[If anyone finds this scurrilous, insulting, or offensive – I shan't be in the least surprised.]
The woman at the ticket office in Budapest's West
Station glares at me.
How dare I not speak Hungarian? Her voice
becomes louder. Still in Hungarian. Still I don't
understand. I've tried asking for my ticket in English and
in German, as well as in desperate sign language.
Just as I'm about to give up, a Hungarian schoolboy
comes to my rescue by telling me that she wants to
know if I want a single or return ticket. Single to
Debrecen. She hands over a ticket. I hand over a
ludicrously small amount in Forints – far less than my
taxi fare to the station – for a 2.5 hour journey by train.
The taxi driver in Debrecen is so startled by the size
of his tip that he gets out and opens the door of the
university for me. His tip is large only because he has
stuck to his original estimate of the cost from station to
university, and not tried to charge me five times as
much!
The conference is somewhat smaller than usual, but
for some reason Canada seems to have bankrupted itself
to send most of its academics here, and large parts of
Oxford must be empty.
In general, the lecture sessions are excellent.
However, one or two speakers, while taking to heart the
injunction to put only twenty-five words on a
transparency, still put them in 12-point type! One
speaker is late because she fell asleep on the tram and
went right round the loop back to the station.
The student accommodation is spacious and
reasonably comfortable. Breakfast is the daily challenge.
Evidently Hungarian students think that caffe latte with
almost no caffe, served slightly lukewarm, is a delicacy
without which no day is complete. Or so the canteen
believes.
Hungarians also have a tendency to experiment with
new ways of making bread dough taste uninteresting: so
far I've sampled thirty-seven. And picking up a pot of
what looks like yoghurt but is actually sour cream is a
terrible shock to half-awake taste buds. The greatest
intellectual challenge at breakfast is how to eat
cornflakes and milk with a teaspoon, without (in my case)
leaving a morning residue in my beard. I thoughtfully
provide my own orange juice for breakfast.
Lunch is considerably better, except for the soup,
which frequently bears an alarming resemblance to the
washing-up water.
Hungarians apparently have a lot to learn about
tourism. The group who went on the wine tasting
expedition soon found themselves rather sozzled, as no
food was available to dilute the alcohol. They were also
somewhat surprised to find that none of the wine they
were tasting was actually on sale. In other parts of the
world, it's almost a hanging offence to leave a winery
without purchasing at least one bottle of the stuff,
however bad.
The Official Reception was unusual: normally at such
events so much sherry and wine is served, with only
non-absorbent foods like peanuts as an accompaniment, that
half the participants are incapable of finding their way to
dinner (or even to their own beds – see later). This
Reception was quite different: a wonderful spread of
food, but only one small glass of champagne each. As the
lack of subsequent wine became evident, whines of
discontent filled the air. The more brazen (mostly
Italians) demanded to have their glasses refilled.
Gluttons among us (I shall remain nameless) ate a hearty
dinner (several times) from the buffet.
My appetite was (only slightly) dulled by acute
vertigo occasioned by seeing Michael (not a small man)
sitting on the stone balustrade of the area, with a
three-storey drop behind him. I kept having visions of his
becoming a more colourful part of the mosaic pavement
on the ground floor.
Apropos of this, the quote of the week was: "A Corpus
is like a dead body" (Geoffrey Rockwell).
Anyone familiar with David Lodge's Small World
will be aware that the greater part of the spare time of
most conference delegates (and the whole of the time of
a few) is dedicated to attempts to bed one or more of
the other participants (not being already a partner of
the first part). Either everyone at this conference was
very discreet, or I'm very unobservant, or everyone was
suspiciously well-behaved. Aficionados of MLA meetings
assured me that this particular conference was
uncharacteristically staid.
"Join us on a two-hour trip across the Puszta [the
great Hungarian plain]. See the wildlife, the cowboys, the
herds of horses, cattle, and buffalo. Experience the wild
flowers and vegetation in this, the driest part of Hungary
[hah!]."
Many of us did so. It was very cold. It was raining. It
was windy. This didn't matter in the coach. However, when
we were forced out into thick mud (and rain, and cold,
and wind) and told that we were about to experience the
thrill of a lifetime – a two-hour drive in open-ended
horse-drawn wagons across the Puszta – we began to
realise that we should have dressed more as Polar
explorers than as summer tourists.
Several pairs of expensive Italian shoes were ruined
in the mud. Several people shivered in horse blankets.
They were the lucky ones – the rest of us had to make
do with our thin coats. The wind howled through the
wagons as the horses wearily trudged through deep mud.
Those at the front and back got very wet. Not a single
wildlife hove in sight, not even an insect. Don't blame
them – nothing would be mad enough to come out in this
weather – except us!
Remarks from Captain Scott's Diary came to mind:
Watching the cowboys in action (while we stood in the
rain and wind, soaked and freezing) spurred some
foolhardy souls into riding the horses as well. The
saddles were loose – no girths [cinches for the
Americans]. This resulted in a couple of rapid dismounts.
Hugh (brave man) took the saddle off completely,
vaulted onto the horse's back, and rode round like a
circus performer. But then, he is Australian. As he had no
coat, he spent the rest of the trip huddled between two
fractionally drier bodies in the wagon to get warm
enough to stop shivering. At least with a horse between
your legs, a few bits of you are warm!
The interesting thing was the fun and camaraderie
that this appalling trip produced. Even the Japanese, not
(in my experience) accustomed to roughing it while on
holiday, found the mire, the cold, and the damp
screamingly funny. One or two Germans [replace with
your own racial stereotype] were even seen to smile.
Just when we thought things could get no worse, we
arrived back at the farm to find that our bus driver had
vanished for a long slow pot of tea in a warm place,
leaving us locked out of the bus. The combined ingenuity
of sixty of the best minds in the world failed to open the
bus door, so we all huddled in the souvenir shop until the
driver returned. Lynching was considered . . .
One of the nicest local restaurants was just a short
walk across the park. We set out in a beautiful summer
evening, wafted by the limpid air. Sitting outside under a
large umbrella was charming. Until the lightning and
thunder started. The Oxford contingent rushed indoors,
completely overfilling the available accommodation,
and demanded yet more beer. We (one Canadian, one
Dutch, one British) remained stoically outside (perforce
– there wasn't any more room inside), our own
umbrellas judiciously angled to stop the run-off from the
main umbrella sluicing down our backs. Paddling back
across the park in almost continuous lightning didn't feel
like a very good idea.
The Banquet was wonderful. Good music and dancing,
excellent food, good wine, short speeches. The whisper
went round, "There's a party on floor 4 of the Kollegium
afterwards – bring a bottle." I liberated an unused bottle
of wine and several unused chocolate cakes from a table
of abstemious anorexics and headed for the party. The
local student helpers, not having had enough of us during
the week (really?!), spent the next few hours chatting to us in
English and German. We were slightly disconcerted when
the porter put all the lights out, but a judicious word
from one of the students (and a bribe?) soon put them on
again.
I went to bed at 3am. One delegate went to bed at
5am, having unsuccessfully tried until that hour to lure
one of the students into his bed. Not surprisingly, few
people were at breakfast the following morning . . .
John Dawson
JLD1@cam.ac.uk