Trust your gut

A Finn at my current client asked me the other day after I had finished interviewing him, “You have quite a strong American accent – is there a reason for that? Have you lived there before?” Ha! Yes, pretty good reason for the strong accent! I can understand people assuming I am Finnish when they see me on the street given the relative rarity (at least in my opinion) of expats in Helsinki but I never thought I could get mistaken for a Finn after having opened my mouth! I told a friend at work the story and he said, “Well, he could have actually thought you were Finnish or, more likely, he could have known you were American and thought it more polite to ask you about it by pretending to assume you were Finnish with an American accent.” I thought Finns were supposed to be direct? These people are confusing.

So, after three months in Helsinki I have run into only one American who, predictably, was working for Nokia and in town for some meetings at Nokia’s headquarters. I then flew to Budapest last weekend and there were Americans everywhere…in the shuttle from the airport, in the hotel, all over the city. Everywhere I turned there was someone speaking American English and I realized what a change this was! As my friend Ken said, “What did you expect? NOBODY goes to Helsinki in the winter!” Fair. However, things are looking up as after three months the temperature has finally eeked its way over freezing and thus has begun the big thaw. It’s probably been two weeks at this point with intermittent snowfall and daily temperatures around 33°F (I told you it just “eeked” over freezing!) but I was actually able to walk to the gym and work the other day, on March 31st, without my snow boots for the first time since I arrived. Thank goodness! It sounds a little bizarre but I felt free! I’m so sick of carrying three pairs of shoes with me every day that I could just about scream. Maybe this is punishment for bringing so many shoes with me in the first place?

I arrived in Budapest around 10pm on Friday night and made my way to the minibus shuttles to the hotels. I was instructed to make my way over to a waiting area until the bus driver called me by hotel name. I was pretty tired after some very long work days and was thankfully surprised to see that there were actually some free seats available in the area. (I swear there are never seats available anywhere when you’re traveling in Europe – I can’t tell you how many floors I have camped out on in the last few months!). Turns out I should have been a bit more suspicious. I plopped down in one of the chairs only to find that the three seats on this particular bench were not fastened to the legs so I nearly fell through to the floor and flipped the whole bench up and over top of me. I somehow managed to get myself and the bench together before everything fell apart while everyone around me, those on the good benches and those standing because they knew about “bad” bench, just glanced over disinterestedly and yawned. Traveling in Europe can be great because there is a lot less red tap e and restrictions than in the US but less controls overall mean that the little things can fall through the cracks. I mean, get me a screwdriver and I will fix the bench! The last thing I need is to crack my head open on an airport floor and spend my weekend in a hospital in Budapest (although it might make for an interesting blog…).

I got called by my hotel name, jumped in the shuttle, and another American girl on the bus said, “Are you American?” and before I could get out a “Yes” she was talking my ear off. I am so out of practice with American friendliness since no strangers speak to you in Finland that I was almost taken aback! She was in Budapest from St. Louis for a long weekend to visit her boyfriend who was working there for a couple weeks. The poor girl had been traveling for about 20 hours having missed a connection in Frankfurt, etc, just to spend three days in Budapest before she would have to turn around and do it again. I always feel very lucky to have this year abroad but experiences like hers remind me how thankful I really should be! It was nice to talk to another American for a bit too and made me miss having friends, let alone English speakers, around. People have been extremely friendly and helpful everywhere I have been but the language barrier is often really restrictive which can make it a bit lonely!

Unfortunately, I got to the hotel only to find that I had gotten an email at midnight from my boss telling me for the first time that we had a client deadline on Sunday evening (who agrees to that?!) and she would need some weekend work. I was already so tired from the previous very long week(s), and now stressed out about the weekend deadline when I would not arrive back into Helsinki until 11pm on Sunday night, that I just did not have the energy to go out in a new city to find food (I still had not eaten dinner) at midnight. I ate peanuts from the minibar and about six pieces of fruit from the fruit basket in my room for dinner and started cranking. I did not want this to ruin my weekend any more than necessary so ended up staying up until 3am on Saturday morning to finish the work. Ugh. The worst part was that my friend Ken was in Copenhagen for business the week before and had flown into Budapest to meet me for a couple days of sightseeing so this meant I had to bail on him Friday night. Major bummer! Ken was a good sport though and I met up with him in the morning to explore what is supposedly one of the more beautiful cities in Europe.

I had checked the weather before leaving and there was a 90% chance of rain for both Saturday and Sunday – not the weather one would hope for but it is spring, afterall, and almost anywhere has better weather than Helsinki so my bar is pretty low. I was very pleasantly (ecstatically!) surprised when the weather turned out to be beautiful. It was probably in the 50s or low 60s Fahrenheit and gorgeous sun. I had short sleeves on and I can guarantee you that my arms haven’t seen the light of day since San Francisco. Literally – first there wasn’t any light of day and now that there’s light it is still too cold to expose your skin to it! I thought I was doing ok without the sun but after having it for a couple days I think I am vitamin D deficient in Finland. Spring cannot come fast enough!

On my way in from the airport the night before I had initially been disappointed because Budapest looked just like another city…until we got to the city center and the old part of town. I recognized then that Budapest really was as beautiful as I had heard and this was confirmed over and over again during the rest of the weekend. Ken and I walked all over old town and saw the gigantic Royal Palace (at the time I was reading the book "The Help" about black housekeepers in the South in the 50’s and all I could think about when I saw the Palace was how hard it would be to keep a place that big clean! Yikes!), the gorgeous Parliament building, the old town on the hill with its cobblestone streets and quaint, multicolored buildings, and walked beneath the famous lions on guard over the Széchenyi Chain Bridge (who watched us cross from Pest to Buda). The center of Budapest was a pretty mix of old and new with many of the historic buildings renovated to both maintain their unique architectural styles as well as to safely accommodate modern businesses in the city. Around nearly every corner was yet another pretty pedestrian street with more lovely and impressive buildings. The many cafes were already beginning their transitions from winter’s closed door, inside seating to open air tables outside. We had lunch out on the cobblestones under an umbrella and it was truly a treat after being relegated to layers, boots, and closed doors for so long!

After traipsing all over the old city we found a little Hungarian food festival in downtown and got to check out some local crafts and special Hungarian food. There were lots of candies, sugared and chocolated nuts, pastries, goulash, and sausage – you name it and it was there. Everyone was walking around with tall pastry cylinders rolled in sugar so we shared one of those (although “sharing” means I ate about 80% of it!). You can see one in my pictures but they wrap thin pastry dough around what looks like a large, slightly tapered rolling pin and then brown it over coals, turning it to make sure it is evenly cooked. Once the dough is brown, the cylinder gets rolled in your choice of sugar, cinnamon, cocoa, or walnuts and pushed off the top of the rolling pin. It was actually a great and not too sweet treat (nothing is as sweet here as in the US). The next Hungarian specialty I was not very interested in trying and not a fan of after trying….rooster testicle stew. Ken and I turned the corner from the very lovely pastries dunked in sugar to see a big sign advertising (in English, so there was no confusion), “Rooster testicle stew.” Yech! We laughed, took some pictures, and, because the testicles were so large, Ken asked the man stirring the vat of them, “What kind of roosters do you use?” The answer, of course, “These are Turkish roosters.” Riiigghhht. I am usually up for trying about anything but was happy to make my way past this cultural experience when Ken asked if we could have a sample. The cook happily obliged and I felt a bit stuck but who knows, maybe they would be good?

Wrong. There is a reason why experts say you should trust your intuition. When you get a bad feeling about something or someone, you’re usually right. I ate half of a rooster testicle and it was the texture that got me – solid but almost creamy and a BAD aftertaste. Gross! I had to buy a Coke Zero to get that taste out of my mouth and I was a little traumatized for the rest of the afternoon (“No more Hungarian ‘delicacies’ for me, thanks!”). Now, I do believe that if you are going to kill an animal to eat it that you should try not to waste it. However, and this is a big however, you really do not have to eat everything. That thing was nasty.

I had chosen to go to Budapest for this particular weekend because the Budapest Spring Festival was being held at this time so there were many opera, theater, dance, and music performances every night for 2-3 weeks in the city. I thought it would be fun to go to a Hungarian opera while there so got tickets for the Hungarian version of a performance called Rossini. The performance was given in Hungarian and the background information I had was literally about three sentences from the website so it was definitely an experience to try to figure out what was going on! At intermission we ran into a group of Brits who were just as confused as we were (which actually made me feel a bit better)! I love going to shows like this but, I can tell you, after 3-4 hours of trying to figure out a story told in Hungarian song I was ready to go! It can be exhausting to follow along when you don’t understand a word! Also, unintentionally, I had happened to pick a very feminist-focused performance – at one point the women were systematically knocking out the men while wearing pink boxing gloves – in which a group of French women band together when their husbands leave for the War (not sure which war) and become a gang of sexually-liberated feministas who are then preyed upon by another group of men posing as monks to avoid fighting in the war. The leader of the pack of feministas is pursued by the head monk of the fake male monks, in addition to his loyal right-hand man. She ultimately turns down the leader of the men in favor of the right-hand man…who we find out in the last scene turns out himself to be a woman. Oy. Ken said he felt emasculated after that show. Sorry, Ken! (Disclaimer: None of the above was even remotely referred to in the three English sentence synopsis!) After the rooster testicle incident we had Italian for dinner which was such a treat after having fish and rye bread in Finland for many weeks. I have never been so happy to see a pizza and drink good wine!

Ken had to get back to New York the next day so I was on my own for Sunday. I took a 6 mile run along the Danube and around Margit Island in the middle of the river. (Shockingly, I didn’t even get slightly lost…landmarks like rivers really help keep you on track!) I really love doing runs in new cities – it is often the only time I do not feel like a cheesy tourist! The weather was, again, gorgeous and being able to run outside instead of on a treadmill is such a gift at this point that I was a very happy girl. I walked around to take a few more pictures and ended up stopping in at the “California Coffee Company” for a latte with sugar-free vanilla. Sugar-free anything is not easy to find in Europe, and nearly impossible to find in Finland, so I am ecstatic when I find it. The run plus my special coffee made my day! I also went back to the food festival, held my two index fingers out in a cross at the rooster testicle booth as I walked by, and got a pastry filled with cherries called a “meggy” at another booth. Very cute name and a much better call than the previous day’s “snack!”

I am now in Krakow, Poland for Easter but that is another blog still to be written about another amazing city. For now, Hyvää Pääsiäistä! (Happy Easter!)