Great Friend and the Great Plain

The other weekend, I had the magnificently good fortune to visit (again) with my great friend Dianna. We met in Hungary, where Dianna has been teaching medical English to medical students at the University of Debrecen (yeah, she's kind of a big deal). It was lovely and warm and whispy dandelion seeds floated around everywhere making it feel like I was in some kind of blissful dream.


Furthering the sense that this trip was some crazy dream was...the Hungarian language. I will tell you this for free- Hungarian is crazy. I am not joking. I am eschewing my inner jokester with a firm hand in order to communicate to you with all seriousness that Hungarian is unlike anything I've ever come across. Maybe Hindi made more sense to me because I expected it to be crazy (linguistically speaking) because of the Devanagri script. Hungarian blindsided me, though if I had done any research prior to my trip, it wouldn't have. Hungarian is a member of the Finno-Ugric group of the Uralic language family. It is an Ugric language, a classification which is shared with Mansi and Khanty, spoken in western Siberia. Sibera, as you may know, is the place where Perchik, the husband of the second oldest daughter in "Fiddler on the Roof" was jailed because he was a Bolshevik Revolutionary. I say this not because it is relevant, but because (with the exception of conjunctive words) "Siberia" is the only word used in the previous sentences that has any meaning to me. I'm bringing it back down to my level. Like when someone starts talking about the bible and my response is, "Well, that's not the way it happened in 'Jesus Christ Superstar; " with a smugness born of the knowledge that my information is infallible not only in an academic sense, but also because it has come the mouth of God. In song. 


So, the takeaway here is that if you, like me, have been lulled into a sense of security and superiority because of a passing familiarity with French and Spanish because hey, you can even understand some words written in Italian! then think again my friend. There's a whole other linguistic world out there. And it's called, well, I wrote it above. And DON'T ask me to pronounce it.


But really, these were just pieces of a lovely, dreamy, delicious few days spent with the lady I can see myself spending the rest of my life with (yeah, I said it. Watch out, Chris...). So here are some photos. And guess what else? I got home, and remembered this quote which, in my typically omniscient and psychic fashion (not), I had copied out of the book when I read it and saved it on my computer. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, the crane is not, as far as I can tell, the national bird of Hungary. But who cares, right? Tom Robbins is a freakin' genius. Just go with it.

The crane is the bird of poetry. It was Robert Graves who pointed out that the crane has been traditionally connected with poetry all the way from China to Ireland. The crane is the national animal, the totem animal of Hungary...Graves says, 'While there are still cranes in Hungary, poetry is bound to continue.' He's right. And if poetry continues, Hungary will continue. Religion and politics are unnecessary to the culture – or to the individual – that has poetry.

- Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Love,

Alex