part was that this bloody legend managed to pull of a surprise again, effortlessly, for no particular reason, and I just love him.

This morning (6.20 as I write this), I am going with a friend to help him practice business english. It's about 1 degree outside, and all the hopeful spring buds are freezing on their hopeful trees. But inside it's a good day. I have some work left to do, some reading, cooking lunch and afterwards probably watching another episode of Spaced.
skip to the end...

BKV

I was on my way home from the theatre with mum tonight. We were at Moszkva ter, and mum was about to validate her ticket. The ticket got stuck in the validating machine. The ticket collector looked as blankly, not moving a muscle. I waved him over to help, he ripped the ticket out of the validating machine, and informed us, with a look I can only describe as smug, that another ticket would have to be validated.
Understand, it's not the 200 odd forints that bothers me, it's his unhelpful and rude manner. Mum and I decided to tram it instead, but half way to the tram I thought hang on a bloody minute: so I went back (except by this time I was already shaking like a girl) and asked for his name. He blithely informed me that all the information he could give out was the number on his badge on his lapel. I wrote it down with trembling hands, while he continued to tell me with an obstinate smile that we would not be going down to the metro. And I thought to myself what is the service these c***s are providing? What is it that they are here for? To help, to serve? And I did something I've never done in Hungary before. I said "A kurva anyad"- and god help me if mum hadn't been standing there I would have said more.
Is this the picture we are to have of our beloved Hungary? Come to Budapest and get your ears chopped off in a kebab shop? Come to Budapest and be fucked over by our public transport system?
I think I'll sooner regain my Romanian citizenship than citizenship of this country.

And now to top it all off, B tells me there are no wookiees in the next Star Wars film we're about to watch. . .

A sucker for sleep...

I must be because I always wake with such a tidy and optimistic mind.

We finished watching the original star wars trilogy in bed last night - oh the wookie. :)
and of course I dreamed about homesickness but in some abstract dreamy way, and I feel ready to face the world again today.

Now it's a glass of my morning cup of mate tea and then to work to work (even if I do stay in my dressing gown :)

Someone very dear wished me truth consciousness and bliss yesterday. I think that's what spiked my sleep to have me waking happier.

It's happening again...

that feeling of what am I even doing here? This time thankfully not to the magnitude of what am I doing on Earth, but what the hell am I doing in this grey country?
I'm having one of those fucking alone evenings again, and it's the shitties thing because everyone I would call is in a different time zone.
As I was washing up the lunch and dinner dishes (yeah right, dream of being a housewife my arse!) tonight I had a sudden recollection of Chook and Keith's kitchen and it went through me like a stab, being back in a balmy night in Bedford, suds up to elbows, Keith drying and Chook making tea. I miss them so much I can feel it in my spine.

This first week of being free, at least from a set office job, although only two days in, is already feeling uncertain. Am I going to be able to organise myself properly? Will I fit everything in? Will I make the time to learn this language and that one, to spend time on the PhD and on me??
When will this shitty yearning pass? (When I'm back in Oz?)

What I'd like more than anything, right at this moment, is to be sitting amid the whirr of summer crickets, drinking some good Fonty's Pool wine, and talking into the small hours of the night I love best. The night bedecked by the Southern Cross- ever faithful, always there.

How I miss it.

How fast?

is time whizzing past?

So, despite my now unfamiliar feeling hangover on Friday, on the trolley in the morning I felt ridiculously happy. Budapest showed her good side, there was sunshine that felt like fresh paint.
Last day at work was familiarly bittersweet, but good. Greg bought oodles of fruit for us silly dietists :)

But the best part of the day came when I got home and opened the door to find B had put up a shelf in the kitchen for our spices and my recipe books, and bought a wok, and written me a note saying "Surprise! For your last day at work!" More than sweet. And for women's day he drew flowers on my desktop :)

We helped Szabi move yesterday - when I say helped, mean I tried to make headway in their kitchen which smelled of sour milk and boys. Really really gross. The new place is in Zuglo, not too far away, but in a high rise, 5th floor with a girl he only met 3 weeks ago. I like her but I can't help but wonder how long until we help him move again.

The beauty I saw all around on Friday has dissipated somewhat, with the rain and the pigeons and the dogshit. Today there's some work to be done, and I'm going over to mum's for a cup of tea (and the tulip Szabi got me for women's day) and we'll go for a run with B and then tomorrow starts the first week of 'freelance' life I guess.

But I suppose the biggest news of all is that last night I watched my first Star Wars film with B. Not as harrowingly shit as I had feared, in fact it was entertaining, save for that know it all gold robot guy. And the wookie...now the wookie is gorgeous...

Ouch

I fell into bed last night - i guess you could say I was (in)elegantly wasted - but not before B could make the point that I should have called the way I went off at him for not calling that other time (when he came home at quarter to five). I don't like sleeping apart like this, though I'll be honest I woke up in the same position in which I fell asleep.
Em wrote, day before yesterday and her letter was full to brimming with her trademark softness, and optimism and hope. It was a tough letter to read though- Aunt Robin died last year and Belinda was diagnosed with cancer, yet Emily writes lines full of thankfulness for the world. I treasure her.

Last night was the Australian get together and yes, I broke the diet and had wine. Evidently much more than just one glass and boy do I feel like shit today, but in a way it was worth it. I could feel homesickness all over my skin, like a ferret in my jacket, but I met a wildly interesting Australian-Hungarian woman, and we may be meeting for coffee later on.

I talked to Greg for a while as well, and he told me stories of when he used to live in Broome, back when it wasn't such a tourist trap. I long for home.

So today is my last day (again) at the Embassy, and Laci is on his way back to Vienna tonight too, so the visa section will be back to its usual two people, shiny new :)

Coffee. Coat. Trolley bus.