27 August 2010

Hungarians

I had dinner with a Hungarian friend of mine today. It was pretty great; I made dal (red lentils, ginger, garlic, cloves, cardamom, pepper, tomatoes, and some peanut oil, topped with yoghurt and mint leaves). There were supposed to be other people there, but they had to cancel. So I had dinner with a Hungarian friend of mine, who I met at a Couchsurfing language meeting, and who works at a Hungarian tourist bureau in Berlin. He's a pretty cool guy.

Mostly, the conversation was not too terribly unusual. I, as is fairly normal, did a lot of the talking. But then we came to the topic of The Treaty of Versailles. And my Hungarian friend has a lot more opinions about the Treaty of Versailles than I do. The Treaty of Versailles, you understand, deprived Hungary of half its land and half its population. Most of this land was predominantly ethnically Hungarian. Many Hungarians, including my friend, have relatives in these places. My friend is pretty okay with the loss of Croatia--there aren't Hungarians there anyway. But he is still embittered about the loss of Transylvania, and he is also annoyed at Slovakia for refusing to allow dual Hungarian-Slovakian citizenship for its ethnic Hungarian minority. I get where the dude is coming from. But I was still surprised.

Also! Today I started buying furniture for my room. I put down a deposit on a bed, and I bought a small bedside table. Craigslist is a beautiful thing. I'm going to check it right now...

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