More flood pictures

The Tisza isn't rising any longer here in Szolnok...but it isn't receding either.

A few kilometers south of Szolnok the Tisza is joined by the River Koros, and a Hungarian friend of mine, Julia, lives in a village near the confluence. That region is being hit hard by the floods and many people have been evacuated. I've told Juli that if her family needs help sandbagging, she can call me.

Meanwhile, Sunday I captured some good pictures of the Tisza at flood stage: Efforts to create mini-locks by sandbagging (note the tree in the distance underwater)

This home has been underwater for weeks. The windows you see are on the second story!

If you didn't believe me that the windows are on the second story, look on the left of the home...that's a basketball hoop!

I think the "Parking" sign should read "Mooring"

Hungary like Iraq?

Hungary's second round of national elections took place Sunday and the outcome in the race for controlling party and Prime Minister remained unchanged from the vote two weeks ago.

In a commentary posted in the Brussels Journal a link is drawn between Budapest and Baghdad, with respect to the Hungarian people opting to reelect an incumbent even during a time when the nation's economy is fast falling behind those of nearby countries like Czech Republic, Croatia and Poland.


If your interest in geopolitics has been piqued by that article, give this one a try. Russia controls one of the world's largest supplies of oil and natural gas, and in the past few years, and especially in the past few months, Vladimir Putin has put the squeeze on former Soviet countries like Ukraine and Belarus, raising gas prices until those country's leaders are essentially forced to make deals with Russian supply companies allowing them to build or control miles of distribution networks between Russia and the European Union. All this sets up the potential for Russia to hold a very powerful trump card over fledgling Democracies in the east of Europe, and economic superpowers in the west.
If you study the European map through the ages, you'll be hard pressed to find a period lasting longer than 50 years in which political boundaries didn't change and national monuments weren't felled. We shouldn't be so foolhardy as to think that this everlasting struggle for power has ended. We should instead be looking forward to realize the next source for a global shift. It seems likely energy will be the flag-bearer of change.

Laundry

As much as I disdain laundry day in the States, here in Hungary it's a real chore.

Saturday I spent the day doing laundry, using the machines in my flat. I have a washer, and a "drier," which is essentially a centrifuge. Now, this is more than many people have. Most have a washer similar to mine, only some have the centrifuge. A handful of people are starting to purchase full size washers, but I haven't met anyone yet who owns a drier as we would call it in the States. However, I strongly believe that during the next five years full sized washers will be nearly ubiquitous, and "American" driers will start to enter the market.

To give you an idea of how long it took me to wash all my clothes (all is a relative word. In my case, it's a week's worth of shirts and two pairs of pants, along with socks and underwear...not that much), while I was washing them I watched Road to Perdition. Then I watched it again with the director's commentary on. Then I watched all the deleted scenes. Then I went back and watched a handful of my favorite scene again. Finally I was done doing laundry. The next day I had to fold all the dry clothes and put them away.

Laundry starts off with the unsuspecting victim having to place the washer in the bathtub, or somewhere where water can be easily added to and removed from the machine (the beach is another nice place to do laundry in Hungary I suspect). Then, using the shower nozzle, the machine is filled with water and just a small amount of detergent (Beware! Use as much detergent as you would in the States and you'll be walking around smelling like an alpine prairie).

Then the clothes are added. On average, I can get one pair of pants and two shirts into a load, or, four t-shirts will fit at once. In other words, "don't overdo it." I made that mistake the first time and the amount of time I spent "unclumping" the clothes cost any time I saved by having larger loads.

Once the machine is full, it's turned on and small disk at the bottom spins, hopefully encouraging the water and the few articles of clothing to spin with it (Again, too much clothes and they aren't going anywhere).

I leave the machine on for about 10 minutes, then return to empty it and start over with a "rinse" cycle. Here you can see how I drain the water (simply lower the hose and gravity takes over).

After two cycles like this, I've learned that it's best to rinse each piece of clothing under the shower head to wash off the remaining detergent.

I then load the centrifuge. This unit is about one-third the size of the washer and can handle 2 or three t-shirts or one pair of jeans. When you close the lid, the tub in the machine starts to spin. About two-thirds of the time it "tilts" because the clothes are not perfectly balanced and I have to open it and reposition what's inside. Once I achieve a good balance it enters high speed and water starts to trickle out of the drain (into the well placed wash tub). 60 seconds of spinning leaves clothes a "light damp" and then to get shaken out and placed on the drying rack or over chairs in the flat.

It's a painfully slow process and one that leaves your dried clothes misshapen, haggard and crispy. It also changes how I dress. At home I never wear a shirt twice without washing it. Here, a button-down might get a third trip around the block before it sees my bathtub.

Miscellaneous stuff

The flood waters are starting to recede. I guess the Tisza reached about 10 meters (30 feet) above normal levels, but it stopped about 6 inches from the top of the levy. Plenty of water seeped through the cracks in the concrete wall, but other than some pubs located by the river, no one suffered any real damage (and even the pubs were serving beer last night while they were pumping their basements).


Here are some more images from my time in Budapest and Vienna. First we can see three of the more prominent landmarks in Vienna: On the left, the Austrian Parliament building, on the right in the distance is the Vienna City Hall, in all of it's gothic glory, and in the foreground is Athena, goddess of wisdom..."may she grant some to the Austrian legislative leaders" is how it must go.


After leaving the downtown Vienna area I ventured into the near northern countryside to the community of Nusberg, where they specialize in wine. At these so called Heurigens (wine gardens) you can eat traditional Austrian foods (pork knuckles, jellied pigs brains...I stayed away from these and focused more on the traditional roasted pork and some sort of a cheese-spinach mixture in a flaky crust) and drink great locally made wine. In the area, there a many little winding streets and walking paths. So, to build an appetite, I started walking up one of them into the hills. Along the way I found tiny, beautiful homes with equally tiny, beautiful gardens. Such a peaceful little neighborhood...if this neighborhood had cheeks, I would have squeezed them.


Finally, this is one of those things that I just had to get a picture of. Just a block off Vaci Utca in Budapest is this McDonald's. Why so important? I have read that this was the first McDonald's built behind the Iron Curtain (1988). However, another source says the first one was in nearby Gyor, Hungary. So, I'll have to leave that question hanging out there, and in the meantime, enjoy this one in downtown Budapest (By the way, it costs 60 ft - or about 28 cents - for ketchup when you buy French fries at a McDonald's in Hungary. The guy working there even said to me in a very broken English, "How do you say, there's no such thing as free lunch?" I sneered and walked away.)

With Tyson, it was the "holy left"

I found an article in the Budapest Sun that explains the mystery of Szent Istvan's right hand being preserved in the Budapest Basilica:

On regular days the Holy Right Hand (strangely, it is known in Hungarian as the Szent Jobb, or Holy Right) is on display in a dedicated chapel in the Szent István Bazilika (St Stephen's Cathedral), but on August 20 it goes on a procession. The procession of the Holy Right takes place around the cathedral, with the relic followed by dignitaries of state and church.

The history of the eerie bodypart is curious and remained unexplained for centuries. In 1951 one Dr Ádám Bockor examined the hand and offered an explanation.

He reached the conclusion that the 45 years between István's death and the opening of his sarcophagus in 1083 was enough for the complete disintegration of the corpse. The right hand was the highest bodypart of the corpse which was obviously lying on its back, and its preservation and mummification was because of the effect of the hot, dry air stuck between the rest of the disintegrated body and the cover of the sarcophagus.

Such a phenomenon is not rare in this climate: another example of it is the monastery of Brünn (today's Brno, in Czech Republic) where the mummified corpses of monks are one of the main attractions of the town. After István's death in 1038, turbulent decades followed with struggles for power, and Mercurius, the chaplain of Fehérvár (today's Székesfehérvár), the burial place of the saint-king, considered it safer to remove the corpse from it marble sarcophagus in the middle of Nagyboldogasszony cathedral and hide it in a tomb under the building. He removed the intact right hand and took it to a church on his own land on the banks of the River Berettyó to the north of what is now Nagyvárad (now Oradea in Romania).

Following István's canonization, King László visited the church, thus giving royal approval to the growing cult of the Holy Right Hand. The reverence of the relic became law enacted in the 1222 Aranybulla (Golden Bull), the Hungarian equivalent of England's Magna Charta.

The Holy Right then traveled to Fehérvár, Ragúza (Dubrovnik in modern day Croatia), and finally to Buda. The procession, started after the Revolution and War of Independence of 1848-49, resumed in 1989 after a 40 year forced hiatus under communism. While a military concert, trooping of the colors and changing of the guard in front of the Parliament, an air parade over the Danube and the procession are integral accessories of Saint Stephen's Day, the event that attracts the biggest crowds to both banks of the Danube as well as on balconies, rooms and roof tops overlooking the river, is the annual firework display.

So, there you have it. The right hand is kept in the Basilica only because the rest of the body had already disintigrated. Too bad, but honestly, would an entire body be as compelling as a right hand?

I didn't think so.