BY NATALIE BOWLUS

In print | Published April 24, 2008

This column is terribly challenging to write. It’s my last of the semester and, what with my brutal rejection from Lonely Planet (What gives? Don’t they think I’m qualified to write about Eastern Europe after living there for four and a half months in conjunction with a study abroad program? Do they not think I’ve published enough already? I wrote for the Swarthmore College Phoenix! For an entire semester! I demand to be reconsidered), this might be the last ever. EVER.

Actually, this close to the end of school it’s hard not to think of everything in Apocalyptic terms. I’m graduating in five weeks and my future is one mega neon question mark with a cherry on top. I had one job interview and was subsequently rejected. This made me understand why thirty three point three three repeating percent of my friends are charging directly to grad school without passing Go or collecting two hundred dollars. At this point, academia is about the only thing I feel qualified for, professional Snood and/or math trivia excluded. Not that a travel column is an appropriate place to vent my anxiety, but since I’m not trying to impress anyone anymore (damn you, Lonely Planet! I don’t even use your lame-o travel guides!) (This is like being the bitter, spurned ex except worse, because I don’t have their address so I can’t do late-night drive-bys), I figured I might as well go ahead and share.

Leaving Hungary felt similarly Apocalyptic, if not to quite the same degree (one point to me for a tenuous segue). It was at least three weeks of worrying whether or not each late-night bus ride or gyro would be my last, three weeks where I couldn’t have any real fun because I had to spend all my time doing all the things that I was pretty sure I couldn’t live without once I left the country and even the times when I was supposed to be having fun, I was never sure I was having as much fun as I should be having.

During one of those last weekends, while my friends were off in Prague or some other far-off outpost of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, an acquaintance of mine came in from Berlin. She was largely self-sufficient, which was good because, for the record, I am a terrible host (I am also a terrible doctor). It was also two days before I took the exam that would determine my entire grade for Real Analysis (it was bad, if you’re curious).

But there was one Saturday when I wasn’t in class and she wasn’t going on any walking tours, so we decided we should team up and I should put my expert knowledge of my adopted homeland to the test. Making an executive decision that was in no way colored by my enjoyment of wine, I chose to take her to Eger.

Like most of Hungary’s other excitements, Eger is not nearly so nice in winter as it is in late August. Nonetheless, we soldiered on: first to a tacky restaurant decorated entirely with taxadermied animals (my personal favorite being a hare standing upright, dressed like a leprechaun and bearing a shotgun), where we ate scrumptious game. I hope our dinners were not part of the décor, but I can’t be sure. Next we proceeded on to the Valley of Beautiful Women.

We really had every intention of moving from the Valley to the center of town in an hour or two, and we were on-track until we made the mistake of bypassing the more commercial and impersonal wine cellars for one that was literally a hole in the wall with an open door. It had all the markers of gritty authenticity: damp, moldy walls, no decoration to speak of apart from the casks themselves and no customers other than a handful of middle-aged Hungarian men.

To make a long story short, what was originally a 20-minute visit stretched into four or five hours of extended conversations consisting of two-syllable words and mime and countless glasses of wine pipetted directly out of a cask. I learned how wine is made and I sampled raw horse radish from the pile of root vegetables conveniently stacked next to some casks. You never know when you’ll be hungry, I guess. At the end of the evening, one of the two gentlemen still left offered us a ride back to the station so that we might catch the last train back to Budapest. I remember him slowly meandering through the suburbs that night, giggling at me and apologizing with the explanation, “Kicsit alcohol.” Driving in a car with anybody after four months of public transportation was surreal, but even more than that was the sense that I had come back to where I had started from. Goodnight, Hungary.

Natalie is a senior. You can reach her a nbowlus1@swarthmore.edu.

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