DOORS THAT OPEN IN HUNGARY

«Where will you go? Oh, Budapest? I loved it, it's amazing! I remember when I was there...». Exactly in this moment of the conversation, this person -and it's not important who it is, because it's everybody- starts to explain all their memories from this city, saying things like: “you should go to the the baths... the beer is so cheap, you will get fatter... Budapest is the Paris from East!... if you haven't a good coat there, brrr!... Hungarian people are distant, but boys are good-looking, specially if they are violinists... you'll see, the language is much too difficult!”. Well, I put all these feelings and pictures in my suitcase, as if they were mine, even if I tried to not be influenced. Now I'm here, finally. And the beer is cheap, but the weather is not so cold, and the only violinist that I met wasn't Hungarian.

When I was in the metro, going from the airport to the center, an old man wanted to help me. I didn't need help, but that was not important for him because he had already decided that he will help me, so he read to me all the metro stations, written above the door. I said thank you very much, but he was not satisfied at all; he still wanted to help me. So I asked him how to say some survival words in Hungarian, and he wrote it on my plane ticket, “Szia, köszönöm, igen, nem, bocsánat...”. He wanted me to repeat them to him, so I became a show in this metro, trying to pronounce strange words for me, and people were laughing, even if they thought that they had concealed it very well.

So in my first hour in Hungary, I understood two things: that this language is really difficult, and that people from here are not so distant as they can seem at the first moment. This old man opened his cultural door for me, and it was a wonderful experience.

After this one, a lot of doors were opened: the people who hosted me the first week opened their flat and their lives to me, and quickly I found a room to rent and my flatmate was also opened to my company; in a few days I discovered a lot of bars and locals with live music, and also the main library where you can imagine Sisi entering any time. And always, doors are opened by Hungarian people, who say to me “let's go, come in”, and I have to pass before them, because if I don't pass before we are like stupid people waiting at the door, giving way to each other like in a film of Buñuel. I remember one day, a friend of mine was telling me a story about a boy, and she said: “at first he seemed nice. He always opened the doors for me and let me go first, he seemed a good person”. I would never think that it's a reason to think someone is a good person, in fact I've never thought about it before being here. So I guess that giving way to people, specially if you are male, is important here, really more than in my country, where we lost this kind of politesse.

And not only this surprised me in Budapest. It's known that comparing can be not so good, but everybody do it constantly. We have some ideas which are so normal for us that we can't imagine that it's not obvious for another person, so when it happens, we compare. Let me explain...

I come from a place where there is a not common language. When foreigners say hello or goodbye in Catalan we are happy and grateful. I thought it was going to be the same here, I imagined that people would be happy when I tried to speak Hungarian when making a purchase, not because it is a small language, but because it is a difficult language that not many foreigners try to speak it. In a country where people open the doors for me, the minimum is to thank them in their language. So I always try; for the first few days I always had with me my plane ticket with this first lesson written on it, and a few days later without it, until today. But here it is different from home: when I say something in Hungarian, people do not care. And if I tell them that I have a Hungarian course in the university, they even laugh! Or maybe I can say that, contradicting this distant behavior that they have as a stereotype, at least they laugh! However, I wasn't surprised the first day of my Hungarian course: I was late, running through the university, and a smiling hungarian boy opened the door of the building and waited for me to enter.

by Núria Curcoll