Wow! We were just in downtown Budapest watching the fireworks in honor of St. Stephen’s day when out of nowhere a near-hurricane strength storm hit, with torrential downpours and winds of between 80-120 km/hr. News is still developing but there have already been several deaths and dozens of injuries, as branches trees have been flying and several scaffoldings toppled. The fireworks continued even after hundreds of thousands of spectators fled in panic. Now all we can hear are sirens and are hoping that the damage won’t be too bad.

As far as I know this is the first blogging of the event; stay tuned for more information as it develops.

UPDATE: As of 11pm there are three official deaths and dozens injured. Several boats collided on the Danube and one sank, and passengers who fell overboard are still to be found.

UPDATE 2: A full day after the emergency, accusations are flying as to what could have and should have been done to prevent this catastrophe. The damage toll stands with at four deaths, although one of the lost boaters is still missing, and more than 100 hospitalized, with billions of forints in property damages caused by flying debris and flooding.

It’s been a busy return to Budapest.  Although I had pretty much decided while back home to give up on this place, mostly due to the lack of steady work, that situation was remedied - in spades. The first job was basically handed to me by one of my former coworkers at Business Hungary, who is in the process of having her second child and didn’t have time for it.  Why she thought of me I can’t quite say, maybe my girlish good looks? 

Anyway, the work is to copy-edit a book about refugees from the Hungarian revolution of October 23rd, 1956 who ended up in Canada, called Bridging the Divide.  The idea is to present pairs of people, often siblings or family members, who were divided by the exodus.  So far, however, for various reasons most of the stories are a bit lopsided towards those who left, including the fact that those interviews were done first, through volunteers tracked down by the Hungarian embassy in Canada, and also because staying behind when your country is being crushed by a totalitarian state is just kind of boring.  This year is the 50th anniversary of the revolution, which is celebrated as a national holiday, even though they got their butts kicked in the end.  Hungarians are optimistic like that - since they’ve lost just about every war and invasion since they got their act together a thousand years ago, they’ve lowered the bar as to what qualifies for a national holiday.  Instead of “whoopee, we won the war!” day, it’s more like “Good try boys, we’ll get ‘em next time!” day, or “We really had ‘em there for a second, didn’t we!” day.  In fact, it seems the only holiday that represents Hungary ever winning anything is coming up on August 20th - St. Stephen’s day.  Yes, once, a thousand years ago, King Istvan, formerly a pagan prince, chose Christianity as a way to unite the tribes of the time.  It was great; there were people singing and laughing and dancing in the streets, shouting “The glass is half full! The glass is half full!”  Just thinking of those good ol’ days brings a tear to my eye.

The other job that I got was through the husband of said previous co-worker, which basically makes the pair of them my life-savers in Hungary.  I now copy-edit, write, and do web maintenance for the Budapest FUNZINE, the only weekly English-language program guide in the country.  It’s a full time gig and I’ve already been put in charge of several tasks, mainly fixing all the terrible English mistakes and finding content for the “Xpat Life” section.  Some of the things I’d like to have every week are an interview with an expatriate, a profile of an expat-run or owned business, some community events and hopefully some creative work such as poetry or photography.  Of course suggestions are also welcome.  Right now the website is under construction, but once we get it up and running I want to get some interactive things going such as a discussion board, polls and whatnot to generate content for the print version.

However, the magazine is free, so our income depends (especially now, in the early stages) on advertising.  Therefore we are a bit constrained for space for deep or really meaningful content, not to mention all our “reviews” have to be a little less than totally objective.  It’s a small staff, mostly young, and everyone seems pretty excited about the whole thing.  I see it as really long-overdue for the city (this is the first magazine of its kind in English), and since we have huge distribution (50,000 copies weekly - sorry trees!) it’s a serious addition to my journalistic resume. Finally, it’s really overdue as far as steady work - in addition to the book, I will finally be able to pay the last two months’ rent.

Hey All,

So, after looking at four different weather forecasts, the conclusion is that nobody knows what the hell it’s going to look like tomorrow - anywhere from sunny and 80 to torrential downpour of frozen domesticated animals.  In that spirit, we’ve decided to go ahead and hold our little BBQ shindig, and if the weather doesn’t cooperate we can set the grill up on our balcony and cram 25 30 people into our studio apartment.  YEAH!

What that means is that things will be starting at 4pm, so bring your spouse or buddy(ies) and bring some stuff to eat such as MEAT or fish, chips, salsa, salad, cookies, a homemade dish that you can make, and drinks, alcoholic or not or both.  We are asking everyone to bring a little something to cover themselves, and we will be grillin’ up a gang of veggies and not-dogs for anyone of that persuasion.  Hopefully not everyone will bring chips and Dreher.

This week, we rocked at being vegetarians. Why is that, you ask? Well, first of all, we made our own soy milk from scratch! It’s actually not that hard; you just soak a cup of beans overnight, cook them with a teaspoon or two of coconut shavings, until they soften up a bit, and drain, saving the water they were cooked in. Then you blend the one cup beans with one cup fresh water and one cup bean water (which contains hella nutrients), until well pureed. Finally, you run the mixture through a fine strainer, toss it in the fridge, and you’ve got soymilk. The residue kind of sinks to the bottom, so you should shake it up before serving. We used it for cereal and in a spinach stew with great results.

The second reason we rock is related to the soymilk. In the straining process, the soy residue, known as okara (yup, that’s a Japanese word), is left behind. Bursting with protein, fiber, and other good stuff, okara is really too good to just throw out and, as you might have guessed, we used it. Following this recipe, we made okara patties mixed with shredded carrots, parsely root, onion and scallions, and spiced them with curry, cumin, koriander and salt and veggie stock. Cooking was a little more involved, as we had to sautee the veggies and okara separately, then mix the two together and add 2-3 tablespoons of flour to tighten up the mixture before making the patties and baking them for about 30 minutes. But they turned out delicious! Served ‘em with some rice and tomatoes, and dabbed a little sour cream on top. Skills.