March 15th in Kecskemét

March 15th is an important national holiday in Hungary commemorating the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Every year the city of Kecskemét selects a different school to perform in front of town hall for the whole city. This year it was Mátyás Király Elementary, the school where Jon and I teach.

town hall


6th and 7th grade students from Mátyás Király Elementary

The second part of the ceremony is the presentation of wreaths to the statue of Lajos Kossuth, an important leader during the revolution.

statue of Lajos Kossuth


"Hussars" standing at attention during the presentation of wreaths

The Néni Experience: Winter Coats

The Hungarian word "néni" (sounds like "nay-nee") basically means "aunt." In school, the first graders call me "Franny néni" because in elementary school it is typical to address your teaches with "aunt" and "uncle" instead of "mister" or "miss." Hungarian is a bit more formal than English, so terminology is important. For children, almost every adult is a néni or a bácsi (sounds like bah-chee). Once when Jon was taking trash out to the dumpster, a little girl asked her mother, "What is the worker bácsi doing?"

Essentially, one uses the term néni to address or refer to a woman who is older than you.

If I were to write a slang dictionary (perhaps entitled "American Hunglish"?) which included the many misuses of the language us Americans in Hungary use, the term néni would be a special entry:

néni
1) Noun. An older Hungarian woman who does not speak English.
Example: "I had a conversation with a nice néni at the bus stop this morning."

To further Englisize this term, one can add on an English descriptor in front of the word to create a truly Hunglish nickname. For example, Jon and I used to get butter from the "dairy néni" in Szeged, we buy our chickens from the "poultry nénis" on the other side of town, etc.

to be néni-ed
2) Verb, past tense. Having been on the receiving end of (generally spontaneous) extremely overbearing hospitality by a Hungarian woman.
Example: "I totally got néni-ed."

You might have been néni-ed if:
- You were just going to join her for tea, but two hours later your Hungarian hostess has fed you far more than you want, then acted truly offended that you don't eat two pieces of cake, and continuously comments about how skinny (in a bad way) you look.
- You bring a néni some homemade jam (probably to thank her for all the food she fed you last time), she invites you inside, and two hours later you leave with at least one grocery bag full of homemade goodies and preserves.
- For weeks, every time the nice old woman who lives downstairs saw you, she would go on and on about how cold you must be because your coat just isn't warm enough. "It's so thin! You must be freezing!" she said, until finally one day, despite your assurances that you are warm enough, she just hands you a fur coat, and tells you if it fits, it's yours.

I totally got néni-ed.

Now, for those of you readers who don't live in Hungary, you may think this is just one crazy néni, but I am not the only American who has experienced this particular phenomenon. Shortly after this happened, I wrote my dear friend Briggi, who used to teach here and had TWO separate coat néni experiences. I asked her to write about them:

I had 2 néni jacket experiences. The first was with Kati upstairs, to whom I was delivering some cookies. She had been thrift shopping and bought a jacket that did not fit well, so she made me try it on and gave it to me.

The other happened on a Sunday evening, Tara and Jamie had left about an hour before and I was watching BBC and working on altering a dress for Hannah, when someone knocked on the door. Confused, I thought it was Jamie or Tara returning to say they had missed their bus. Instead it was a néni. I had met this néni once before, when we drove to a concert, but other than a polite "Jó Napot," ("Good Day") I generally did not say much to her. So there she was, a relative stranger beckoning to me like some geriatric siren calling, ''Gyere ide drágám'' ("Come here, darling!"). So I did what any sensible person would do, locked my door and followed her upstairs. She pointed to her door and then herself and said, "Mária." Then pointed to me and said, "Briggike" (a Hunglicized diminutive of Briggi). After several repetitions we went into her flat. It was back when Russia had turned off the gas (Jan 2009), so we passed through her living room...saying that it was cold, and into her bedroom. There she pushed me onto her bed to sit, handed me her remote control motioning for me to change the channel and disappeared into the kitchen. She was gone long enough that I flipped on the BBC (in reality probably 5 minutes). She came back with cakes and hot cocoa, looked at the BBC, switched it off and put on Hungarian folk songs. Some of which she sang along with. After a half an hour I was beginning to desperately search my lexicon for some excuse to leave, she abruptly turned off the music and said time to go. As I stood and thanked her for her hospitality, she made me wait. She ran to a closet, grabbed a jacket, zipped me into it, tied the waist draw string and sent me back downstairs.

Thanks, Briggi for sharing! If I do write that fake dictionary, I'll definitely have you help me with the entries.

Hungary is a strange and magical place, isn't it?

Christmas e-card 2011

Snow in Kecskemét

Pumpkins 2011

Can anyone guess which pumpkin is Jon's?

I'll give you hint...



It was delicious! :)

Cricket Lady Finds a Husband

Today was one of my kindergarten group's Mother's Day presentation. The big performance was a play about a beautiful cricket. One day she finds a coin and goes to the shop to buy a red ribbon. While sitting and admiring herself in a mirror, different animals approach her and ask for her hand in marriage. She asks each animal to first sing for her a song, but she doesn't like anyone's voice. Finally, the little mouse sings to her and she accepts his proposal.

After they performed the whole play once in Hungarian, they did it again "This time in English!" It was so cute I could barely hold the camera to record a few moments.

And so it continues: a duck, a rooster, some bees, etc. Everyone sings their songs to please the vain little cricket until the little mouse wins her hand.

Aaaawwwwwww!

Easter Eggs 2011

My story begins with this egg:

In the weeks before Easter, as before any holiday, the kindergarten classroom began to transform. Art projects featuring eggs, hens and bunnies began to populate every bare surface along with vases of forsythia and pussy willows adorned with dyed eggs hanging from ribbons.

One of my colleagues handed me this lovely egg told me it was a gift.

"Oh, it's so lovely!" I told her.

"I made it myself. It's easy. I can show you how to do it." Kati replied.

The following week, I was given this little tool along with a stack of traditional Hungarian patterns. I realized that she was not actually going to show me how to do it, but help equip me with the tools and information I would need.

íroka (sounds like: "ear-oh-kah"): the tool used to apply the wax onto the surface of the egg

Next on the supply list: beeswax. The search for beeswax was a project in itself, but after many failed attempts, I finally bought a half pound of beeswax from the only source in Kecskemét: "The Honey Shop" - a tiny room tucked inside a small strip mall that is only open two days a week according to their sign, and less than that according to whatever handwritten post-it note is on the door at the moment.

Approximately 0.5 pounds of beeswax (MUCH more than I needed)

Jon and I had been blowing out and saving eggs for Easter for a couple weeks. One lesson we learned from the 2009 project: If you plan ahead, there is no need to blow out 15 eggs in a single afternoon and spend the following two days eating nothing but scrambled eggs. I had come across a few other tips since then I also wanted to try. First of all, if you soak the leaves in water, they stick better to the egg, and secondly, if you leave the eggs in the dye bath overnight, there's no need to hang them dry. With all this new information, I wanted to try a batch of the leaf patterns to see how they would turn out.

Easter Eggs 2011: Batch no. 1

Now it was time to try the new technique: hímes tojás (sounds like "hee-mesh toy-ah-sh). It is essentially the Hungarian take on the well-known Ukranian wax-resist egg, pysanka. The premise is simple: Apply wax to the surface of the egg in your desired pattern, soak eggs in a dye-bath, and wipe off the wax leaving the pattern which had been under the wax a lighter color than the dyed egg.

I am both proud and embarrassed that my egg turned out to be exactly the opposite of what I was shooting for.

Kati's egg (left), Franny's egg (right)

How could this happen? Let me explain.

After I had gathered all my supplies, I sat down to work on the designs. It was a rough start.

first attempt: "blobs"

I was doing it all wrong. I tried dipping the íroka in a can of melted wax (I swear that's what I thought Kati told me to do!), but by the time I got it to the egg, the wax would solidify making anything other than blobs an impossibility. Thankfully, Jon took one look at my blob egg and started doing research on the internet. Turns out you should heat the íroka over a candle flame and melt the wax into it.

Now I understand!

Franny's learning curve

Both Jon and I tried our hand at copying the patterns Kati had given me, and before long we had eight eggs ready for dyeing. I still had the dye leftover from the first batch of leaf-patterned eggs, but I wanted a brighter dye. They just didn't look as dark as Kati's egg. We didn't have any more onion skins, so Jon suggested adding a little vinegar. "Why not?" we both thought. Let's give it a try.

By now I'm sure many of you have figured out why my egg turned out a little funny. For those of you as rusty in science as I apparently was: If you leave an egg in a vinegar solution OVERNIGHT, the eggshell will dissolve.

This is called an acid-base reaction. This calcium carbonate crystals in the egg shell react with the acid in the vinegar creating carbon dioxide. Notice the little bubbles?

What have I done?!!

Thankfully there was not enough vinegar in the mixture to completely dissolve the eggshells, but two were too soft to salvage. The rest turned out pretty cool. The vinegar washed away the brown color and the wax preserved the original brown color.

Easter Eggs 2011: Batch no. 2
"acid wash" hímes tojás

Oops!