Dear July,
Today, a rather dark rainy heat-up-some-chicken-soup-to-make-yourself-feel-better
kind of Monday, I’ve been thinking about Hungary.
The year I turned twelve, my family spent the summer in Budapest. My Dad was working over there for a few months, so we went to be with him. It was hot. The hottest it had been in
years, apparently. We watched a lot of BBC World in our little apartment (the
only TV channel in English and we grew thirsty for words we recognised) and there
were continual cries of ‘Heat wave! Heat wave!’ on the news. On the days we went
into the city – our feet clapping in flip flops, collecting dust from the
streets – we’d practically sprint from one café to the next, buying bottles of
cold water or Lipton’s lemon iced tea to gulp down. We spent all of our days in
shorts or swimming costumes, jumping and splashing into the blue pool outside, diving for coins with goggles sucked onto to our faces. We had to sleep with
the fan on full and windows cracked open – the sound of crickets and dogs barking
and the opera singer next door practicing scales echoing long into the night.
We wiped watermelon juice from our chins, and licked peach
juice off our wrists. We ate lemon sorbet ice-cream every other day. We put ketchup on pizza like the locals. We ate the best thing I've ever eaten - a big deep-fried fritter-type thing topped with sour cream and grated cheese called 'Lángos' - and have never found again since. Almost
every time we went out for dinner, we’d order 'cucumber salad' as a side:
cucumbers soaked in a vinaigrette dressing. One time we ordered ‘Grandma’s
special cucumber salad’ because the name made us laugh, but when it arrived, it
was just a plate of fat dill pickles (which forevermore made us suspicious of food
described as ‘special’). They had bizarre translations for things on the menus. ‘Diced
curd with graves’ was one option on the desert menu (literally no idea). ‘Chicken throat shaped
pasta’ was another.
We went to the circus while we were there – silver clad trapeze
artists, cats jumping from great heights onto red cushions. We visited a park
full of old communist statues. We went to Lake Balaton and felt the mud squelching
between our toes. We went into supermarkets so big the staff had to roller-skate
from one end to the next. We bought vegetables that came straight from the fields,
meaning they hadn’t been prettified, meaning the closer you got to the produce stalls,
the stronger the smell got, meaning sometimes you’d pick up a nectarine and it
would look deliciously juicy face up, but when you turned it over the reverse
side would be crawling with flies.
♥
Living in a country where we were constantly faced with
things we didn’t know – food, words, buildings, customs – could have been a small
disaster. The three of us – my brother, my sister, me – were still quite young so
were prone to whining, as children sometimes are (‘Whatsthat?’ ‘Idontlikeit.’ ‘Idontwantit’
‘Whatsthat?’). But that summer knocked it out of us, I think. We had so much fun, and my Mum taught us to think
of everything as "an experience".
‘We might not like it,’ she said. ‘But it’s all an
experience, so we’ll just give it a go.’
‘It’s an experience,’ has now became short-hand for: ‘That was weird,
but strangely wonderful’. By the end of the summer, we’d all grown a few inches;
our hair had turned a few shades lighter, our skin had turned a few shades darker,
and we’d stopped complaining as much. We spent the last few weeks laughing our heads
off at things that no one seemed to find as funny as us when we got back home – ‘Well, you just had to be there, I guess.’ – but that was
okay. We didn’t mind (#heatstroke).
♥
I came across Anya Silver’s poem 'Doing Laundry in Budapest' today, which set me off on this path of reminiscing. (Forgive
me. I hope this post isn't too long or self-indulgently nostalgic to read.) We have no photographs of it – they all got lost – but it’s a summer I
remember in warm bursts of colour. Orange and browns and reds.
Silver (the poet I was reading today) writes about pickles, and covering her
shoulders to get into churches, and the begging ladies on the street who sold
half-dead flowers to passers-by and I recognised the images in her words: I’ve been there, I thought. I’ve
seen those things. I’ve eaten those pickles. I bought those flowers.
♥
(Pictures - letters of the Hungarian alphabet - by: Anna Kövecses.
Also: this song by reminds me so much of being there - it was 2003, after all. My sister and I listened to Delta Goodrem's album on repeat the first night we were there. We'd somehow managed to convince ourselves that there were terrorists running about outside our hotel so were trying to distract ourselves. Like I said, we were pretty young and had poor geographical knowledge so we had no idea where in the world Hungary actually was. Ha.)
