More Ghetto than You!

So, we finally did it. We moved. A new flat... downtown. Our new home is smack dab in the middle of the historic Jewish Ghetto of Budapest, Klauzal tér Its almost overstepping the bounds of stereotype: Klezmer fiddler moves to Klauzal tér (tér means 'square' in Hungarian.) This area is one of the few historically identifiable Jewish neighborhoods left in eastern Europe. In 1944 the area was walled off to form the Budapest ghetto, and some 70,000 Jews were crammed into the buildings to await deportation to the German concentration camps, or, with luck, liberation by the Allied armies.

More ghetto than you!

Our house was once of the designated "Yellow Star houses" in which Jews were made to reside in 1944. But Jewish life is not all about what happened in the past. The Ghetto is still a center of local Jewish life with an Orthodox synagogue down the street, a kosher butcher shop offering the only beef hot dogs in Hungary two minutes away, and Hasids waddling the streets every Friday evening. I hear Yiddish spoken almost daily. We have Jewish bars (good!) and kosher restaurants (bad) and "Jewish style" unkosher restaurants, the best of which, Kadar Étkezde, is now just across the square, where the #2 tram used to run long, long ago.

No longer a convenient destination.

It is also the heart of the "bulinegyed" or Party zone of Budapest, based around the dozen or so "ruin bars" that sprang up squatting in abandoned houses but by now have grown into pricey drink-n-grope meccas for all our loud Australian tourist friends. I have always been connected by work to the Ghetto, but never lived in it. I am definitely going to miss Zuglo, and Fumie and I now consider ourselves proud members of the Zuglo diaspora. I will continue to go shopping at Bosnyak market when the weather permits a bike ride - the supermarkets downtown are all overpriced and pretty limited. I will miss the absurdly corrupt local politicians and the road signs in right-wing runic script. And I will miss watching the newly elected independent district Mayor Gergely Karacsony face off against implied threats of nastiness to come from the previous FIDESZ shitbird who held the post.

A life in boxes.

The actual act of moving our stuff was made easier by simply calling a company - in our case Tutiteher, which provided boxes and returned with three burly guys and a truck and got all our stuff transferred in about five hours for about the price of treating four people to a sushi dinner with beer. Suddenly, I was left in an empty flat, uncluttered with the material evidence of my existence, completely free of stuff. Stuffless. Its what the Buddha was all about!

Where once the happy sound of fiddles sang out... now silence abounds.

When you move, you toss out a lot of stuff. Yesterday's treasure, today's trash. I managed to toss about ten crates of crap. Old letters, old promo stuff from my band, English language magazines from the last century, books with no imaginable reader, cassettes of Albanian folk music bought in what was then still Yugoslavia, old floppy discs that can no longer be read by any machine, dead tape recorders, dead microphones, dead radios, leftover toys from when my son was a five year old, even unusable salt water fishing gear - Jeebus, what was I thinking... Hungary is landlocked!  We had a lot of stuff.

Be it ever so humble...

If any museum curators out there recognize my historical value and wish to accuse me of a crime against future scholars of Bob History, I gladly stand guilty as accused. And I was even more lucky than usual. Instead of worrying about where to put it all, I let Fumie decide. I made a promise to myself that I would not pipe up with any debate to any interior design decision made by her. If she wants to put the rug there, so be it. If she wants to get an Ikea shelf, well, how quickly can we get to Ikea. simple. No conflict. Effective! If you are a male, take my advice and never attempt to make a place look nice. It won't work. Men are, as is often observed nothing more than "bears with furniture."

our new space

We have one large room here which is basically unusable for anything except storage. Its got water stains on the ceiling, a huge antique couch, and art supplies from the landlady, and old furniture we won't be using stored in there. And I am going to attempt to excavate a private space out of that. Right now it is filled  some of our other unnecessary stuff, and most of my instruments. But soon I will make it into my own, my unlivable and unclean-able nook of bagpipe reed making, fly tying, bookbinding, and fiddle repair. It shall become my... Man-cave!

Its completely Boyash City across the way!

The view from the new flat isn't quite the forested vista we had in Zuglo, but at least we get a lot of south facing sun and there is no huge building blocking out the light. And for added delight, ours is the building that was the home of Vili in the 1989 Hungarian animated feature film "Vili a Veréb" - Willie the Sparrow, in which a little boy gets magically turned into a sparrow on Klauzal tér.