Interesting Hungarian word #4 = Paradicsommadár

Sometimes our students really surprise (and delight) me. Today was a perfect example of this. 

I started my Grade 2 lesson with a game. Basically, the students had to think of the names of as many animals - in English - as they could. I then called on them one by one and wrote the animal names that they provided on the board. No repeats were allowed. The game ended when no student was able to come up with any more animals, and the student who named the last animal was declared the winner and received a red star in their report book (this is a pretty big deal).

Anyway, the game was supposed to take about five minutes but I grossly underestimated how many animals these kids knew! As well as a whole bunch of the usual suspects - dog, cat, pig, horse, etc - the kids were also coming up with some pretty obscure animals. Among them were jaguar, puma, eagle, platypus, dingo, raccoon and worm.

But my favourites were still to come. Are you ready? The first one was "sea cow".

I initially refused to write it on the board as it seemed so ridiculous. But then about five seconds later I realised that it actually sounded pretty familiar, so I wrote it up. I'm just amazed that a seven year old Hungarian kid even knows what a sea cow is, let alone the English name for it.

My second favourite animal was "tomato bird". I know, I know, this isn't actually a real animal in English. But when I told the kids that, they were pretty insistent that it was, so I grudgingly added it to the board. After doing some Googling when I got home, I discovered that the Hungarian word for "bird of paradise" is paradicsommadár. This literally translates into tomato (paradicsom) bird (madár). So there you go.

All in all the kids were able to successfully name sixty animals in English. Not a bad effort at all.

- Amanda

New Contract

The Hungarians are happy with us at the moment because as from yesterday, we officially signed up for another 12 months at the school. We are now gainfully employed until June 2012. This was a bit of a hard decision for us to make as we weren't sure if we wanted to spend an additional year in Mariápócs. It's not so much that we aren't having fun here, or that we are unhappy, it's more that we really only want to be away from home for three years and to stay in this small country town in western Europe for two of those years might not be the best way to see as much as we can.

Still, the thing that pushed us towards staying the extra time is that we really aren't ready to leave yet. The only other option would be to leave in June 2011, which would only give us another couple of months with the kids. I think it's going to be really hard to leave them when we go and we really feel as though we've only just arrived. Besides, we get to travel a fair bit here, so I'm sure we'll see more of Europe in the coming year.

The kids are pretty crazy at the moment, I think. Spring is coming back so all the snow has melted and I think the increase in pollen has sent their little brains into a semi-psychotic rage.

Our grade 3s have decided that they hate English and instead of "Hello" they now greet us with "Freetime! Freetime! Outside! Outside!" - there is nothing like crushing the spirits of ten year olds make another day worth waking up for.

The grade 2s are a lot more enthusiastic as they're starting to really put some of those random piles of vocabulary together to make sentences. Balázs, one of the nicer if more ditzy kids, today raised his hand in the middle of a lesson about public transport to announce in a very loud voice "I like Rock and Roll! Hahaha! ". He later declared that "I don't like Eszter! Hahaha!" Balázs is one of the kids that struggles a bit more in English, but he's also one of the ones who tries the hardest. He often comes up and gives us the latest news on all the dogs, pigs and other animals that seem to wander around his house (they have five puppies at the moment).

The grade 1s are still in that barely controlled flux between crazy and adorable. Amanda was teaching the kids about baby animals today and taught them that a baby duck was a "duckling" and when she asked what a baby cat or dog was called they decided that it was called a "catling" and "dogling". They were very stubborn about adjusting from this decision or so I'm told - pretty adorable. But on the other side of the flux, the Principal caught Péter trying to pee into a rubbish bin yesterday and when he was asked why he would do such a thing it was apparently because "Feri dared him to".

Yes, we'll miss them when we leave in mid 2012. :)

- Daniel.

Poland... the trip.

Our third day in Poland was a bit quieter: we woke up at 8am, had the standard buffet breakfast, then headed back to Zakopane to have a look at the markets. Amanda and I have tended to find that the bigger markets that we've been to (such as the Vienna Christmas market) are nowhere near as fun as the smaller local markets. The bigger ones tend to be co-ops, where every stall basically has the same goods at basically the same price, everything is production made and nothing that you couldn't find anywhere else. At the smaller local markets you tend to get hand-made stuff sold by the people who made them.

Today, it seemed that the Zakopane market was a combination of both, there was the standard collection of fuzzy hats, pop guns and shot glasses, but on the other hand we did find a little old lady sitting in the snow selling clumps of cheese. How can you not buy clumps of cheese from a snow sitting old lady? The other "locally made produce" was the basket of puppies that was on proud display between two stalls. They were /sooooo/ cute. Iago would love to have a little puppy to play with, and I'm sure they wouldn't get so big... would they?

At the back of the market there was a fernicular taking people up the mountain. The ride up gave a great view of the surrounding mountains and led us up to even more stalls. I'm not really one for a lot of shopping but some of these stalls are really quite neat. The other thing that we saw at the top of the mountain was exactly how big those little puppies will get. At that moment, methinks Iago just lost the opportunity to gain a friend.

After our Hungarian friends had sated their lust for souvenirs, we boarded the bus once more and headed off for Niedzica Castle, on the border between Poland and Slovakia. Another thing that Amanda and I have learned is that every castle seems to have its own cool legend. In this particular case, it seems that 18th Century owner Sebastián Berzeviczy traveled to the new world and fell in love with an Incan princess, the resulting daughter then married someone with particularly blue Incan blood and although it all went badly at the end the rumour says that somewhere in Niedzica castle a map still exists that might lead to Incan treasure. This might explain why there was a sign of a chained up ghost farting out the front of the main gate. Or maybe not. Regardless, as you can see below, Amanda is channeling all her Incan powers to divine the location of the map - unfortunately with no success.

 

Once leaving the castle, we headed home which passed quickly with a combination of catching up on some sleep and doing uni work.

- Daniel.

Poland....the trip so far

This blog comes to you from high up on a snowy mountain in Poland where Daniel and I are in the midst of  a 3-day bus tour with a bunch of Hungarians. We left Máriapócs at 6am yesterday and a little over six hours later, we arrived here at our hotel in the Tatra Mountains. The Tatras are the highest mountain range of the Carpathians and they form a natural border between Slovakia and Poland.

Having seen the last of our snow in Máriapócs disappear in recent weeks, we were somewhat unprepared for the sight of snow on the mountains here. I guess we figured that if it wasn't snowing anymore in Máriapócs, then it wouldn't be snowing anywhere else either. Wrong! This was a bit of a problem as we didn't really pack appropriate clothes for our trip. Still, we've managed to make do with what we have so far, and we hardly even notice our frozen toes anymore.

Yesterday, after settling in briefly at our hotel, we reboarded the bus and set off for the Polish town of Zakopane, the unofficial 'Winter Capital' of Poland. When we arrived in Zakopane we immediately departed on a four hour mountain hike. While parts of the trail were icy and muddy, the scenery was quite lovely, and our guide was able to tell us a lot about the local area. The trail ended at a partially frozen waterfall near an isolated and misty mountain valley. 

 

After our walk, we returned to the hotel, ate a fantastic Polish dinner in the hotel's freaky restaurant filled with stuffed animals (including an evil weasel) and then crashed into bed by 8:30pm.

This morning we were up and on the road again by 7am. This time our destination was Krakow, the second largest city in Poland. We began our tour of Krakow by wandering around the Wawel Castle. Daniel and I were particularly impressed when we came upon the castle's very own fire-breathing dragon. We also found his cave nearby.

   
From the castle, we wandered along the city's laneways until we came to the Main Market Square where we spent some time browsing through the stalls in the marketplace. We also admired the uniqueness of St Mary's Basilica, a large church located on the edge of the Square. One of the women in our tour group told us that the church has two different spires because each one was designed by a different architect. She explained that the architects were also brothers and they were involved in a fierce competition with one another to see who could design and build the tallest spire. If you look at the church, you can see that one brother emerged as the clear victor. Apparently this is because he killed his sibling before the construction was completed. Nice.

From Krakow we set off in a westerly direction towards the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps. I wasn't really sure what to expect from our visit to Auschwitz. Everything that I have read and heard about it describes it as a place of nightmares, a hellish reminder of one of the darkest chapters in human history. So it was a little weird to find it crawling with tourists chowing down on sandwiches and talking in loud voices about how cold they were. Daniel and I managed to hook up with an English-speaking tour group and we set off on a very confronting journey around the original basecamp. Our guide lead us through several of the original buildings which once housed prisoners, but which have now been converted into a large-scale museum. On the tour we learned that of the 1.3 million people sent to the various parts of the Auschwitz camps, approximately 1.1 million were killed. Of these, approximately 1 million (90%) were Jews. We also learned that almost half of the Jews killed at Auschwitz were from Hungary.

The video below shows part of a display at the museum in Auschwitz. It is basically a long room filled with shoes taken from prisoners as they arrived in the camp. Our guide told us that there are approximately 40,000 pairs of shoes in the display. This represented just four days worth of arrivals. It was sickening. I really can't find any other words to describe it.

We also walked through an area that was once used as a gas chamber and saw some of the ovens where the bodies were cremated. I noticed that many areas of the camp had small shrines like the one in the picture on the left. It was a reminder that the horrors of Auschwitz are still very much present in people's lives and that the crimes that were committed there, and the people who died there, won't be soon forgotten.

After the basecamp tour, we caught a bus to the second part of the camp which is known as Birkenau. This was much more like what I had imagined Auschwitz would look like. There were long rows of huts in which those 'lucky' enough to survive were housed. We glimpsed the appalling conditions that they were forced to live in - the 3-tiered bunk beds which would sleep up to 24 people, the lack of heating, the lack of insulation, the lack of toilet facilities, the lack of dignity.

There was also a long central yard containing a train line. This allowed trains to travel right in to the camp to deliver prisoners. We saw the place where the SS doctors stood to 'assess' those who arrived, motioning in one direction to allow a small number of people to enter the camp and in another direction to condemn large numbers of people to death in the numerous gas chambers. We walked along the same path that hundreds of thousands of people had walked before us, many of them suspecting or even knowing that they were taking their final footsteps, others innocently believing that they were headed for communal showers and other promises that didn't exist.

All in all, visiting Auschwitz was not a fun experience. In fact, it was heartbreaking. But I'm still glad that I went. Hopefully tomorrow's final day of activities in Poland will be a little more lighthearted.

- Amanda

Thank you 1848 Hungarian Revolution for another long weekend

Today (March 15th) is a national holiday in Hungary and our school was nice enough to give all the teachers yesterday off as well, effectively giving everyone a 4-day weekend. Unfortunately, we will need to work on a Saturday in April to make up for the extra day. Still, that's not so bad as we have heard that most Hungarians also need to work this coming Saturday to make up for national holiday. Huh? What's the point of a national holiday if you need to work an extra day some other time to make up for it?

Anyway, the national holiday on March 15th each year commemorates the events of the Hungarian Revolution which began on March 15th 1848. The Revolution was an attempt to put an end to Austrian (or Habsburg) rule in Hungary, and it began as a series of mass demonstrations in Buda and Pest, followed by various uprisings throughout the country. 

At first, the Revolution achieved great success. This was mainly because the Austrians were too busy fighting off other insurrections throughout their kingdom to pay much attention to Hungary. This allowed Hungarian reformists to quickly declare Hungary's new government and appoint the first Prime Minister. A number of other changes to the political system were also introduced during this period of independence.

Unfortunately, by September 1848, the Austrians were no longer distracted by other insurrections, and they turned their attention to confronting the Hungarian reformists. Almost a year of armed conflict ensued. The Hungarians initially achieved several victories, however this did not last long. By June 1849, Austria had teamed up with the Russian Empire and a 200,000-strong Russian force invaded Hungary and made short work of bringing the vastly outnumbered Hungarians back into line. On August 13th 1849 the Hungarians surrendered to the Russians, who then handed the army over to the Habsburgs.

Despite its ultimate defeat, the Revolution succeeding in initiating a chain of events that would utimately lead to the autonomy of Hungary within the new Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867. But that's a whole other history lesson...

Today, March 15th remains an important national day in Hungary. Red, white and green cockades (kokárda) are worn to commemorate the fallen revolutionaries and the ideal of the Revolution. Red symbolizes strength, white stands for fidelity, and green for hope. 

Interestingly, the cockades worn to commemorate the Hungarian Revolution are a bit unusual. It is customary for a cockade to be 'read' or deciphered from the inside out. So the true Hungarian cockade should be red on the inside, then white, then green on the outer edge. This corresponds to the colours on the Hungarian flag - red at the top, white in the middle and green on the bottom. 

However, the first Hungarian cockade was sewn by a woman named Szendrey Júlia - wife of the famous Hungarian poet Petőfi Sándor - and she was obviously unaware of the rules associated with the correct way to read a cockade. As a result, she made the first Hungarian cockade with the green stripe on the inside. This mistake was then copied by countless others and today almost all Hungarians wear the incorrect colours. 

I'm not sure how true this story is, but I think it adds a certain amount of extra character to the Hungarian cockade. I'm also curious to know how Italy feels about the Hungarians unofficially stealing their pattern.

 - Amanda

Spring has arrived in Máriapócs

I thought I'd post some pictures that we took around Máriapócs this afternoon. Today was the first really gorgeous sunny afternoon that we have had so far in Spring, and Daniel and I were able to venture outside without our coats for the first time in months. Iago also had an awesome time as we discovered a cool little park with some small lakes where he was able to go for a swim.

It's hard to believe that we have been living here for over six months already and this is probably the first time that we have posted pictures of the town's famous church. For those who may be unfamilar with the significance of the church, it is known throughout Europe as a place of pilgrimmage for those of the Greek-Catholic faith. This is largely due to its impressive icon - the Weeping Black Madonna of Máriapócs. According to the history books, the icon - a wooden painting of Mary and the baby Jesus - first began to shed tears in 1696. When this occurred, the icon was immediately sent to Vienna, Austria (where it remains to this day), and a replica was commissioned for Máriapócs. 

Ordinarily, this would have been the end of the story. However, the replica icon was obviously not content to play second fiddle to its talented older sibling, and in 1715 and again in 1905, it shed its own tears. This cemented the icon's place in history and Máriapócs has been a popular place of pilgrimmage ever since. In fact, even the Pope visited the town to check out the icon in 1991.

This afternoon during our walk around the town, Daniel and I also visited Pápa tér (aka Pope Place/Square/Park/Space), a memorial park which commemorates the Pope's visit to Máriapócs. It is essentially a large field a few hundred metres from the church and it's the perfect place for Iago to run around off-leash. During today's visit to Pápa tér , Daniel and I came across some bizarre plants growing in the ground. I think they might have been some kind of freaky mushroom. As you can see from the pictures below, they were quite large and most of them were full of a significant amount of fine brown powder. They looked pretty nasty, so I'm glad that Iago didn't seem particularly interested in them.

- Amanda

It's great being a woman

This morning Daniel and I turned up to work and lots of the children immediately began to present me with flowers. I was completely baffled and couldn't work out what was going on. Was it my name day again? Or had the kids just really, really missed me when I wasn't at school yesterday (due to attending the Busójárás)?  

I was even more confused when I noticed that some of the kids were wandering around with flowers that they weren't giving to me. How dare they! Didn't they know that it might be my name day or whatever? Luckily, before I embarrassed myself by wrenching their flowers away from them, our colleague Ili explained that the flowers were gifts from the students for all female teachers in celebration of International Women's Day.

Ohhhh....

This afternoon the school is also putting on an afternoon tea for the staff to commemorate 100 years of this  global event. I'm expecting lots of homemade cakes, biscuits and pálinka. Awesome.

With all the flowers and food that International Women's Day seems to generate, I think I'll be adding it to my calendar from now on.

- Amanda