Hunting in Slovakia Part I

Last Sunday at 7 am, we were in southern Slovakia, meeting one of Th's Slovakian colleagues to hunt with a larger group. I was encouraged strongly to go, and decided it would be an experience I should probably have--not to mention meeting new and, shall we say, different people.
Since moving the time back one hour (right?) we have early mornings, but it gets dark here on cloudy days around 3:30pm. Dressed all in green, waiting in the trusty blue škoda outside a little Kneipe. Across the street were people waiting for a bus. I am amazed at where busses will go. This was a small town, with a beautiful church steeple of green and white tiles.
Every man (everyone except me) is wearing a certain uniform, marked by (often) camouflage, thick, mountainous boots, rubber boots, safari hats or green hunting hats with special pins and feathers or other merits acquired, some dogs, and, of course, shot guns...and the jarring, but somewhat sexy shot gun shell belt (mostly adorning round bellies) with leather accents such as long leather loops from which you can hang your kill by the neck after you wring it.
I shook hands with every one of them, saying "Jo reggelt kivanok" over and over. (I have gotten so good at looking at people in the eye. It's so much easier when one knows it could be an insult to shift the eyes.)
Working and studying in the department of Gender Studies in Budapest, I am keenly aware of the utter masculinity, masculine signals, signs, understandings, being passed back and forth...and I am like a fly on the wall...a fly gradually getting intoxicated by herbal liquor (which hasn't numbed me to the cold yet).
(Little did I know that I would become HIGHLY involved and the opposite of a fly on the wall by the end of the day.)

My Sentimental Statement of Blog Purpose

Here is my sentimental STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
15 November

This blog is for family, friends, and anyone else who may be interested thoughts, experiences, study topics, political issues and other aspects of my life here in Hungary. Most importantly, I see this blog as a way to keep in touch with loved-ones who I cannot speak to about my life on a daily basis (which is what I’d prefer, and is often much-needed!)
I have felt intensely the separation between myself and my American home, culture, and important, unique memories. The familiarity I feel with the US is in serious disproportion to my daily experience here, and HAS been since 2003 when I set off for Shanghai. Even the 8 months I was home in 2005-2006, I felt I had one and 1/2 feet in Memphis, and one-half foot in, well, somewhere else because of my (confused ;-) consciousness of future plans. So I turn to the internet, which brings so many other things in this world closer together, to bring me and my loved-ones closer together.
This blog will prove useful and comforting for all those times I am on the train from Győr to Budapest, staring out the wagon window at the landscape with the famous vast Hungarian plains, morphing into hills, speckled with farms, old, misused factories, former communes from Soviet times altered only by the dwellers’ addition of new, fresh red roofing tiles. I am always with new strangers (except for Hans, the Austrian banker, whom I sat going and coming from Budapest one day) who are usually silent.
When I am on this journey, I will, inevitably, think of how far I really feel from former times: my grandmother’s house, sitting with my mom in the den, my university friends and experiences in Memphis and at U of M (having ended just 6 months ago); from Shanghai (like a misty dream, meeting so many diverse people who are full of life and contradiction, and, ultimately and rather miraculously, falling in love); Anne’s and my search for and renegotiating of our twindom in Thailand; my newspaper job; my grandfather’s death; my Chicago art student controlled desperation and release; my father’s death; my high school; the struggle(s) my mother endured, and her constancy. And then, there are the subtleties, minutiae or frivolities: dancing at Backstreet or Senses; watching utterly sarcastic and caustic cartoons and eating pizza with Brian, the really good Thanksgiving stuffing, my 80’s hair band fan period, moving from the DC area...

It is sometimes troubling and highly emotional for me to realize where I am and where you all are...HOW to bridge this gap (or the “big pond” as the ladies of the North American Women’s Association-Budapest call it --without irony).
What I hope for is that this will be reciprocal. I want to know if we are all feeling the same things, what changes are we all experiencing, or what is unique in life for my loved-ones. My mother said once (to my disbelief) that I was a sociable girl, who enjoyed connecting with others (I am paraphrasing;-) This is my new way of trying to continue these friendships and connections, this sharing. I believe it will all lead to something...

I hope that you all enjoy and feel closer to me, or at least get a better impression of my life and growth here, my thoughts and feelings, by reading my blog entries occasionally. I miss all of you dearly, in all the unique ways, as unique as your life paths, identities, your backgrounds and places of residence.
In times of retrospection, after wondering if I am cursed by my sensitivity, and contemplating my life abroad, I always decide I am blessed to be doing this, to know all of you, and to be so valued and loved.

12 November

12 Nov. 2006
I cannot complain that my life should become any more interesting. It just needs to become directed.
I spent three hours today studying German and Hungarian. It really improves my mood because I see I can grasp an expression and tell someone how I feel. This used to be so important to me in my own language...and I discovered the pleasure of doing the same in German.
I have had an amazing variety of experiences, and all I can do sometimes is think about what could be of more variety and more excitement! It’s silly, but natural I suppose.
In the river I am floating along in, people are all going all over, crossing borders, challenging themselves, seeing what is to be made sense of, what is to be figured out, seeming to accept, also, when the answers are so unclear. Something (editted) I wrote to my mother today:

Even though he has been gone for almost 4 days, I have had a good time alone here. I stayed overnight in Budapest Friday night with a colleague from university, went to see some documentary films (very disturbing- a women's shelter in Iran, Russian runaways living in Moscow train station, sniffing glue, the siege of Leningrad, the Polish secret police reports under communism-- seeing all this makes it very clear that, while I see the good aspects of the theory of communism, I could never agree that it was humane, good, free in practice... it is the horrible, heavy feeling that you could NEVER achieve anything, have any acknowledgement of your talents...it's so hard to imagine, coming from a place like the US where this is so inherently part of our culture, my up-bringing.) The theatre rooms were quite small, but it was packed. I made some make-shift Hungarian conversation with my neighbor...I should expand my political vocabulary.
Yesterday, I came back here in Gyor. I went swimming with Kriszta and Nikki (Brian met Nikki), and then last night we went out to a karaoke bar and a disco.
It is good he went to Germany at this time. He was with a hunting party the last two days, in the Eifel, and when i talked to him yesterday he was SO happy. It was a courteous invitation to go hunting with these people, I think. But also, he said he had some very "grounding" conversations. Now he is with his parents, and his mother's birthday is tomorrow. I wrote her a long card, in which i tried to articulate myself especially well...(It took about an hour to write! I kept looking up more vocabulary and checking tenses and genders!) I realized she has been my best German teacher, and from the beginning, she has had such an open heart towards me...so I told her how much this meant to me.
Last night, I sang along to Hungarian songs on the karaoke system in a bar with vaulted, stone ceilings..it was so difficult to pronounce everything. Besides Brian Adam's "The Summer of '69," the topics of the Hungarian songs were interesting (as Bea was translating some into my ear as I precariously perched upon the bench: 50 tons of coal, working, working, and more working, "I am in the middle of the circle, and this circle has both my friends and enemies" and travelling to Africa to enjoy the sun and women- and returning and claiming that nothing happened during the trip to Africa.
The expat's desire to be incognito.

Leningrad

This past weekend was the Verzio Festival in Budapest, an extensive line-up of international human rights-related films.
www.verzio.ceu.hu
"Blockade," by Sergei Loznitsa, assembled in 2005, is a collection of footage shot during the siege of Leningrad during WWII. The footage had been deemed "inappropriate for propaganda purposes" and shut in the national archives. Silent, black and white, and "non-sensationalist" in showing the population in its gradual starvation.
The spirit is never so dark in this film. The Russian people in their thick, stiff boots (the uniform style of Soviet society) pushing sleighs with everything from their belongings and rubble to the dead wrapped in coarse cloth. The dead were simply left out in the street, to be picked up by an official brigade. We following them into a graveyard where corpses are given last rites and laid carefully in a mass grave.
The Leningrad women are clearly rubble, along with their children, as we see in other footage from post-war Germany. This is evidently "women's work" of the war.
The tensest moment of the film, for me, was the escorting of German prisoners through the streets. Only about 20 prisoners, who are denied any military prestige or recognition as soldiers by having their identifying medals and Nazi regalia stripped from their clothing. You see them as young, fresh from battle, only 2 or 3 are limping. One has what looks like a frozen or rotting arm in a sling.
The first citizens shown eyeing them are young women. They appear fascinated or at least curious, following the group tentatively with their eyes, then with their feet. The crowd swells--the scenes eerily quiet--as men and older women join. The Russian soldiers guard these enemies with stern resolve as an old women shakes with passionate rage, spitting at the prisoners. I become so tense--trying to realize these are Nazi offenders, who began such a war, starting the slaughter of millions. But, I mostly think about their fate. How powerless they are in small numbers, without weapons and military honors, surrounded by those who have every reason to loath them, wish harm for them. (Another example of me feeling sympathy for perpetrators of crimes---but it's the history that somehow clouds my judgment...the layers of wrongs done by all sides. Whoever has the power is often the last to be sympathized with.)
At the end, there are wooden structures built like the tent-like armature of a swingset like I used to swing on as a child. It is a very long and bulky structure from which, I realize, corpses will soon hang. The wide yard fills to capacity from shot to shot.
Large trucks with flatbeds are parked underneath, makeshift platforms for the German prisoners and Russian their executioners. Then, the trucks drive away at once with mechanical efficiency, leaving (very matter-of-factly) the prisoners hanging. I wonder what kind of fate had been endured by these men since I had last observed them.

The sentencing of Saddam

The sentencing of Saddam Hussein
CNN’s coverage is sensational and hyperbolic, as usual.
“The Iraqi people” haven’t had “the rule of law,” observing the “unprecedented”

I do not deny Saddam deserves punishment. I am still not even sure about how I feel about the death penalty.
They are showing footage of him, repeating it so that viewers can search for the recognition of impending death on his and other defendent’s faces when they hear their “fate” handed down by the court. Saddam is defiant and shouts “Allah is great,” “to hell with the US” (mentioned on German language EuroNews) and “damn the court,” competing with the judge in a shouting match.
What makes me so angry is that I believe we are supposed to watch with fascination, as we are supposed to do with all media...the networks are appealing to our voyeuristic sensibilities. We are supposed to watch in fascination as a once powerful man is reduced to a dead, guilty, pitiful man before our safe, alive, and Western eyes.
It even starts to seem sad to me...his position... a victim of gazes. All victims manage to bring out this emotion in me, no matter was their past wrongs.