i'm in pest

i'm all by myself in budapest. i have been coming home mostly around when the sun sets. i am on kiss joseph street. i am told this is in a gypsy neighborhood, and that it is terribly dangerous. the truth is there is something ominous about this city, but it's not isolated to whatever mind-barrio people have delineated, the eighth district/gypsy town. all over town i find people lingering/loitering too long in what i consider to be my personal space x-zone.

and then it's all so hard to pin down -- it's both bleak and glitzy here. you think about how extraterrestrial societies are depicted in the movies, like, everything is the same, there are pop songs and tv shows and streets and transportation and telecommunications, it's just in an utterly indecipherable language ---- and there you go, here, everything in hungarian. i mean, if i were in some village in uzbekistan and they were speaking uzbeki, the alienation factor might be tempered a bit by the different physionomy of the people, the clothes, the technology. but here ... even though the girls dress pretty much like they do in germany, the furniture is in the same basic shapes we've come to recognize on planet earth, and there are drugstores and supermarkets, i can't shake the feeling -- with pretensions of 'taking a vacation'-- i've sidestepped onto another, slightly thwarted plane where yes means no and mp3s played backwards reveal some deeply embedded astronomical formula that they're currently decoding back on the mothership.

i also get the sense that they DON'T GIVE A SHIT. I mean, not in the not giving a shit way that the germans don't give a shit, as in, i'm the postlady and i don't give a shit if you get your mail or not so i'll just leave it on the windowledge at the bar across the street... no, they don't give a shit in a way that germany DOES. germans have this puffed up sense that their language is universally relevant but at the same time out of the grasp of all those drooling bumbling foreigners who want to bask in their light, the light of being born with a german tongue.... and so they chuckle to themselves smugly when they have to translate into english for you, naja, you'll never learn...
but the hungarians, i dunno, i can't say their isolated because this is clearly a major metropolis, but they don't speak english, really, and they don't care that you don't speak hungarian. they don't care that their language is just... impenetrable...

anyway, i'm sure someone has written all about all this.

of course as i'm reading hungarians in translation, márai, esterházy, and as i get seduced by that trashy-belle-epoque-smudged-by-iron-curtain-grime-mixed-with- romantic-irrelevant-nationalisms i'm thinking i might want to try and learn some hungarian. maybe it wouldn't hurt to spend a little more time here.

(once again sucking up to the historic oppressor of my ancestors... my slovak great grandparents and their like were the peasant servants of the hungarian bourgeois... hmm, the hungarians weren't so great to the jews, either...)

hang on a second though. i'm not going to erase anything from up there, but maybe will go on to nullify it. buckle up.

as i stumble along in the footsteps of my complimentary "visual guide: budapest", i wonder what tourism is, what it means to be in different countries, if it really 'opens your mind' to travel. because really the more foreign everything is the more the mind grapples along towards essentialisms, like all my waxing-stereotypical above. i wonder if everything isn't just a question of moods, levels, what you like and what you don't like. i mean, what does it matter at all to me that my great grandmother might have been a servant to the great grandfather of that guy leaning over me on the tram to blaha lujza tér whose grandfather is still grumbling about the loss of what's now slovakia in the treaty of trianon in 1920? it's interesting to know that history in the name of my future integrated-theory-of-everything, but going back to some 'homeland' to rediscover some biologically based or ethnically inspired temperament -- that's all just baloney. really. and anyone who's going around (and i mean YOU jonathan safran foer) thinking they can discover something about themselves by excavating some history book, or sorry, wikipedia identity, and visiting what they perceive to be it's physical nerve center might feel all warm and liquidy inside with whatever mental scrapbook they take home as a footnote for the crappy 'tongue-in-cheek' tour-de-barf they'll write back in park slope, or sorry, berlin, but the truth is we're all alone in the present with our complimentary guidebooks, there's no going 'back,' there's no going home.