The Magyar Memoir- Part 3 (Szeged)

Sík Sándor Hostel

My fellow teachers and I lived between the farmers' market and the historic downtown square in a big house donated to the city by a wealthy family upon their passing. It had since been turned into a extended stay boarding house of sorts. Six of the original seven teachers lived there. We thought it would only be us, yet we discovered that there were many more residence than expected. Perhaps as many as ten Hungarian medical students also bunked with us, but they kind of came and went like ghosts sometimes bringing girlfriends or friends to stay with them (us) for days on end, then they would disappear with or without their guests for just as many days. Honestly we didn't know who actually lived there as compared to those people just randomly squatting, but everyone was nice and offered us food and drink upon our first meeting. The strangers were actually more social than the permanent residents and included us in their conversations and backyard smoke laden drunken gatherings in the gazebo, which they called "the octagon". Therefore, all were welcome as far as we were concerned.

I lived on the top floor, under the eaves, and under a tree which meant lots of mosquitoes and bugs crawling through the sky light. My room was also one of the warmest rooms in the house, which wasn't nice during the heatwave that was occurring throughout the entire summer of 2007 in Hungary. I'm fairly certain my bed had bedbugs, as I woke up sometimes looking as if I had passed out in a field based on the number of new bits and marks I had acquired overnight, other than that it was superb.

The house itself was strange in that the layout made no sense. We were constantly discovering new rooms, like when we found a mini chapel off the library, complete with an alter. The library was where the teacher gathered most often. It had books from floor to it's high ceiling. It was the type of library you would expect in an Edger Allen Poe story. Perhaps that would be too complimentary, maybe more like in the haunted mansion at Disneyland before the remodel, because it was kind of 70s as far as style and furniture. There was a record console, with a few nice records, we often would spin a little Bartók, or a Beatles dubbed into Hungarian was always fun. We would drink our fountain water, and court the other residents to help us get the ancient internet server up and running. We would plan our lessons and joke about who was going to quit first, and who would be voted off the island first. ( We had a clear idea of who that would be, and made mention of this person often). It seemed eminent that any of us would be going home at given times, since we were working so hard, for so little money, and there was so much we wanted to see and do in Hungary, which was hindered by our work schedule, and frequent unannounced impromptu meetings. There were reoccurring allusions to a joint fantasy, which involved running away to Romania in the night and drinking $1 beer all day at a lake and getting a killer sun tan.

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