What's One Year in a Millennium?
Wednesday, February 6, 2002 |
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Today we had the afternoon off, so everyone piled into a big bus with box lunches and took a tour of the city. At first I was tempted to get off the tour as soon as we got downtown, so I would have more time on my own, but the guide was amusing, so I stayed with the group. Here is what I learned: In 1896 Budapest celebrated its millennium since the arrival of the Magyars. There is a large plaza called Heroes' Square, full of statues, which was the entrance to the exposition. It was used of course by Nazis and Soviets for various parades, but now is relegated to a few hardy skateboarders in the winter fog. |
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| The catch is, that the Magyars didn't arrive in 896, they arrived in 895, but the planners of the expo weren't ready, so they decided it was easier to rewrite history than to abandon the event, and declared their ancestors arrival in 1896, so the millennium could take place. Now of course there was the issue of whether to celebrate our millennium in 2000 or 2001, but I guess they weren't that particular, and beside the issue must surely be settled now that we are all full embracing 2002.
Along the way we saw the avenue known as the Champs Elysees, and a bridge built by Eiffel (as in Eiffel Tower). We went back past Parliament, but when I suggested to the guide that he point out the bullet artwork on the building across the park, he didn't seem interested -- it wasn't on the plan. Oh well, it will be a secret just for Nikki and me. |
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| We headed back up Castle hill and this time got into St. Matthis church, which I had seen when I was here with my mother in 1989. The walls are described as done in "moorish style." I don't know that I would describe it that way, but they are fascinating, in delicate muted colors that looks more like a paisley tapestry than anything else I could think of. I think they are fresco -- definitely not tile. Less gold here than in Parliament. Go figure. |
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| We headed downtown where we were promised time to shop in the covered market where there were food shops on the lower level and crafts upstairs. My one plan was to buy a tablecloth and there were plenty of those, but mysteriously they were all the same price and very little bargaining -- no Turkish bazaar here! How could someone who had not sold anything all day not want to sell a tablecloth for $30 instead of $40 -- vestiges of communism, I guess. So no tablecloth from the market, but I did find some chocolates for my students and paprika for my adult friends. I bought a bottle of Tokai wine because it's supposed to be very special, but now I hear its sweet, so I probably won't like it. Come on over and have some! Finally I bought a liter of peach juice of Nikki who had tried it at the Gellert Hotel and liked it. In truth, it's much more refreshing than apricot nectar, I wonder why we don't have it. |
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| Speaking of food, on Sunday night, after our visit with Luiz up on the hill, Nikki and I walked from the Gellert to find a place for dinner. It was dark and a Sunday, so not much was open and we settled on an unlikely place called the Nevada Bar, which had loud American music, but an interesting menu. I had an dish which looked sort of like a chicken cordon bleu, but it had peaches and camembert cheese inside instead of ham. I hadn't realized it came with a crust like chicken Kiev, but that was easy to remove and the rest was delicious. Nikki says everything here seems to taste like something different from what it says it is, but she has been happy enough with the choices. Here at the University the food is more predictable, but not bad, with fruit and salad and fresh peas, --former delicacies which have probably only recently been imported in wintertime. I figured they were probably from Israel, but someone said Malta.
The place where we are staying is Central European University, a new university founded with money from the Soros Foundation. I looked on their website and discovered that Soros was born in Hungary in 1930 and emigrated to the US in 1956, but I haven't been able to find out where he got all his money. In addition to building this university (and a second campus in Poland) he has just endowed this university with a quarter of a BILLION dollars to keep it going. Now that's faith in the future of Eastern Europe. Soros also funds many pro-democracy projects throughout Eastern Europe and the NIS, and many of the participants here have or have had Soros grants. This morning we did an activity on teaching about controversial issues. Everyone was asked to move to a different part of the room depending on whether they agreed, disagreed, or were unsure about the issue. The question posed to us was whether a country should mandate ethnic balance in all schools. I was surprised to see so many NIS participants on the YES side. (I was on the NO side.)I think that may have to do with the size of their countries. It is not an issue of not having ethnic diversity. Kazakstan has 130 different ethnic groups, but of course it is so much smaller. Kazakstan, by the way, is staying with the Cyrillic alphabet, but explained that their language is closest to Turkish (which uses the Latin alphabet). They allow as to how the time might come for a change -- and explain that their neighbors who did change did it for political reasons. Actually, the language is not the kind of big deal it would be for, say, the Chinese. Since both alphabets are more or less phonetic, and students learn both English and Russian in school, they will learn to read phonetically in both alphabets. I asked about the teaching of Arabic, since some of these are Muslim countries, but was told that it was not being considered in schools. That was an issue for families -- these are secular states. The Armenian presentation was most impressive because they are innovating with a lot of high tech programs. They have a distance learning project involving 200 students from 60 schools which have Internet connections. That's 60 out of 1400 schools, but they said that the technology issues were "no problem" because things would only get better. Theya regue it is cost efficient because one teacher has 200 students from all over the country. At the end of the course they all got to meet one time. I love the optimism. Evidently the students have access to a "chat room" related to the course on Saturdays and some of them will wait two hours just to get on for a few minutes. It's a reminder of how spoiled Poly students are, where I have ten Macintosh G$ computers with flat screens, just for the 9th grade history classes. How do you explain to people from Armenia that we have not only fifty states with different laws for education, but within those states there are thousands of school districts each making their own decisions. The pattern here seems to be that about 80 percent of the curriculum is dictated on the federal level and that districts (or in Ukraine local schools) can make individual decisions. I get the impression that in Ukraine you can do whatever you want so long as you come up with the money for it -- I will learn more about that when a group of six Ukrainians students and two teachers from the town of Kalush come to our school in a few weeks. Well, we are back from our evening in Budapest (at a Greek restaurant..) and a brief tour to the top of Gellert hill, the highest point in Budapest with a view of both Buda and Pest. Alas tonight there was too much fog to see very much. It's nearly eleven, the pool is closed, but I can catch CNN, and if tonight is like last night, have my choice of reruns of ER in German or NYPD Blue in Italian. That's not quite a fair description, there was an intellectual talk show in French, and some shows in Hungarian, but my multicultural synapses were quite spent, so I settled for the German version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Surely this is more detail of my day than anyone in their right mind wants to know. |
