Weekend Ramblings

Between working for a week in Budapest in March and arriving in the city last week, I have been repeatedly asked, “So what exactly are you doing here?” It is as if (thank you, GMAT) Hungarians cannot fathom why someone voluntarily would leave the US to move to Hungary.

On Friday night I met M, the friend of a friend of my couch-surfing friend (yeah, get your arms around that! I won’t even go into how we saw a clock that went backwards at the previous bar). M grew up in Budapest but moved to Jerusalem four years ago. Because asking questions is one of my favorite pastimes, I asked him why he moved to Jerusalem while I simultaneously tried to remember my religious history. Is Jerusalem Christian? Jewish? I was pretty sure it wasn’t Hindu.

M told me he moved to Jerusalem because Budapest was an unhappy city and Jerusalem wasn’t. M hated the way people scowled when they walked down the streets in Budapest and avoided eye contact with others. I assumed M never had the pleasure of walking around midtown during rush hour in NYC.

M summed up the differences between the cities in an anecdote. Recently, a little girl in Jerusalem needed a bone marrow transplant, and the girl’s family parents went on a local TV station pleading people to get tested as donors. The next day, 60,000 people, out of a city population of ~700,000, volunteered to be tested. In Budapest, M explained, people just would have changed the channel.

I have heard the disillusionment among residents of Budapest as well as the rest of Hungary stems from an ineffectual government and a low living wage relative to the cost of living. But inhabitants in cities with similar characteristics aren’t known for being “unhappy.” There has to be something else going on.

Thinking more about this, I wondered if it might be the fashion. Hungarian women’s fashion can be summed up in one word: tights. If you put on a pair of tights with the last outfit you ever would imagine pairing with tights, you will look like a Hungarian. Even more so if you manage to incorporate an 80’s vibe into the ensemble.

But seriously, what is going on? All of the happiness research I have read points to unhappiness and apathy resulting from the perception of the inability to change things. That is one perception with which I have not had much experience. At Dartmouth, if one wanted to change the salad bar in Collis, all one needed was 200 signatures and a letter explaining why organic lettuce increased cognitive aptitude. At Deutsche Bank, I would bust my ass to add a comma to (and subsequently reprint) ten pitchbooks at the request of some crazed VP two hours before a meeting. It doesn’t seem like Hungarians share this “I can do” attitude.

Maybe that’s what decades of communism does to people.

Maybe Nike had a different advertising slogan in Hungary.



(Finally got my geraniums.)