Baby Naming Struggles

When we started our baby name list we agreed to a Hungarian name, because he'd have an awesome Anglo last name. There was just one condition: I had to be able to pronounce his name in my maple syrup-y Canadian accented English. 

That eliminated Abel, because a Hungarian would pronounce it like A-Bell, while a Canadian would say it like Able. We decided this would confuse the poor kid.

Kata really wanted Samuel, because the cutesy pet name for it would be Samu, pronounced Shamu. I decided naming our kid after a famous whale wasn't a good idea. I vetoed it, but Kata never understood the North American reference.

Hungarians pronounce their S like Sh, so that pronunciation issue eliminated Simon (Shimon, phonetically). A Canadian Jacob, would sound like Yak-ub. Benjamin made its way onto a few government documents, like our daycare sign-up (yes, you have to sign up early for day-care here). But that J issue popped up again. Plus, it isn't a Hungarian name.

Kata had a girl name figured out, but thinking of a boy's name hadn't occurred to her and she didn't want her son's life to be like a JohnnyCash song. I approached it with my usual shrug and let's-not-think-too-hard-and-something-will-pop-into-our-head attitude. So, the process went on for a while. A Hungarian woman and a Canadian man living in Germany can have a tough time thinking of a name.

Armin was a favourite for a while, but then it wasn't. We both pronounced Felix the same way, but we didn't like it because it's far too common in Germany and it was not a Hungarian name. As an expat family, Felix was raus! as the Germans say.

For a while Kata was fiercely advocating for Csongor, pronounced Chong-Gore. I should have liked it, it's a great Hungarian name, but it always rubbed me the wrong way. Csongor. Chong-Gore. Little baby Chong-Gore. Nope.

Another great Hungarian name we both liked was Attila. Hungarians have been naming their boys Attila since the days of Attila the Hun, the great barbarian... pillager... plunderer... oh... right...

There was Áron, which was our choice for a week or so, but then I would write Aron all the time because my Canadian computer keyboard doesn't have an A with an accent on it, so that was out. Another name starting with an A was Antal, for Antal Szerb, my favourite Hungarian writer and one of Kata's favourites too. That was cut after a while. I can't remember why.

There was Gellért, for the hill in Budapest I wind-sprinted up a lot. Then Bence, the Hungarian version of Vincent. Both considered, liked for a day or two and cut. Imre? Out.

There was one name that kept popping onto the list and was never eliminated. We've been using it for the last few months now. "How is ____ doing?" or "Oh, ____ kicked!" And neither of us has vetoed it. The name has stuck. So, with six weeks remaining until his arrival date, we have a name for him.

Familiar Territory with Family

Discovery Walks in familiar places.

The only condition my brother-in-law had to drive his wife, a five-and-a-half-year-old daughter, a four-year-old son, and a one-year-old toddler 1,185km from Budapest to Dusseldorf was to see the North Sea. That was it. His wife, also wanting to dip her toes into the sea, happily conceded.

The actual drive went alright, from what I was told. Two days of driving with a night's rest in Bavaria. No crappy weather. No drama on the autobahn. The kids went into their car seats without kicking, squirming, screaming, or any other drama – they're far more well behaved than I remember me and my brother being on the family road trips.

Although, there was little room for squirming or kicking because the car was rammed full with a playpen, a stroller with three different seat attachments, baby clothes in heavy vacuum-sealed bags for the expected arrival of our own little road-tripper.

They arrived on a Thursday night – Kata's birthday. I worked in Aachen all day Friday, arriving in the evening to a raucous apartment filled with three happy kids who spent the day at the Dusseldorf Aquarium, walking along the Rhine, and being young tourists in the Dorf. They were running from room to room, playing with their umbrellas, and rolling around atop their air mattress. Their long march across the Dorf hasn't seemed to tire them out.

We were back on the road on the weekend, heading to Ghent. The kids, all settled into their car seats had one tablet to share. The baby wasn't going to use it (she has little hands and fell asleep before we left the Dorf), so the other two had to share it. The older sister took it, telling her younger brother she was going to use this tablet, but she had an invisible tablet he can use. She handed him the invisible tablet, which he accepted. I don't now how long that move will last, but I hope she gets a lot of mileage out of it.

The details in Leuven's city hall.

The road were taking was one Kata and I took two years before. We were driving towards Ghent, with a stop in Leuven for a snack. Leuven is a fun place to stop. It's at a point on the highway through Belgium where you think it might be wise to stop before you hit Brussels ring road with its wild combination of reckless drivers, merging lanes, and diplomatic license plates. Leuven's city hall is the real treat. You don't see it until you turn a corner and then you walk right into a gothic building covered with gilded stone and statues.

And Ghent? 

Instagram-able Ghent!

Ghent is great. We had visited in the spring, so there weren't the August crowds in the streets of the old town like there was this time around. The canals, which were still when we visited, were choked with boats. The weather was far more warmer and sunnier. The Flemish summer can be amazing. And yet, the press of people and shoppers and cafe drinkers didn't push in on us. The town was beautiful when we visited in spring of 2016, but it felt livelier now and, in a way, better. I kind of envied the road warriors for seeing it the first time that way.

The umbrellas were the ultimate toy on this trip.

Each place they visited, the kids brought along their colourful kid umbrellas (I think Kata told dreary rainy horror stories to her family in fairer-weathered Hungary). When we arrived at our airbnb in a Belgian hamlet, they took their umbrellas onto the big deck in the back, swung them around and played with them until the sun set behind the neighbouring deer farm.

We awoke the next morning, packed up quickly and began the next leg of our super-quick road trip: Bruges.

Bruge-ing on a Bruges boat in Bruges.

Everything you heard about Bruges from that movie is true, but August is no time to visit. Unlike Ghent, where the streets accommodate the visiting hordes and is made more vibrant by them, Bruges felt like a stone and human vice. The streets were choked with tourists. You could stop and appreciate a medieval building or snap a photo of some pretty facade, but you'd risk being shoved by a ill-tempered tourist trying to eat his waffle and walk and take a selfie at the same time. Not a great place for several small child. But they have boats in Bruges! So everyone piled in and saw Bruges properly.

And what about the North Sea?

That was our first stop in the morning. It was wild and windy at Ostend, so you had to wear a windbreaker instead of a bikini, but we had the beach almost to ourselves. The tide was out too, so we walked a desert-length of beach to reach the sea. Shoes and socks were taken off and the adventurous travelers waded in as the tide rolled in.

Reaching the North Sea.

Of course, this whole odyssey was never just about the seeing the North Sea. It was also about family time. It was about the first of hopefully many family visits to Dusseldorf from the Hungarian side. It was about sharing the familiar and the new on the road together. And it was also about wiggling some toes in the Sea.

Our DIY Wedding in Denmark

The beige waiting room was like something out of a modern fairy tale.

It's the morning of our wedding and I'm picking wild flowers in a field an island in the Baltic Sea. The flowers are for Kata's floral hair arrangement and my lapel. In less than an hour, we will walk to Aersokobing's town hall and stand before the registrar to be married.

It wasn't an easy journey to this field on Aero island. We took a plane to Amsterdam, another plane to Bilund (of Lego Land fame), then a bus to Vejle, a train to Odense, a local train to Svendborg, and finally a ferry to Aeroskobing.

But the journey began months earlier when we walked into Düsseldorf's city marriage office and saw the couples lined up out of the waiting room, into the hallway, down a flight of stairs and into the lobby. As if that wasn't enough, a newly married couple and their wedding guests were navigating through this snarl of waiting not-so-nearly weds.

We'd later learn that couple, if they were both foreigners like us, would have spent hours talking to bureaucrats in their embassies and the German government, gathering important documents from their homeland, getting them translated and certified, and then waited a year for the honour of pushing their way through a crowded government building to be allowed to the privilege of being married.

We wanted none of that.

One alternative was Denmark, the Las Vegas of Europe, because of the ease of getting married. Especially for a couple of foreigners living in Germany who had neither the time, patience, nor inclination to gather their required papers and wait months for an appointment to find out more papers would be needed before they could get on an eternal waiting list. There's a baby on the way, after all.

We found one of several businesses whose sole purpose is applying for a marriage on your behalf in either Copenhagen or Aero Island. In a matter of weeks, we had an appointment to get married.

We weren't the only couple running to Denmark for a quick and easy town hall wedding. After our comically long journey to Aeroskobing, we saw couples everywhere. Some were mixed race couples – an obvious sign of two people from different countries dodging huge document requirements and embassy visits, like us. We'd see others strolling the old town, the women with noticeable baby bumps, also like us. There was also a young-ish, extremely grumpy couple staying at our hotel, who we'd see later at the town hall just after their wedding, still looking miserable, unlike us.

So, ours was not a unique decision. The staff at the town hall knew the drill. When we arrived to confirm our marriage and get a time for the next day, the elderly lady behind the desk made copies of everything and gave us our appointment quickly and efficiently. A rarity for city government.

The old town of Aeroskobing.

So, the next morning, after picking our flowers, I return to our little cottage in the compound we share with mostly Danish retirees. It starts to rain as we finish getting ready – a few attempts with my tie for me and Kata fixing her hair – and return to the town hall, a little wet, but punctual.

We wait in the little grey, government-issue waiting area and watch one young couple come out, with their parents and a few others, and watch another young couple pace impatiently around the town hall office. Kata gets up to the bathroom, maybe because she's nervous and maybe because she's pregnant, and while she's away they call our name. I wait at the door of the office for Kata to finish up and she rounds the corner directly down the hall from the office. So, I whistle "Here comes the bride..." and Kata walks down the aisle... well the hallway.

There are three elderly ladies in the room. One is the registrar, who will marry us, and the other two are our witnesses, who will, you guessed it, witness the ceremony and snap photos with Kata's phone. The whole thing will last fifteen minutes. After a bit of small talk, the registrar reads a prepared statement, asks us do we, which we do. We put on the rings and we're married. There's a kiss, papers to sign, and a quick toast. Then we're outside in the rain, which we've been told is good luck in Denmark – these marriage office people know their stuff.

When the rain clears up, we spend the afternoon with Kata's nice camera and a tripod, DIY-style, snapping photos around the island's famous beach houses. We eat a steak dinner at a local restaurant. We spend the next two days exploring the island. We mentioned our plan to the registrar, who was surprised because people don't spend any more time here than is necessary to get married. They get in and get out. That is a shame.

Aero island is beautiful!

The old town is lovely, with its 200-year-old houses and post offices and stores and restaurants, but a walk away reveals so much more. The Danish islanders grow lovely gardens filled with neat rows of blooming flowers and apple trees. The entire island is covered with long, golden grass that swishes around in a sea breeze that rarely stops.

The place is clean, and not the German-style of clean where it gets dirty and workers clean up the mess at dawn, but clean in a way that it doesn't get dirty because people take care of it. We saw very little litter. Most people rode their bikes. And they smiled and waved as we took our wedding photos on the beach, totally at ease with marriage tourists wandering their shores.

Like any island, the pace is relaxed. We found ourselves getting into that groove. Our only tasks was breakfast and then one errand (registering at the town hall one day, getting married the next, mailing documents another day). The rest of the day was spent visiting the beaches, another town at one end of the island, eating freshly smoked salmon, or cooking in our cottage and watching TV where the English isn't dubbed, but subtitled so we can enjoy it without straining.

Yes, it would have been fine to get in, get married, and get out, but lingering here turned it into a mini-honeymoon with a wedding in the middle of it. We missed our family and friends. We wished our loved ones could have been here for it. But in the end, it was just the two of us, and that's all we needed to make it perfect.

Newly weds.