Drinking Amid the Ruin Bars

The ruin bar Fogas Haz in all its pre-happy hour glory

John A. MacDonald, Canada’s first prime minister and a spectacular functioning alcoholic, was reportedly so drunk during an election debate that he keeled over on stage, threw up, then stood up, pointed at his opponent and said that was how sick his opponent’s policies made him.

My friend Tommy and I had a term for getting that drunk: London Drunk. It’s not as pukey as the honourable Mr. MacDonald’s antics, but just as debaucherous. It happened often in London, because it’s our hometown and we were always in good company. Sometimes it happened in Toronto, where a chunk of hearty, strong-livered Londoners have set up shop.

Even though I don’t get that way as much as I used to, Budapest is a place that wholly supports London Drunkeness – as proven by the ruin bars here.

For the uninitiated, ruin bars are apartment blocks converted into massive bars. The courtyards are dance floors or drinking terraces. The rooms of the old apartments are converted into party areas with different themes. The cellars are dancing dungeons of debauchery.

Drinks in Budapest are typically cheap by Western standards. Drinking bylaws are similarly lax, by killjoy Toronto standards. You can close down a bar at 4am, and then stagger blindly into an afterhours dance hole. But the ruin bar remains the heart of the evening.

You factor these circumstances into a situation where you are partying with hundreds of people in a formerly dilapidated apartment block and you have the potential London Drunk.

There's  the usual uncoolness. I had my winter coat stolen at one bar. A friend got into a fight at another. The dance dungeon should have a warning at the entrance for epileptics. But these are fun, cool places. The decor is all weird, the vibe is pretty cool, and there are pretty girls too. It’s tough to put a finger on what exactly makes them so great, but I suspect that's what helps keep people coming back.

Is it an owl? Is it a lady? It's the ruin bar decor at Instant.

The debate about where to go out or, in most cases, where not to go out is eternal. How often has a gathering of friends turned into a debate club about what we’re in the mood for: music or ladies or avoiding that damn bar we go to all the time or a combination of the above.

For some reason that kind of abstract mental math has not entered into the debates about going out. The ruin bars, and all the different sorts of people they attract, for better or worse, make it better places.  

Nobody gets London Drunk anymore, but I cling to the belief that even John A. MacDonald would want to get Budapest Drunk in a Ruin Bar.

Weather Small Talk and a Mispronunciation Anecdote

In my last post I wrote about the challenges of correctly pronouncing some of the Hungarian consonant combos. I’m not alone in these difficulties.

One of my expatriate colleagues was touring around the Castle District area and wanted to find the Sikló, which is a cable rail car that runs on the side of Castle Hill.

Unable to find it, she asked a guard where the sikló is, which should sound like shikloo but came out of her mouth as chikloo, or csikló, the Hungarian word for clitoris. So she asked the guard where the clitoris is.

In other news, spring is here. The sun has been shining, we have been enjoying T-shirt weather and outdoor beers have been imbibed. It still gets cold in the evening, but the warm weather has raised my spirits. The last couple of weeks have been exciting, with plenty of material for blog posts, I have have to get around to writing them.

Also, the first contingent of Canadian visitors is arriving this weekend. I’m excited, but also nervous about hosting in Budapest. So come visit Canadian friends, I'm sure I'll get the hang of hosting as more people visit.

Hungarian Language Update

A while back I wrote about using cheat sheets for my market excursions in the hopes I would improve my Hungarian over these quick grocery exchanges. The results have been mixed. I get perplexed looks. People laugh at me. Others sympathetically shake their heads at me.

An example:

I went to the metro station to buy my monthly pass with one of my cheat sheets. As I inched towards the lady behind the glass, I practiced in my head what I would say. When I got to the counter I read my cheat sheet aloud. She stared blankly at me. I tried again. Another blank stare and people behind me in the queue began shifting awkwardly. I showed her my sad, little handwritten cheat sheet and she seemed to understand.

“Student or normal? Student, yeah?” she asked, nodding her head as she stamping my pass.

“Normal,” I muttered.

Growing up with landed immigrants in Canada, I understood how hard it was to learn English. The slang, the endless exceptions and the phrasal verbs. All made more difficult when they must communicate with native English speakers who completely neglect their grammar and syntax. 

But learning to speak Hungarian seems more like learning how to speak all over again. Vowels have accents that change how they sound and, therefore, the entire meaning of the word changes. I tell taxi drivers to take me to Vaci utca and Fővám tér. The exchange ends a lot like the one with the metro lady: Awkwardly.

Anyway, English has no accents. English just assumes you know whether it’s a hard vowel or soft vowel. However flawed this system is, I'm used to it.

The consonants are a whole excruciating ordeal too, especially for me, the native English-speaking mono-linguist. For example, 'cs' in Hungarian makes a ch sound. A 'dzs' makes a j sound. When I'm looking for cheese, I'm looking for a label that says sajt, which is pronounced shite. 

As a native English speaker, I fluently speak the world’s most common second language. It is the lingua franca. It’s a blessing. Like my time in Montreal, people here can get the general idea across to me in English, but, unlike in Montreal, I cannot do the same in Hungarian.

And there's the rub. I have no other frame of reference for pronouncing Hungarian. Sure, I have those petite French language skills, but that’s not even near a business-level of functioning, and I have met France French speakers who frown upon my Quebecois twang.

So I take my cheat sheets. I read the odd food label. I work on my counting. I fumble. I mumble. I stammer. I mispronounce. I get laughed at. I laugh. But I have acknowledged that living here means being functionally illiterate. And I'm not alright with that.