Half Way

It seems crazy that this year is almost half-way over. I know that the rest of winter and spring are going to go so fast and I am not ready for that. For the first time ever, I wish I could slow down the rest of the school year! July has never seemed so close as it does this year. I have really enjoyed my time in Hungary and am not ready to think about it coming to a close.

The month of November provided a much needed break from the whirlwind that was September and October. Between adjusting to living in Hungary, traveling with and for Fulbright, and my own personal traveling, the first two months of the year went by in a flash and I really needed some normalcy and thankfully, November came through for me. I didn't think I would say this while I was over here, but I didn't really go anywhere in November and it was fantastic. We had one Fulbright trip to Budapest to the Jewish District, but I went up on Friday night and came home again on Saturday night. The other weekends I spent in Békés just relaxing and being normal and as a result, I finally felt more grounded and at home. As Thanksgiving approached, I started to feel sad I wasn't at home for the holiday. However, I am very blessed to work with some amazing people who made sure that Thanksgiving in Hungary was great. One of the other English teachers at Szegedi (my school) had me over on Thursday night for a mock Thanksgiving. She made chicken (whole turkeys are hard to find), mashed potatoes, vegetables, and even made sure to have cranberries. We had a great time and it was a wonderful way to spend Thanksgiving evening. The next night another English teacher at the other school where I teach had the entire English department over to her house and we had another mock Thanksgiving. This time we had turkey sandwiches and some other American type food. It was another great evening. Although I will be very excited about a traditional Thanksgiving in the US next fall, I truly enjoyed my Hungarian versions of Thanksgiving.

December made up for the calm of November in spades. I spent every weekend travelling. Nora and I went to Vienna the first weekend, I had a Fulbright trip and Christmas party in Budapest on the second weekend, Nora and I went back to Vienna on the third weekend, and then Katie Lorey gets here Monday the 23rd, Christmas is the 24th and 25th and then Katie and I leave for our Christmas trip to Spain and Portugal on the 26th. Whew! It has been/will be amazing, but I know I will be ready to relax again in January.

School has also picked up. I feel like I have "hit my stride" with teaching and as a result have been getting busier and busier! Now that my goals and student's skill levels are clearer to me, it is easier to create more meaningful lessons and I have started to see an improvement in my students abilities and comfort level with English. Since my job here is not to teach English grammar, but to work with the students on their conversation abilities, I do not work out of a textbook at all. In some ways it is great - I get to create all my own lessons and have pretty much total freedom with what I do. In other ways it is a huge challenge - I have to create all my own lessons and have pretty much total freedom with what I do! It has been fun however to learn what really works for teaching English as a language and I know I have grown professionally from this experience. I have started assigning much more writing to all levels of my students. While this has obvious benefits to both the students and myself because it allows both of us to see where they are making mistakes and where I need to focus my mini-lessons, I am right back to grading a bunch of papers! While obviously I am not grading 4-6 page research essays, grading shorter writings from 11 different groups of kids is still time consuming! I have been thinking a lot about what to do 2nd semester and have come up with, what I think will be, some good ideas. I am excited to see how they work in the classroom!

Reflecting back over the first 1/2 of this school year, and how much I have grown both personally and professionally already, has inevitably made me think about how this is the last year of the Fulbright Classroom Teacher Exchange and what a complete and utter travesty that is. While I am happy to see the other Fulbright Programs for students, scholars, and researchers continue because the people involved in them are doing truly fantastic work and have been professionally and personally inspiring to me with their dedication and skill, I cannot help but think the government defunding of the FCTE Program is an egregious error. 

FCTE participants interact with the widest range of people during their year abroad. On any given day, I speak with students from the elementary through college level. I speak with parents, senior citizens, teachers, business owners, professionals, stay-at-home moms, and everyone in between. I speak at school competitions, community events, and to other classes at school about American history, my life and school in Michigan, and try to show people the reality of life in America instead of the Hollywood version they get on TV and all too often think is real. I speak to people who live in a country less than 25 years removed from Communism about life and freedom in the United States. We have engaging and thought-provoking conversations about the social and cultural changes taking place in the US and around the world which are beginning to effect Hungary more and more. Through these conversations I am able to correct misconceptions about life in the US, discuss how race, religion, and homosexuality (topics I have had numerous conversations about) are viewed in the US and give assurances that not everyone in Michigan owns a gun (an actual question I was asked after my first presentation at the local library).  I am able to clarify answers to questions they have, even if that answer is "it depends on where you are from." I have been asked hard-to-answer questions about my country and my culture which have forced me to take a critical and introspective look at things I often take for granted. This ability to see the USA through the lens of people who have never set foot in my country has been both challenging and enlightening. Sometimes it makes me very proud, other times it makes me very sad, and often it makes me feel very humbled and thankful.

At the same time I am informing and educating people here, they are doing the same to me. I have had the opportunity to have my misconceptions about the world corrected by getting the opportunity to visit many places and talk with people who live there. My knowledge of the world has grown immensely in the five months I have been here and I know it will continue to grow for the next seven. This exposure to different cultures, beliefs, life-styles, and ideas will be invaluable to my teaching for the rest of my career and will help me to help thousands of future students in a myriad of ways.  In addition, getting the opportunity to travel, while fantastic on a personal level, is also incredibly important on a professional one. I make it a point when I travel to look for places to go which will improve my teaching. Visiting places I discuss with my students, enables me to bring another element to my teaching. Instead of just talking about a place, I can show pictures and give personal stories about my time there which helps my students connect to, understand, and learn the material.

While I see the value in the other Fulbright Programs, I wish my government saw the value in mine. It makes me sad, embittered, enraged, and disappointed to again witness the government devaluing education and its importance. In a time in our world when misunderstanding, ignorance, and intolerance are too often the leading factors in change around the world, it is shameful that the government is cutting the one Fulbright Program that has the most ability to change those things.

Fulbright Friday #2 - The Jewish District

Our second Fulbright Friday took place in Budapest, specifically the Jewish District of the city. We started out with a walk around the area of the city that was heavily inhabited by Jewish people before WW2. I am going to try to take you on the tour with me by posting my pictures and explaining then as we go.

This is one of the original buildings where Jewish people lived in Budapest

Being Hungarian and Jewish were both very important to Hungarian Jews. The marking on the left is the seal of Hungary and on the right is the Star of David. Both were inscribed on the original building above at the same time illustrating the equal importance of their nationality and religion.

The far stone wall (through the archway) is part of the wall that housed the large Jewish ghetto in Budapest from 1944 until the end of the war. For most of the war, Jews were not forced into ghettos in Budapest because the government hoped that it would discourage any Allied bombing of the city. That changed in 1944 after Hitler invaded the city and forced the ghettoization and removal of 400,000+ Jewish citizens within 2 months. This was the fasted deportation of Jews in the entire war.

Memorial to Carl Lutz who saved 60,000 Jews in Budapest. He gave them false papers that said they had permission to travel to Palestine and could not be deported.

The Great Synagogue of Budapest. It is the 2nd largest synagogue in the world (the largest is in NYC) but holds the most people.

This is inside the Great Synagogue. Traditionally, during services, Jewish women would sit in the upper balconies and men would sit on the ground floor. This was done to keep men and women separate so no one was distracted. The upper balconies used to be covered with fabric curtains so the women were concealed behind them, but this is no longer done.

The alter of the Great Synagogue

During WW2, 27 bombs hit the Great Synagogue, but it never collapsed. It obviously needed major renovation which began in 1991 after the Communist regime left the country. The renovation took 6 years.

Next to the Great Synagogue is a cemetery holding the bodies of the people who died in the ghetto and were only found and buried after the ghetto was liberated. Most of the people could not be identified or had no family left to identify them. The bodies were buried in several mass graves behind the Synagogue. Family members who were still alive and able to identify a body, placed memorial stones over the mass grave where their loved one was interred. In all, there are over 2,300 people buried in this cemetery.  

These two pictures are of the Tree Memorial which is also outside the Great Synagogue. It is a Weeping Willow for obvious reasons and if you were to vertically flip the tree 180 degrees it would be a Menorah.  

The leaves have names of Holocaust victims on them, but there are also many leaves left blank to represent the victims who are not named.

The alter of the Orthodox Synagogue. This alter is in the middle of the main floor, instead of at the front like the Great Synagogue and most Christian churches. 

The inside of the Orthodox Synagogue. Again, you can see the balconies that separate men and women during services.

What the Orthodox Synagogue looked like after WW2. It had been used as a stable for horses.Today it has been restored to its original beauty.

After we toured the Synagogues we went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, which focused primarily on Hungary's experience in WW2 and the plight of Hungary's Jewish and Roma populations. Some of the information I knew already, but I learned a lot more specifics about Hungary's role in WW2 and the horrifying fate of its Jewish population. I was unaware that Hungary was talking with the Allies in WW2, trying to remove itself from the Axis Powers, which prompted Hitler to invade the country at the end of 1943. By the beginning of 1944 the Jewish people of Budapest were in ghettos and being deported to concentration camps. 1 out of 10 Jews in the Holocaust were from Hungary. 1 out of 3 people in Auschwitz were Hungarian.

The layout of the museum was perfect for its topic. Interestingly, the exhibit didn't follow chronological order; instead it was organized by the various phases of persecution (the deprivation of rights, freedom, human dignity, and life) the victims endured leading up to and during WW2/the Holocaust. Each section focused on that phase from its beginning to the end of the war and beyond if applicable, and then started all over with the beginning of the next phase in the next section. If you are like me and tend to like learning things in a linear fashion, this had the effect of keeping you slightly off-balance in your knowledge of what was happening.  I found this to be a successful way to give the tiniest echo of how people living during that time must have felt when they had no idea what was going to happen next.

It was dark in the museum, with the main source of light coming from the lights that illuminated the artifacts, signs, and pictures.  The path was twisty and wound around from sign to sign in each room.

In addition to the informational signs, there were lots of pictures and videos of historical images as well as images of the victims that were really hard to look at. Many of the rooms were dominated by huge projection screens showing videos about the particular phase of the room. These projection screens became especially noteworthy at the end, during the phases of the deprivation of human dignity and life, when they showed images of the victims of the Holocaust. The screens, and thus the pictures and the horror, were inescapable. In addition, the museum provided information about the fate of individuals and families. So often, in tragedies of this magnitude, history tends to gloss over the individual stories in favor of the bigger picture. By tracing the history of specific people and families, and allowing us to read the stories of the people whose images we were looking at, the museum personalized the horror of the Holocaust.

For a long time, I tried to think of how to put into words how impactful this day was to me and everyone else at Fulbright and found I just couldn't do it. Instead of trying to find the words, I want to share the reaction of everyone I was with as we made our way through the museum because I think this speaks louder than any of my words ever could. When we first began walking through the exhibit, people were moving together in small groups from exhibit to exhibit and making comments to each other about the artifacts, pictures, and music, just like usual in a museum. However, as we continued, the groups got smaller and smaller and the conversations got less and less. By the end of experience, we were all separated from each other, no one was speaking, and we were surrounded by a solemn, horrified silence which continued even after we left the exhibit area of the museum.  I think there are times in life when words are unnecessary and superfluous to understanding how people feel, and this was one of those times.

 

Geneva, Switzerland

The rest of my Fall Break was spent in Geneva, Switzerland. I had originally planned to go to Florence, Italy, but that didn’t work out, so I chose Geneva. Now I am happy that Florence didn’t happen because I probably wouldn’t have made it to Switzerland at all this year if it had. I guess I had so many other places on my list that I wanted to visit and Switzerland wasn’t one of them – but it should have been.

View of The Alps from Mount Salève

 

Riding down in the cable car from Mount Salève

View of Geneva from Mount Salève

 I went to Geneva alone, which at first I was nervous about, but it ended up being really great. It was nice being able to follow my own schedule instead of a tour groups or compromising with people. Although I am happy my friends will be here for some other big trips this year, I did enjoy the solo traveler life. J I got the opportunity to meet some really nice people from all over the world and spent one day sight-seeing with a girl I met there.

Geneva has lots to see and do: the Jet d’Eau, Mount Salève the Flower Clock, St. Peter’s Cathedral, the UN, the Red Cross, Old Town Geneva, chocolate shops, and of course the lake itself and the surrounding mountains. I was definitely busy all three of the days I spent there. One of my favorite things I did was take the cable car up to the top of Mount Salève. The view from the top looking down on Geneva is stunning. Another thing I really enjoyed was visiting the UN headquarters in Geneva. It was pretty cool to be in a building where such important decisions get made. We also got to spend some time in the old League of Nations (the precursor to the UN) which the sometimes-History teacher in me really enjoyed. I love the fact that wherever I travel, I always find something that I will be able to bring back to my classroom in the US. Of course just walking around Geneva is beautiful – the lake, the mountains, the Jet d’Eau, and Old Town are all so picturesque.

 

The Jet d'Eau

The Broken Chair outside the UN

Original League of Nations building

The emblem for the League of Nations is still on the doors in the building

 My first day in Geneva was an adjustment. Living in a small Hungarian town and fresh off a trip through some rural areas of Romania, did not prepare me for the bustling streets, diversity, and prices of Geneva. Everything in Geneva is expensive…even a basic McDonald’s meal would set you back at least $15. Geneva is also an incredibly diverse city (like most big cities in the world), but the area where I live in Hungary is not diverse at all, so it was really great to talk to people who were from outside my town and Hungary. I stayed in a hostel while I was there and met people from England, Tunisia, Spain, India (but she had been living in France for 1 year), and of course other American travelers. It was also different to be in crowds. The biggest crowd I had been in before that was the hallway at school. J

 

 

 

View of the city from the boat tour

During the archeological exploration underneath St. Peter's Cathedral part of the original floor of the original baptistery was discovered. This floor was actually heated with pipes of hot air running underneath it

Close up of the floor and the individual tiles

One of the things about Geneva that struck me the most was the many different languages spoken there. Switzerland actually has four official languages: French, German, Italian, and Romansh and it depends on where you are in the country what language people speak. Because Geneva borders France, people there speak French. However, everyone also speaks English. Sometimes I would be sitting next to a group of people and one minute they would be conversing in French and then they would switch to English. What really impressed me were the people doing the jobs that might not typically be associated with an ability to speak several languages, like waitressing, selling/taking tickets, security, etc because they all were multilingual as well. In fact, they could not have performed their jobs without being able to speak several languages pretty fluently. When I was in line at the UN I was behind a French couple and a Spanish family and the ticket lady switched effortlessly from French, to Spanish, then to English for me. It became very obvious to me that an incredibly small number of Americans, who do those same jobs in the US, would be able to do them in Europe because we are limited by being monolingual. Throughout my whole stay in Geneva, I was uncomfortably aware of and embarrassed by, my inability to speak another language.  It really made me wish I had taken learning French and Spanish in school a lot more seriously. However, I was proud of the fact that enough of my middle school French came back to me by the end of the trip that I could say basic pleasantries (Bonjour, Merci, Merci Beaucoup, Bonne Nuit, etc.), understand spoken numbers (important when using public transportation) and get the basic gist of what signs/information cards were saying. So often I hear my students at home say “why do I need to learn to speak another language? Everyone speaks English.” Before this trip, I never felt like I had an acceptable answer to this because it is technically pretty true. Now however, I can tell them from first-hand experience that one day they will be traveling in another country and be very grateful for that time spent in the language classroom.

 

Looking out over Lake Geneva

Shore of Lake Geneva

 

 

Dracula's Homeland (but no Dracula)

We started out Fall Break by taking a 3 day trip to Transylvania, an area in Romania. Since pretty much everyone was on Fall Break some of the other people who came here on various Fulbrights got to come too which was a lot of fun. I have to admit, Romania surprised me. Every time I thought I knew what to expect from a place, Romania proved me wrong, which was wonderful.

Some of the highlights of the trip included going to Kalotaszeg for their Rosehip Festival. Rosehip is a fruit and the people of the town make homemade jam when the fruit ripens. We were there for the opening of the festival so we got to see the opening ceremonies, which was neat. The school age kids in the town dressed up in traditional clothes and performed several traditional dances.  The people of the town were also selling their homemade goods: fabrics, table clothes, pillow cases, ornaments, food, etc. Some of the things they made were really beautiful.

Women making the rosehip jam by hand

Stirring the final product

For those of you that had no idea what a rosehip was (like me) this is what they are

 

The following movies are all of the children dancing during the opening ceremonies of the festival

 

 

 

 

Another great thing we did was go to the Torda Salt Mine on the 2^nd day. I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect from a salt mine and wasn’t prepared to be impressed, which I was! This particular salt mine hasn’t been in operation for many years because the company that owns it had financial difficulties, but the tour guide said there was enough salt left in the mine to supply the entire world for several years!  We choose to use the stairs to get down into the mine itself which was definitely the right choice! It was neat to see how the salt was accumulating on the wood and other materials put there by humans. The main room of the salt mine was incredible. It was huge and the walls were beautiful. The veins of salt running through the ground looked just like expensive granite. They had converted some of the area into an amphitheater because the acoustics in the mine were good for classical music. We also got to rent a row boat for 20 minutes and row around the little lake at the bottom of the mine. It was neat because we could get right next to the walls.

The Fulbright group outside the Salt Mine

Fulbright group and our tour "mom and dad"

The walls of the salt mine

 

After the salt mine we went to Torocko which is famous for some its original houses from the 19^th century. The village sits in a valley between mountains so the views are incredible.

 

One of the original houses of the town

 

The cities of Romania surprised me the most. When I thought of Transylvania, I thought more of the countryside and not really about the cities, so I was really surprised how beautiful they were. We visited two cities: Kolozsvár and Nagyvarad. Both of them were gorgeous with big, old, ornate buildings and nice city centers. Kolozsvár has a slight edge because it just had a charm that I didn’t feel in Nagyvarad.

Kolozsvár  

The area where we had lunch in Kolozsvár

Kolozsvár

Kolozsvár

Kolozsvár

Nagyvarad

Nagyvarad

The theater in Nagyvarad

Nagyvarad

 

Before I went to Transylvania, people told me it was like stepping back in time 50 years. They were wrong. It was more like 75-100 in some areas of the countryside. I saw more horse drawn wagons in three days then I have seen in my whole life. I saw people harvesting big fields of crops by hand and using a wheelbarrow to transport the crops out of the field. I saw people using scyths to cut corns stalks and then rake them up to heat their house in the winter and feed their animals. I saw cattle wandering freely in pastures and horses staked out on long ropes to graze. Most of the houses had some sort of garden where the family grew fresh produce and a farm area where they raised animals to eat. Many houses also built trellises on which they grew grape vines. It looked like the grape vines served a double purpose as both shade next to the house in the summer as well as a source of food. Driving down the road I was struck by 1. how physically hard life is there. I take for granted being able to go to the nearest grocery store and pick out my food and I have a garden in my backyard because it seemed like a fun thing to do – not because I needed its produce to survive. I can’t imagine walking though an entire corn field and harvesting ears of corn by hand or cutting down the corn stalks with a hand held scyth. And 2. how the people there waste very little. The grape vines were evidence of that. The vines themselves served two purposes, and by growing them on a trellis, the people were able to use other ground area to grow different plants. Driving through the countryside brought home to be how priviledged I am in my everyday life to have the ease of living that I do.

Something else I noticed, and my friend and I talked about it on the way home, is that people stay pretty close to where they are born. They don’t seem to have the cultural ideal where moving away from your hometown is a sign of adulthood and independence like in the USA. One of our tour guides still lived in the same town in Romania where she was born. She mentioned several times during the afternoon how difficult life had been because there was no real source of income. Tourism to the area had been minimal, but was picking up in the last few years, for which she was very grateful because it meant extra money. However, I couldn’t help but wonder why she just didn’t move somewhere with more opportunity, but that didn’t ever seem to be a viable option. She even talked about how her grandaughter was being raised in a Hungarian household, attending a Hungarian school, and learning only the Hungarian language, even though they lived in Romania. (There are many native Hungarians who live in neighboring countries because of the way Hungary’s borders were redrawn and shrunk after WW2). I asked Nora the question of why the family didn’t just move back to Hungary, and she said that this was their home. It was as simple as that. Coming from a place where moving across the state or the country for a job, a relationship, an opportunity, or just because you want to is normal, natural, and sometimes expected, this attitude of sticking it out because it is your hometown is equally impressive and baffling to me.

Transylvania was beautiful, unexpected, and eye-opening and I am very happy I got the chance to visit, even though it was for a short time. Hopefully before this year is up, I will get the chance to go back to the area and the country and see more of it.