The text message was brief: “On Thursday evening Gulyas Party at 7:00 pm on the 6th floor. No formal dressing is required.”
That would be the 6th floor of a building in Budapest overlooking the Danube, and the message was from Tamas, one of our superhosts at the AirBnB where we’re staying for 3 weeks.
It was a nice surprise, and a goal realized. Months ago when we started thinking about three weeks in Budapest, Nora would tell people, “Ron’s big goal is to get invited to someone’s house for real Hungarian goulash.” I’m not sure either of us thought it would actually happen.
The unlikely sometimes becomes the lucky. When we first met our hosts, Katalina and Tamas, we chatted about how to lock the doors properly, where to find groceries, and our goals for our stay. We told them we wanted to visit places beyond the most popular tourist attractions, we wanted to get a feel for Budapest, we wanted to meet people, and “Ron’s big goal is to get invited to someone’s house for real Hungarian goulash.”
They got it. They suggested places we might find interesting, invited us to walk with them to one such place, helped us buy train tickets and, in the most surprising gesture of all, invited us to a goulash party in their home a floor above us.
We went to a flower shop and bought a plant, then dressed in what we hoped was proper attire for a goulash party, went upstairs and knocked on the wrong door several times before I texted to find out where we were supposed to be. Thankfully no one answered the door we knocked on, because we wouldn’t have been able to explain that they weren’t whom we were looking for. Ooops.
Tamas and Katalina (“Kati”) are a lovely couple, both of them energetic and bright, and both speakers of good conversational English. Their home is a collection of African wood figures, her daughter’s art, and comfortable chairs apparently designed by a world-famous furniture designer. We’ll have to take their word for that, having never heard of the designer.
The evening started off with a taste of Hungary’s famous alcoholic beverage, Palinka. I had read about it. Pálinka is a proudly traditional fruit spirit (or fruit brandy) with origins in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. The European Union has protected it so only fruit spirits mashed, distilled, matured and bottled in Hungary, and similar apricot spirits from four provinces of Austria can be called “pálinkaIt.”
The offered drinks in our hands started as mashed plums and ended up as lightning: more than the tiniest taste and we would have self-combusted, which Nora insists is a real possibility. On the plus side, if you had a bottle of it in the kitchen, you could sterilize knife cuts.
We had so many questions for them, from the mundane to the meaningful. Is DIY a thing here? Where would they get tools and materials? Who owns the yachts at Lake Balaton? Who pays Dr. Katalina, neurologist and researcher? What was Tamas’ career? What was it like under Soviet rule?
Dr. Katalina is paid by the government healthcare system as a neurologist, and separately for her research work. She works odd shifts, having just finished 24 hours straight. She is an avid traveler/hiker/explorer who shuns organized tours in favor of figuring it out on her own. When she met Tamas “in the pool” he wasn’t a traveler, hiker or explorer, but she turned him into one. They still exercise by swimming laps together.
Tamas is an electrical engineer who owned his own company specializing in medical devices, and he owns a patent on an EKG device people can use in their own homes. He had a relatively small staff of experts in electrical engineering and computer software. Of his five experts, at one point four emigrated in search of better options. He sold the company, then, and has been retired since. The AirBnB is his job now.
That led to a conversation about how so many of Hungary’s best and brightest are moving out of the country because of low wages, limited opportunities, and discouragement about the political climate here. It’s distressing to those who stay. Among other things, the government has been accused of having manipulated the electoral system, weakened the independence of the judiciary, and limited press freedom through increased state control of free media.
According to the Swedish Development Forum’s website I found while looking into the emigration issue, the KESMA Foundation, which is controlled by people loyal to the ruling party, “has control over around 500 different media companies in Hungary. Several major independent publications and radio stations have shut down the last few years, and the Fidesz political party today has de facto control over 80 percent of the country’s media. Corruption has been widespread and the position of minorities in society…has weakened under the leadership of Viktor Orbán and Fidesz.”
In the same article, “80 percent of those who emigrate are under 40 years old. A third of those who leave have a university degree, in contrast to the 18 percent of the total population who do. Hungary is thus experiencing a kind of “Brain Drain” — that highly educated and highly qualified people emigrate to a large extent to find better working conditions in another country.
On a brighter note, dinner was, indeed, homemade goulash accompanied by a wine that had a whole lot less alcohol than the Palinka. It turns out that traditional goulash is more a soup than a casserole, which was fine by us on a cold evening. I ate two big bowls of it. A soup, according to Kati, is always the first course, followed by something else. In this case it was followed by a dessert of fruit jam rolled up in something like a crepe. “A very traditional food in Hungary.”
Of all their travels, Kati’s favorite has been Peru. They’d gone all over the mountains both on and off the beaten track, and loved the whole experience. She made two books of pictures, and of course she wanted to know more about my life there, which was ancient history compared to her travels.
There was much more before we called it a night. All in all, it was more than I could have hoped for. And if Kati and Tamas ever come to Georgetown, they can expect to be invited to my house for a traditional American meal. I wonder what that would be?