Scottish Dancing!

The church we've been attending here, St. Columba's Church of Scotland, hosts an evening of Scottish dancing once or twice a year, and we are fortunate enough to have been here for one of them.  The Budapest Scottish Dance Club did some demonstration dances, the band Dagda provided the live music, and Debbie Moss instructed everyone in the basics of a number of dances.  Also, can't forget that there was mulled wine!  And a good time was had by all...

My Thanksgiving Litany

For music swelling and echoing through the rooms of St. Columba's Church,
I thank you, Lord.

For dancing and silliness and not being afraid to look foolish,
I thank you, Lord.

For the wonder of food:  the labor that produces it, the hands that prepare it, and the providence that supplies it,
I thank you, Lord.

For the bed at 852 Calvin that is starting to call my name,
I thank you, Lord.


For family members who travel halfway around the world to be with me,
I thank you, Lord.

For family members and loved ones who are halfway around the world from me,
I thank you, Lord.

For fellow travelers on this journey,
I thank you, Lord.

For the endless beauty and wonder of this world,
I thank you, Lord.

For the promise that the darkness and despair of this world will not be endless,
I thank you (and remind you), Lord.

For the path that is waiting to lead me home to you every time I stop running away and turn around,
I thank you, Lord.

For grace sufficient,
I thank you, Lord.

Practicing Joy in Poland

Our visit to Poland was not only mourning and lament.  For a visual tour of the joy we found there, click here:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.290183881015244.79624.100000709028573&type=1&l=fc18b4fd24

To whet your appetite...

"A Cry of Despair and a Warning to Humanity"

How can the sky be blue here still?  And how can the sun still shine?  How can my stomach retain its food?  It's not sure it wants to:  it's knotted, clenched like a fist.

My feet are walking in the exact same places their feet walked, stumbled, fell, marched, terrorized.  This is not a movie set.  As disturbing as that place is, this is not the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum.  This place is the blood-soaked origin of the anathema.

I look at the exhibits, or I look at my feet.  I do not meet people's eyes, especially not the eyes of people I know.  I am ashamed to be human.

I see a display of children's items, and I realize that under different circumstances of birth my mother, born in 1941, could have been one of these children.  These piles of shoes could have contained the shoes of my grandparents, her young parents.

There is hallway lined with intake photos of prisoners that list the date they entered the camp, the date they died, and sometimes the date of their birth.  One man shares my birthday.  In 1942 his birthday present was a trip to camp. 

I see the standing cells, not big enough to lie down in, where prisoners were made to enter through little doors down at floor level, like animals.

It's cold outside, but it feels so much better to be outside than inside the buildings.  I'm not sure why.  Some things here are even beautiful, like the numbers on some of the buildings and some of the light fixtures.  How can this be? I don't know.

We get back on the bus, and the only appropriate response after being attacked by dementors is to eat chocolate.  So we do.  But it is only a brief reprieve.  We are driving only the short distance to Birkenau, the largest part of Auschwitz, what you think of when you hear that word - "Auschwitz".

We see the memorials, large and small, and I wish I could read Hebrew.  We see the ruins of two gas chambers and crematoriums.  I walk completely around one and wonder at how much death can be accomplished in such a small space.  I wonder if I am walking on the ashes of victims, and I think about my feet carrying them back out of this  place.

We go inside one of the remaining barracks.  I see a man, probably in his fifties, wiping away tears with the backs of his hands, like a little child.  This is not a momentary upswelling of emotion.  I see him more than once, and both times his emotion is on raw display.  Did he have a relative who was killed here? or who lived through this horror? more than one? Or maybe his relative was one of the SS guards?  Perhaps he is just a man whose soul has not been seared by the endless litany of man's inhumanity to man.

The sun still shines in Auschwitz.  It still casts its warmth.  Colors are still beautiful here, especially the ones on the inside of my eyelids.  Birds fly over this place as they would any other.  People even build homes nearby this place, as they would any other.  Is redemption possible for such a place?  Do I want it to be?

Things We Don't See At Home

These thoughts have been bubbling up for a while.  The title pretty much says it all...

• dogs on public transportation (You can purchase a special pass for your dog.)
•  doggie social hour at the local park.  I know you think we see this at home, but we don't.  Not like what they do here. The same dogs and their people night after night just standing/running/sniffing/laying around.  And this isn't the dog park, just the closest park to us (right at the end of our block), but this happens in every park that we walk past.

•  extremely well-behaved dogs everywhere.  Don DeGraaf swears that he saw a lady tell her dog to pee in a grate in the sidewalk, and it did.  If I ever get another dog, I'm going to ask a Hungarian to train it for me.
• signs like this one:

                                         Is it a warning... or a prediction?

• serious bike lanes
• statuary as a normal part of building decoration
• food delivery Vespas (I'd be a pizza delivery girl, if I could ride one of those...)

• Turkish/Mediterranean fast food chain (Star Kebab and others)
• little corner produce stores everywhere
• little corner floral shops and booths everywhere
• a couple stretching out in prep for running as part of a Marathon relay team, then taking a smoke break to calm their nerves
• air filter masks on bicyclists
• public displays of affection  (unfortunately they are not all this beautiful)

•  rose-shaped gelato

  As if ice cream needed something to make it better...

•  people sitting on park benches:  Some are homeless.  Most are not.  Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.
• men carrying wicker market baskets
• high heels:  Heels with a suit or a dress is baby stuff.  Intermediate heel-wearing is  heels with jeans and shorts.  Advanced heel-wearing is heels with jeans pulling a wheeled suitcase while walking through a border crossing and on down the road into the next country... 
• torsos holding things up

 

• public telephone booths (also not all this attractive)

I probably could have kept adding to this post, but I decided it might never be finished and that incomplete was better than nothing at all.

Office windows, Budapest style

Some of you may have been in my office at Calvin College, an office which I love and miss.  One feature of this beloved office is its windowlessness.  I have lovely decorations on the walls, and work to do in this space that I love, and daily meetings with colleagues and students whom I respect, enjoy and admire, but no meaningful window from which to gaze out and appreciate the out of doors.  (I say "meaningful window" because, as some of you know, the office *does* have a window, but it is in a corner of the odd-shaped office, from which one cannot see out).  So yes, there is a window, but no, I cannot see out from it.  I say all this to introduce you to my "office window" for the morning, the Starbucks porch situated on the plaza of St. Stephen's Basilica, one of our favorite spots in Budapest.  I took this picture just now with the photobooth camera by turning the laptop around.  I make no apologies - soon enough, I will be back in a windowless office.  Now back to grading...   Cheers!

Bureaucracy

To visit Hungary, you do not need a visa.  If you are going to be staying for longer than ninety days, however, you do need to apply for a residence permit with the Hungarian immigration office.  How many days have we been in Hungary?  Eighty-eight.  And so today we spent most of the day in the immigration office, submitting our applications for residence permits.  (Yes, we are procrastinators.)

The details of our visit are not all that interesting.  In fact, the key emotions we experienced were boredom, confusion, and frustration.  One of the Calvin students, however, wrote a blogpost about her experience at immigration that so well sums up the feeling of being at immigration, that I will encourage you to read it:  click here to read Jen Vos's hilarious take on visiting the immigration office.

One last thought.  When Jeff and I were part of Latin America Mission's Spearhead program in Mexico City in 1993-94, we saw the immense numbers of Mexicans lined up outside the American embassy and realized just how difficult it is to immigrate or even visit the U.S. legally.  Now, from a different perspective, we see again just how difficult it can be to do things the legal way when you are dealing with a bureaucracy whose main language is not your own and whose reasons for asking what they do of you are as clear as mud.  Still, I can't be too displeased with the Hungarian government - they've let us experience all the other things we've written about in this blog, plus so much more.

Then again, there is that waiver we had to sign saying that if our application for residency permits is denied, we agree to hit the road, Jack.  But I'm sure that won't happen...will it?

It's All About Who You Know

If you know Jeff and I well at all, you probably know that Jeff is the adventurous member of this marriage.  He is the one dreaming and scheming new (and to some people, crazy) things for our family to do.  And he is definitely the member of our family with the most serious case of wanderlust.  So it is not surprising that sometime last spring (I think that's when it was...see, I don't even know when it was!) when Jeff told me that he had had a proposal for a presentation at a conference that would take place during our semester in Budapest accepted, I barely registered the fact in my mind.  I'm not sure I could have told you that this conference was taking place in Dubrovnik, or that Dubrovnik is in the country of Croatia.  And I'm quite sure I could not have told you that the conference was sponsored by the Alliance of Universities for Democracy.

So a few weeks ago, when the time to attend this conference was drawing near, I decided to Google Dubrovnik.  I realized that I really ought to take some interest in this trip we were about to take.  After seeing pictures of Dubrovnik online, I started to feel a little excited about this five-day part-time work trip (for Jeff), part-time (for Jeff)/full-time (for the other Boumans) vacation.

Having now been to Dubrovnik and back, I can only gush  like a star-struck adolescent, with completely inadequate words, about the wonder and beauty of Croatia, especially the Dalmatian coast.  So beware that the following could be a paid advertisement for the Tourism Board of Croatia!

First of all, the wonder of our drive (in a rental car) there can only begin to be approximated by listing all the different things we saw and experienced in one twelve-hour period:

• We drive to Croatia on October 22, Bastian's sixteenth birthday.
• Pennsylvania-like landscape and fall colors
• innumerable hawks on fence posts at the side of the highway
• animal overpasses on the highway
• snow deep enough to have been plowed
• lots and lots and lots of tunnels, including two that were three miles long!  (Breath-holding strictly not advised.)
• landscape changes first to more mountainous (not quite Colorado-like), then to semi-arid (California-like?)
• citrus groves
• palm trees
• pomegranate trees
• olive trees
• road-side stands selling mandarins, pomegranates, honey, and olive oil
• two rainbows
• As we reach the Adriatic Sea, the landscape is mountainous, both on the mainland and in the numerous large and small islands dotting the Croatian coastline.  By this time, our mouths are hanging open, and we can only look at each other as if we must be dreaming.
• amazing clouds and light as the sun begins its evening descent
• cruise ships - two or three - I think it is the first time I have ever seen one, aside from TV.  They are both strangely attractive and strangely frightening - bigger than many of the small towns they are beside.

 Finally, Dubrovnik, "the pearl of the Adriatic", according to Lord Byron, and "Paradise on Earth", according to George Bernard Shaw.  (Who am I to disagree?)  The Old Town is surrounded by walls that were originally built in the 8th century and took their present form in the 13th century.  It has mostly narrow streets, many of which are on steep hillside and thus stepped.  Vehicles are (mostly) not allowed.  Oh, and the streets are made of marble.  It was like stepping into a storybook, perhaps (as I've said elsewhere) Inkheart or Kiki's Delivery Service or The Cat Returns. If all that is not enough, the sea (all along the Croatian coast) is a beautiful, crystal-clear aqua in which you can see the bottom until the water gets too deep.  We all swam, yes, in late October.

Really, I could go on about our three-day stay in Dubrovnik forever.  Forever and a little longer, if I started writing about the rest of the Croatian coast that we saw.  I won't go on forever, though.  I'll just end with a few thoughts.  1) I have a new dream of where to spend my later years.  See picture below.  2)  I can't imagine not coming back here.  Next time, I think a camping trip down the coast and through the islands...  3) Mamas, it's OK to let your babies grow up to be academics.  Thanks, hon, for opening that email about the AUDEM conference in Dubrovnik.

I think this (top right) looks like the perfect place to spend the empty nest years.

If you'd like to see more pictures, I have a 45-picture album called "In Love With Dubrovnik" on my Facebook page.  If anyone really, really loves us and wants to see all 750 pictures we took, make a date with us.  (Even while we were taking them, Jeff said, "No one loves us enough to look at all of these," but we just couldn't stop!)