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.

How I do Lunch

I have only worked at one office where no one complained about the area’s lunch options. That was near the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto. No. Wait. Actually there was one complaint: There were so many options, everyone suffered from choice anxiety come lunch hour.

Every other office in Toronto I worked in had a legion of complaints about nearby lunch options. There are too few places. Or it’s all fast food. There’s not enough fast food. It’s too ethnic. It’s not vegetarian enough. Too much gluten. Not enough gluten.

As someone who paid Toronto rent and wrestled with student loans every month my only complaint was that buying lunch every day was expensive. I usually packed a lunch and treated myself to lunch on Fridays, which, depending on the office and workload and time of year, was a patio beer lunch.

Save for the lack of beer lunches, there is little to complain about in Budapest. A good cafeteria downstairs serves hot, square meals. The price is measured by weight, so I guess it depends on your appetite. The food is good too. They even do a mean meatloaf some times. MEATLOAF!

If I’m looking to get out of the building, and want to avoid vegetables with my lunch, there is Maros Étterem, a homey neighbourhood restaurant/pub across the street from the office. They serve up a daily lunch special, usually a meat and a potato. It’s hearty, simple food that does the job for a good price. It has also turned into a post-work drinking hole for a few colleagues, where One-Drink Plans often go awry.

Maros Étterem: “The Best Restaurant in Budapest.” Just because it’s hyperbole doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

A few colleagues have taken a shine to Maros. One art director, Carlos, the unofficial mayor of Budapest, declared it the best restaurant in the city and awarded them with a certificate he created in InDesign.

But feelings in the office are mixed about the venerable Maros Étterem. Walk around the office to round up a lunch posse for Maros and you will get enthusiastic joiners or nay-sayers that scrunch their faces on the mention of Maros. Some claim to have gotten sick from the food. Others bemoan the food’s sodium content. Others inexplicably dislike its 1970s-style wallpaper. Still Maros Étterem has its fans among the agency’s workforce and while there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is definitely a good lunch to be found at Maros.

UPDATE: For lunch today we visited Maros. I had the duck liver soup to start with pork and potatoes in some kind of sauce that the Hungarian waiter could not translate into English. It was delicious.

ONE MORE UPDATE: A Lunch Wheel has appeared in the office with all the lunch choices nearby. For some reason it's been landing on the sinfully delicious fast food more often than not.