Sliding doors
It’s a funny thing living it two cities, one week here, the next week there. As I walk to work in London I think ‘was I really living Budapest last week?’ and vice versa. This way of living engenders the feeling of a double-life. Almost as if when in once place, the other is a dream or past-memory. Am I two different people? (No, you idiot, you’re the same person living in two cities, though now you’re having a conversation with your/myself who knows?). Anyway, it’s the subtle similarities, which bring the difference home, like taking the metro or tube. Same activity, different experience. People look different, are dressed differently, and the stations even smell different (the presence of bakeries in Budapest metro stations give the dusty air a home-baked sweetness). It is standing on the Budapest metro that I feel like a Londoner, out-of-place, not tourist, not local. Otherwise with the passage of time the newness of Budapest fades, the flirting over, the wonder diminished, but replaced with the joys of familiarity and knowledge. There is always something unusual that crosses my day in Budapest and the puzzle of the language presents itself on shop-fronts and advertising boards like hieroglyphs. But now what surprises me is how normal it is to be here, how commonplace my walk home, that my brain begins to merge the two and I could be living in a fantasy part of London where they for some reason rounded up all the Hungarians.
And it’s a curious thing the transformation of place to home. For example, when talking about places in Hungary i.e. home, Hungarians use a certain ending to words. When talking about any other place in the world it’s a different ending. Basically its I’m ‘on’ hungary, ‘on’ Budapest, whilst I’m ‘in’ London, ‘in’ Paris etc. My Hungarian teacher told me about Hungarian emigrants living in the USA, who adapted this notion of home, so over time the ones who came from Boston would say they’re ‘on’ Boston, ‘on’ Pittsburgh, but ‘in’ for everywhere else. The magyarocentric view transplanted with new roots.
