This is Easter Monday, a holiday in many European countries, including Hungary.
Not an ideal day weather-wise; we had quite a thunderstorm about 3.00 PM, just as I was about to leave friends' where I had dinner. Fortunately I had both my car and my umbrella. Tomorrow I have the English Club, where we are reading Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca. One of the members obtained a video of the original film, with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. The acting style seems terribly dated at this point, and while Hitchock did not overdraw the character of the young wife as did DuMaurier in her novel, the story does become a bit exasperating at times. It is full of those improbabilities for which films of the time---and especially English films---were noted, beginning with the name of the lead male character, Maximilian DeWinter. Now Winter is a German name, and there is no way you can combine it with a French de to produce DeWinter. For such a strikingly rich family with no noble title, there is no explanation whatever as to how they came by all that money and still escaped corralling even a minor noble title. And on and on. After the English Club I attend a performance at the Conservatory. On Thursday there is a performance of Messiah at the Dom in Szeged, to which we have four tickets. Since Anna is still in New York and will not return until next Wednesday, I shall take our friend Sari and ask other friends if they wish to go. I have not yet decided which friends I shall ask.
The sun has come out. It is only 5.00 PM and I am in my pajamas. We have our national elections this coming Sunday. There is no mystery about who will be the winner. We do not elect our President, who is chosen by Parliament; our elections are for members of Parliament, and the winning party's leader becomes the Prime Minister. That will be Viktor Orban, the President of FIDESZ (FIatal DEmokrata SZovetseg/Alliance of Young Democrats), a Right-wing party, who was PM from 1998-2002, which is expected to win at least 70% of the vote. The big question is how well will Jobbik, an extreme right-wing party entering the national stage for the first time, do. Some express fears they may even exceed the Socialists, the present governing party, but I doubt they will do that well. In any case, even an overwhelming FIDESZ victory may not signal anything about 2014; Hungarian voters are notoriously impatient and fickle. Most will give you 30 days to give them all they want; some will give you 60 days; but after sixty days, even giving them what they want is only marginally better than not having done anything at all. To keep even the few promises they have made FIDESZ will have to propel us headlong toward bankruptcy, so keeping their promises is likely to arouse just as much anger as not keeping them, since the economic effect will drown every household.
MAY 26
Well, a great deal has happened. Politically, Fidesz won 68% of the vote, and Jobbik won 16% of the vote, barely edged out by the Socialists. Today Parliament passed a law granting citizenship to persons residing in former Hungarian lands in neighboring countries if their parents or grandparents were citizens of Hungary. Slovakia immediately countered by stating that anyone who applied for Hungarian citizenship would be stripped of Slovakian citizenship. Because Slovakia is an EU country, they cannot be deported, because citizens of EU countries can live and work in other countries that are EU members. However, without citizenship they would not be eligible for health insurance. True, they could obtain an EU card in Hungary and use it in Slovakia; but Hungary would end up paying for the health care, not Slovakia. And they definitely would not be eligible for free university education.
We have done a great deal of traveling. We spent a week in Nemesnep, at a timeshare on the Slovenian border. I had been there a couple of years ago, but Anna had not. All the places we went to we went to two years ago, but it was very enjoyable. The following weekend we went to Serbia and Croatia. It was a very good trip with quite breathtaking sights. I had been to Subotica, which is just across the border; but Anna, suprisingly, had never been there. Then the following week we went to Austria to a timeshare sort of near Salzburg, on a lake named Grundlsee. It was a strikingly beautiful place in a stunning setting, and we had a fine view of the lake from our room; but it was cold and rained every day to some extent. Fortunately, there was heat. We lucked up and got so-so weather on our drive to Regensburg, a city with a sizeable medieval quarter in southern Germany. It was cool, but we only had occasional sprinkles. We learned that the weather in Hungary had been, if anything, worse than what we experienced in Austria, with a vicious storm in Budapest. Now we have no plans to go anywhere to speak of before late August, when we go to Heviz with a visitor from USA.
JULY 25
I was to Hamburg to visit my bridge-partner in mid-June. We play on the internet but had never actually met, although we have spoken on the telephone several times. She does not actually live in Hamburg, but in a small town outside the city.
Luckily, she works about eight minutes from home. She is the chief chemist at an industrial paint and lacquer company and is originally from East Germany. I found her a thoroughly charming and amiable woman whose company I enjoyed immensely. She planned out a very interesting program that included concerts in Lubeck and in Hamburg. At the end of June I went to Berlin for several days, my first trip there since 2004. Whereas Hamburg was rainy and cool, Berlin was scorching hot. Almost immediately after my return from Berlin we went to Transylvania for several days. that takes care of our travels until the arrival of Barbara the first weekend of August.
Following some heady comments by various government officials, which included a veiled suggestion that Hungary might default on its debt, followed by an insistence that we need not comply with IMF requirements because we do not need IMF or ECB money, we can borrow on the open market at competitive rates, we have witnessed some fluctuations of the forint that are likely to worsen, since Moodys announced that it would down-rate Hungarian bonds to junk status! This is just fine for me, as I receive money in dollars and must pay for everything here in forints, so if the forint falls against the dollar, then that is the same as cutting prices for me. It now stands at 220HUF=$1 and I expect to see it fall to around 233 when banks open Monday morning,, with a further decrease to about 245 by the end of the week.
The heat has finally abated. Until yesterday it was in the mid-90s; today a cold front came through and it is in the low 70s. We attend a performance of Carmen this coming Friday at the Summer Festival in Szeged. I have seen the symphony schedule for the coming season and it is excellent. The Easter performance will be Bach's St.Matthew Passion, which will be a very great treat, it has been many years since I have attended an actual performance of it. In spite of thunder, no rain, and the sun has come out. A guest will come in a few minutes, so I close and post this. the next one will be at the end of the summer.
