The Hiroshima Diaries Budapest - Classroom Carnage

The Hiroshima Diaries Budapest - Classroom Carnage

Imagine a language where the word for hello can be pronounced ‘See ya’ (szia) and the word for goodbye can be ‘hallo’ but hardly any other words resemble any other language known to man. Imagine a language where the word for thank you has three umlauts, a language whose word for cheers is the splendid ‘eggersheggerdreh’ – please don’t ask me to spell that. Imagine Hungarian. I love it.

Budapest absolutely rocks. It is up there with the Ginger cities of the world – Beirut, Jerusalem, Tbilisi, Sarajevo, Kampala. If you have never been, get on the first plane. If you have been before - but not for a while - it has changed, it is alive and it is most certainly diverse. I was first here in 1988, my first peek behind the Iron Curtain, and I felt self-conscious as we approached the border, because ours was the only car in the long line that did not have a fridge or a washing-machine on its roof.

I decided to do my intensive TEFL (Teach English as a Foreign Language) course in Budapest for a number of reasons – dates, price, proximity to my new home, but also because I wanted to experience a brief snatch of life in a bustling Central European city. I realised that the course would be intensive and that I would have little time to enjoy the city, as I would be preparing my lesson plans, doing assignments every night. I was really looking forward to the course, keen to glean as much from the course as possible. For the first time in ten years, I would be a student and I would be engaging my brain. As I completed the pre-course assignment on the train from Zagreb, I resolved to have an alcohol-free month (I had managed 23 days in January, so it IS possible) and really dedicate myself to my new career training.

I lasted twelve minutes.

I had opted to share an apartment as I thought it would be useful to live with someone from the course and also because I am a sociable animal. Mike was from Chicago, 24, fed up with being an engineer and (I jumped into stereotype mode again – when will I learn?) an all-American boy – must have been the goatee beard. Over the first beer, he told me he had never heard of Rwanda or any genocide in Africa; indeed his only perception of Africa was through that awful film about Somalia, ‘Black Hawk Down.’ He had no opinion on Israel or Palestine, except that it had something to do with psychotic Muslim terrorists. We fell into conversation with a Brit, who had lived in Dallas for 25 years. I asked him, out of curiosity, what he knew of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. He looked at me and replied:

"If we don’t fucking knock Saddam out, he will kill us all." At least he had got the right continent. But then I asked myself why Mike should know about Africa or Palestine. He was a Chicago boy and subject to whatever propaganda the American government dished up. And then my stereotype was shattered, for Mike spoke both German and Japanese, had some excellent insights into Japanese culture and also a good understanding of Central Europe. If he was interested in something, he went overboard, if he wasn’t, he couldn’t care less. Not everyone is interested in the things you are, Mr. Ginger. Lesson number one.

But Dori interested Mike. A lot. And she became for me a symbol of the randomness of Budapest. Dori was a pretty girl on every poster in town and she had come to dance, complete with her cowboy hat. I didn’t expect to see Hungarian cowgirls, just as I didn’t expect to be talking Russian to a Sudanese refugee; nor watching my friend Andrea dancing evocatively with a Senegalese drummer; nor being taken down a peg or two by a Polish student, who objected to my past association with a controversial Warsaw newspaper; nor discovering that my course tutor went to my boarding school; nor to discover that one of my students had lived next door to me in the Urals ten years ago; nor to meet a group of Hungarian-speaking Japanese violinists in our local pub, nor to be taken to a jazz concert by a Hungarian friend on my birthday and sit entranced for two and half hours. Budapest – it’s diverse, so check it out.

Our school, on the superbly named Bimbo Street, was a long way away across the river in hilly Buda. We were in bustling Pest, the business centre, a fifty-minute walk from the school. Mike liked to walk and I had no choice – I had no idea where I was going, so I followed. But even when I did know the way, I walked every day, there and back, one hour and forty minutes, the only person on the streets without a coat (as most of you know, I don’t find minus seven too cold). Crossing the majestic Danube on a crisp morning, admiring the castle and the painstaking restoration of the Gothic parliament (charcoal black is passe, bring on the off-white look) – surely one of the great buildings in all Europe – and talking to Mike en route, was a perfect start to the day. But it was nothing like as entertaining as the walk home, especially if we were a little late, for then we would be subjected to the aggressively promoted sex industry.

A friend told me recently that Budapest is the new porn capital of Europe. I can well believe it. In all my travels (with the possible exception of Cuba), I have never been subjected to so much aggressive sexual marketing – both from the girls themselves, but also from the pimps and the touts. It took all my ingenuity to get them to leave me alone and I was fortunate to be able to draw on my Somalia experience.

The dude (as Mike insisted on calling him) was cool. Sharp suit, clean-shaven, trench coat. He stood in the middle of the pedestrian zone and his commanding presence indicated that we were not going to get past without at least acknowledging his existence.

"Hot girls, just around the corner. Look at these," as he thrust pictures of female genitalia in our faces.

"No thanks, I am gay." This stopped him for perhaps two seconds and he called after us as we walked on:

"No problem, gay club one hundred metres." Sensing he was onto something, he quickened his pace. His answer stopped me for a second or two, until I managed a response.

"Actually, I am into farm animals." As Mike and I smirked and continued our journey, we waited for the comeback. It was ten seconds in coming.

"Typical gay." I saw him again a couple of nights later. He didn’t recognise me initially and started with his girl routine. I cut him short.

"Got any gay goats yet?" He never spoke to me again and the girls started giving me a wide berth too. I was actually a little hurt that he didn’t go the extra goat mile for me, a potentially good customer.

But while he gave up quite easily, the next chap was a real challenge. Dressed similarly, he cut an even more bizarre presence, for he was a cross between The Godfather and the English actor, Leonard Rossiter (Reginald Perrin), complete with rolling tongue and masticating XXXXX (what do you masticate?). Arms crossed, he measured us up as we approached, before reducing us to laughter with his opener:

"Good evening, gentlemen. I am The Fuckmaster General. Please step inside to my office to see how I can help you." Out came his palm pilot and the computer images. Although I find the whole pornography/prostitution scene disgusting (all the more after my exposure to the sex-trafficking industry on the Ginger Tour in 2001), I did enjoy The General. He promised me goats, but we both knew that we would never do business of any sort and we took to chatting for a few minutes on the way home some nights.

But I had come to Budapest to study. There were five of us on the course: an engineer from Chicago, a wannabe English poet living in Turkey, a gay actor from London, a music teacher from Sydney and me (whatever I was). Rarely have such an odd assortment of individuals been thrown into the pressure cooker of an intensive course and come out the other side, if not friends, then at least tolerant of each other.

I have several friends who have done the TEFL, some of whom describe it as the hardest thing they have ever done. By day three, I could see what they meant – the two girls had already been reduced to tears and lunch-time drinking was a pre-requisite stress management technique for all.

I had no idea how the course would be structured or what I would learn, but it was quite simply awesome (as Mike says). We all arrived normal people on the first day, only to find out that we would each be teaching an assessed lesson to real students the following morning. The girls both expressed outrage, the actor raised his eyebrows and Mike uttered his stock phrase – "Whatever." I have never met anyone who is so unphased by anything, it was awesome (as Mike says) to watch; when we overslept one morning, I would have panicked if I had been Mike – he had got pissed the night before and determined to get up early and plan his lesson. Time was against him and he ran all the way to Bimbo St and arrived three minutes before the class, with his photocopying and lesson plan yet to do. And yet, he appeared calm and gave an entertaining lesson. Hats off to you, buddy.

We had a lesson in Polish, a language that was new to us all, so that we had an idea how it feels to be a complete beginner. There was grammar, observation of experienced teachers, phonetics, lesson planning, drama and song, language analysis, classroom management, and a whole lot more, as we were bombarded from day one. And there was teaching.

It was a neat trick. Charge trainee teachers lots of money to learn how to teach and offer would be students a huge discount to be guinea pigs. Our first class, lower intermediate level, aged between 19 and 65, was a riot. There were fourteen of them, all with different levels of English and different learning experiences. In addition to teaching, we had a number of written assignments, one of which was to tape a student in an interview situation and then analyse their mistakes and come up with a plan as to how one might help them with concrete exercises. I chose Natasha, a Russian businesswoman from Ekaterinburg – we had been neighbours in 1993.

Teaching is hard work – my respect to all of you who have been toiling away for years without recognition. We were given different types of lesson to plan and execute – grammar, listening, vocab. It was just lovely (as Mike started to say after a week with me) that I was given the lesson on the pickled sheep. I had heard of the Damien Hirst exhibition, where a dead sheep was pickled in formaldehyde in a museum in London, but quite how I was going to get this across to a group of Hungarians was going to be a challenge. I had eight target words to get across as part of the lesson – pickled, formaldehyde, suspended, consent, container, protester, controversial and motive; how would you get these words across?

I chose a short cut. I took a jar of pickled gherkins to class, thinking I might be able to explain pickled and container at the same time. I hadn’t anticipated that the jar might leak all over my bag or that I would feel six years old as I went to my tutor and said: "Excuse me Sir, but I have pickled my course book." The students loved it of course and everything came back to the farm animals. Having shown them the picture of the pickled sheep, one of the students piped up:

"Paul, is that your sheep?" I didn’t think. I forgot that I was teaching an assessed lesson in Budapest.

"No, I left mine at home this morning." Mike erupted, the students looked bemused and the assessor, who had been exposed to the same sheep experiences at our Lancashire boarding school, buried his head in his hands.

I developed an antipathy towards textbooks and wrote most of my own material. So, for example, to demonstrate the difference between the past continuous and past simple, I told the story of me waking up in a Belgian hospital unable to move my legs; story-telling phases were covered in a dialogue with Mike about my dressing gown arrest at St. Petersburg train station; modal verbs of deduction by the plane crash in Eritrea. Something that I already knew about myself was confirmed: I can’t draw. Students looked at my aeroplane on the board and came away convinced that it was a fish. I think the students appreciated my efforts, but came away thinking I was weird.

Mike meanwhile was out there in a world of his own. So relaxed about everything, he engaged the students more than the rest of us put together. I really enjoyed his lessons, especially the lawyer joke. As usual he hadn’t prepared his intro and I was looking forward to what he would pull out of the bag.

"So what do you call a lawyer chained to the bottom of the sea?" I closed my eyes. This was going to bomb. Mike sensed so too, but he had already committed himself. Once the concept of being chained to the bottom of the sea had finally been grasped, the best punchline in the world wouldn’t have saved him, and the incomprehension increased as he answered "A good start." Lawyers aren’t reviled as much in Hungary as they are in America, a reminder of the importance of understanding one’s students’ cultural background.

I really enjoyed the teaching, enjoyed it more than anything I have done in a long time. And I was reminded how much I enjoyed language in general, understanding and explaining how and why things are said. I am looking forward to the challenge of the Japanese classroom and I am keen to try out new things out there. There is even a thought (and quite a strong one) that I might do a Masters in some linguistic field in a year or two. Let’s see how Japan goes first.

Of course, my biggest challenge in Budapest was to make myself understood. Not with the students, they were fine, but more with my flatmate, or should I say roommate, since that is what he called me. I never realised that the gulf between American and British English is as wide as it is. We constantly looked at each other as though the other was talking Vietnamese. I picked up more of his Americanisms, merely because I have had greater exposure to Yanks, but he was constantly lost in my idiomatic and slang world. Certain stock phrases became the cornerstone of our friendship. One evening, I asked if the supermarket was still open.

"Let’s take a gander." I failed to understand how a male goose could have helped us. I was also bemused when he told me that when his pipe was plugged, he called the dude to route it out with a snake. Quite how the Hungarians managed to follow us both was beyond me.

I began to realise that time was against me as the end of the course approached. Only twenty-two days until I was on the plane to Japan for a one-year contract with four weeks holiday. I had to spend some time at home sorting out the building carnage, so that various friends could use the house and I wanted a week in Jerusalem as well, so I took the logical step, the overnight train north to Warsaw.

Tony and I met Petra on a bus in Serbia last year. Half Polish, half Serb, a resident of Slovenia and a product of the English boarding school system, we had hit it off immediately. I had never really been to Warsaw and we had a splendid weekend, walking for miles as she out-talked me. The old city, the parks, the museums, all aided by the Petra chatter. There was the odd coffee break and a cinema stop (Frida – I enjoyed it), but otherwise relentless walking and conversation in freezing conditions. I almost felt cold at one point. We must have walked thirty kilometres and I can’t recall such a pleasant weekend in recent times.

The overnight train back to Budapest brought the first stress-free day in the city and a chance to enjoy its beauty. Westernisation is here to stay, but there were enough glimpses of the old Hungary to keep me interested. And as I walked by the train station, among the beggars, the drunks and the homeless, I realised what was different about Hungary – I have visited many countries in the former Soviet bloc, yet this was the first that I had spent any length of time where nobody had been interested in my passport. Life in Hungary may have been tough, but nobody was looking to leave.

Another 3am finish was painful as I rose at five to catch the train to Novi Sad. I am not sure what it is about Serbia or Serbs, but I find it and them addictive. Perhaps it is because, while there were many despicable aspects to Serb involvement in the Balkan war, the net effect has been to render the nation a bunch of criminals in the eyes of the world. Normal Serbs have been penalised for having Milosevic as their president for almost fifteen years – sanctions, bombing, isolation. Their country is impoverished, there is no opportunity to travel, little hope that things will improve. I have been struck by the difference in the former Yugoslav states: Slovenia is almost European; Croatia, undoubtedly the winners of the war (if there is such a thing as a winner) is rising from the ashes, its people confident, its tourist potential yet to be fully exploited; even Bosnia, despite all its problems, is showing positive signs. Yet Serbia, once the de facto ruler of the Yugoslav state, is being left behind.

I first met Dave in Pale on the Ginger Tour. He was one of the infamous Muslim-eating triumvirate. I was shocked by his humour then but now I understand it much better. He works at Novi Sad University and had laid on a cracking night with some of the English students.

Serbian beauties lining up to talk to a native speaker. It was a friendly enough start, but the reality of modern Serbia soon came out. I live on a picturesque Croatian island, they all knew it, had been to it in their childhood, but now it was beyond their reach. Three of them were from Croatia – Serbs who had been hounded out. Even if they wanted to return, none of them could.

"So what do people in Britain think of Serbs?" asked the heavily made-up blonde to my left. I had been expecting the question, but perhaps a little later.

"You are all evil murderers." They laughed. I laughed. We all knew that people saw the Serbs as the bad guys. Serbs are the most direct people I have ever met, a quality I adore, and I would have lost their interest if I had tried to dress up the truth with niceties.

The conversation moved on and we all warmed to the theme, all save the visiting American professor, who found our conversation distasteful – he preferred to dwell on Germanic prefixes. I started to tell the story of my visit to Pale, of eating Muslims. There was laughter, behind which I sensed pain, pain at the fact that it was the Serbs who were reviled when all sides had committed atrocities.

"God I miss those days, when you could just pick up a Muslim baby and take a bite," said the youth across the table – he had been hitherto silent. They laughed. I laughed. I understood why it was being said. The American professor was appalled. I want to work in Serbia. If I stick with the teaching, this could well be the next stop.

There is no money in Serbia (as is true in other parts of the region) and students have to make their own fun. The six girls were making their one drink last all night, but their spirits were high and we had fun. But they really came alive when a group of musicians came into the pub and started to serenade a nearby table. Serbian folk music was something they loved to dance to and they were all soon shaking their stuff on the floor, distracted, for the moment at least, but the harsh realities of life in Novi Sad. It was lovely to watch. I really like Serbs. Rightly or wrongly, they have been dealt the worst post-war deal; everyone has a horror story but there is no point telling it, as it is no more shocking than all the other stories around. In order to succeed there, you have to be better, tougher than the others; the desperate situation has produced some tough characters.

I could have stayed much longer than the single night in Novi Sad, but time was against me, so I ventured onto another slow-moving Balkan bus, south to Sarajevo for the night. Walking along the river at sunset and into the Turkish quarter, where I stopped for an excellent portion of cevapi, I was happy to let the experiences of the previous weeks sink in. I stopped at my favourite bar in this, one of my favourite cities, and watched the local youth strolling elegantly, confidently forth in front of me.

The peace was soon shattered (at least for me) with the news that Uncle Sam had finally decided to save the world yet again with the invasion of Iraq. I was as depressed as many of you must be and, not for the first time, mourned the death of the Soviet Union – not because I have any great love of communism (I don’t), but because back then America could not just do as it pleased in order to control oil and other nation’s economies. The sooner China achieves superpower status the better. I am not going to comment on the war as I am sure your media is already saturating you (I have no television here at home and my Croatian friends have been in a war recently and have no desire to talk about another one), save to say that my feelings are summed up in an email I got the other day. There is a picture of Blair asking how we know that Iraq has all these weapons, with Bush replying "Well, we kept all the receipts." I have never been more ashamed to be British than I am at present, and, if the passport were not so useful for travel, I would seriously contemplate trading it in.

I experienced a strange and unfamiliar feeling in Budapest – homesickness. I really missed my island and I was looking forward to a week there, before heading off to Israel and Japan. I had left a friend supervising the rewiring and rebuilding while I was in Budapest and was pleased to hear in my final week in Hungary that everything was almost finished. Mike wanted to visit and so we agreed to meet on the island. I was looking forward to catching up with him and showing off my island and small but comfortable new home.

When I arrived, I thought it had been hit by a stray US missile. There was no electricity, gaping holes in most of the walls, dust everywhere, windows missing. Even finding somewhere to sleep proved difficult as all the mattresses had been covered in dust sheets, although admittedly our cause was not helped by the fact we had got tanked up before arranging the bedding.

The last week has been a frantic attempt to get everything into shape for my first visitors, a family of six, next month. I left yesterday morning, with everything almost finished except the painting. The house should be pretty comfortable for 7-8 people to sleep. My friends, Miranda and Frank, have the keys and will make sure bedding etc. is available for those of you who choose to stay. I am hoping to have the website up and running by April 20, so people can just put their names on the available dates. As far as I remember, at the moment, I have Williams family coming for a week on April 28; the newly crowned Mr and Mrs Unsworth about May 17 for a week; Catpain Georgy and Marina at the end of May for ? days; Tony’s Trumpets on August 11 for 10 days; Captain Hydraulic for an extended period on dates yet to be determined; Liz E from Oz in September. There are lots of others who have expressed general interest. Let me know if I have forgotten you.

So I am now sitting on a train from Zagreb to Graz, admiring the wondrous Slovenian mountains and rivers outside. I am overnighting in London tonight with a school friend, before taking the El Al experience into Tel Aviv on Saturday. I had planned to visit Israel long before the war started and want to go more than ever. I have friends on both sides of the conflict who are having a hard time of it and I want to spend time with them. And of course there is the Palestinian Bikini Goddess, whom I admire even more for her refusal to evacuate with her international colleagues. It may be a long way to go to give someone a hug of solidarity, but she has been a real inspiration to me and I really enjoy her boyfriend too, even if he doesn’t look as fetching in a bikini.

Five days in Israel and then a day in London, before the long-awaited flight to Japan. I am really looking forward to it and it sounds like I have a good social scene already in place. Tom is a school friend in Tokyo and he has promised me a seedy night of drunken debauchery on my first night, to be followed by a more refined evening with Amanda, whom I met in Johannesburg. My former Munich chambermaiding colleague, Adolf Koelping, will meet me at Hiroshima Central and escort me to my new home, where I am already the proud owner of a washing machine. I have had some contact with my new colleagues and they sound really nice and are keen to show me different aspects of Japanese life. Looks like I will be kicking off in the smoky mahjong parlours – do any of you play?

I intend to make the most of my year in Japan, to seek out the bizarre and downright incredible. Ginger Reports will be a fortnightly feature of your inbox (let me know if you do not want to receive them). Teaching is good to be fun. I am even looking forward to teaching the German and maybe French (possibly Russian for beginners too – take a moment to think about that). In short, life is as random as it ever has been and I can honestly say I have never been happier. So come out and visit me in Hiroshima and we will have a blast.

Keep writing,

Love Paul

From Hiroshima Diaries Budapest to Gaza