"Intellectual toursim" and flight delays

We continue to await SP's arrival. After having to reschedule her flight twice due to illness, she showed up at the airport yesterday only to find out that her flight was cancelled due to some problems with UA not meeting a deadline for inspections. Her flight was bumped by a day, and then, cancelled again this morning. Now, she is scheduled to arrive on Friday at 2:30 pm, pretty much just as our research program ends. Fortunately, we still have the weekend and most of next week for her to see a bit of Budapest. We'll also go out to the country-side Mon-Tues, and visit an alcohol rehab hospital there (returning just in time to see La Boheme at the Grand Opera House).

SB coined the term "intellectual tourism" for what we've been doing the past week, and it's rather accurate. We both agree that it is a unique and really interesting way to see a country and try to get to know the culture. We meet interesting people we would have never met otherwise, and have conversations with them that one rarely has with the locals when visiting a place, and get a unique picture into their culture. I have no doubts that much gets lost in translation and often. At the same time, I've definitely come to realize that the differences between Hungarian and Polish cultures are fairly subtle, and though I'm no longer very Polish myself, their way of seeing and reacting to the world still feels natural and understandable to me. Though on the outside, I don't think the Poles and Hungarians and other Easter Europeans are very different from Americans - basic customs and interactions apply, especially since the last 20 years of globalization. At the same time some of the cultural subtleties are still there, and the Poles and Hungarians - with a history of the same wars, the same predominant religion, and the same recent 50 years of a totalitarian regime (with the propaganda, schooling and indoctrination it brought - are really remarkably similar.

Anyway, it is all still very interesting, sitting in psychiatrists, psychologists, and other physicians offices, talking about what they do and what they think about the Hungarian health system, the problem of alcoholism, and the recent political changes.

Yesterday, we had another interesting day. In the morning, we visited a small private house that had been convereted into a voluntary alcohol rehabilitation center (12 beds), run by a psychiatrist, director and assistant. It was on the outskirts of Budapest, next to the frequently used railroad tracks, and it took us nearly 30 minutes to get there by car (with a good tour of the more industrial and residential parts of Budapest). The people greeted us enthusiastically, with juice and cookies, and the director of our international program who had driven us there also translated all of our conversations. (Many people educated in the communist system era - over 35 or so- do not speak English here, and everyone younger pretty much does. So far, we had mostly met with psychiatrtrists and professors of the bilingual Semmelweis University, so translators had not been necessary.)

The rehabilitation house followed a traditional model of alcohol rehab from the US - "the Minnesota Model", and patients stayed in the house for 6 weeks with daytime group and individual therapy, and then returned to their homes and communities and continued to follow up with therapy and AA meetings. The program, though very small (they only had 3 patients while we were there, which was really surpising) had success rates of up to 50% (patients who continued to participate in AA and remain sober for more than a year). The high success rates were probably at least partially due to the fact that the patients were all self-selected (voluntarily found the organization and chose to participate), had to commit with a sliding-scale fee, and probably had good family and social support.

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Shoot! Not finished, but have to go catch the metro for our next appointment. will continue soon.