Moving back to Hungary from China
It’s been a long time since I haven’t posted here, so I will make a short update here. I moved back to Europe, Hungary this month, so I want to write about some of the reverse culture shocks I experienced, the things that were new to me, OpenStreetMap and my planning of the Camino de Santiago.
Reverse culture shock and new things to me in Hungary
Since I haven’t spent this much time in Hungary in a long time, there were some details about our culture that I have just realized now. One of these things is that we Hungarians are quite formal in the spoken language when talking to strangers or to older people. Meaning that we say hello and goodbye using formal words and address the other formally (formal he/she with corresponding conjugation). Comparably, I felt that spoken Chinese (and English) was much more informal, although maybe my language knowledge was the bottleneck there.
Perhaps because of the recent inflation figures but I also noted that complaining about high prices frequently emerged in several situations. Also discussing how those high prices are unreasonable and just the result of the greediness of the business. Chinese people stereotypically complain about high prices, well it seems we also do.
Another thing that surprised me was: the prevalence of paid restrooms. After the abundance of free public restrooms in China, this is quite a shocking development. The usual explanation is that at least the cleanliness is better this way, which is mostly true but I think the state or local government could also open free public restrooms too. Only the political will is missing.
Not as interesting maybe in itself but I found out about Vinted, a second hand buying/selling platform and application which became popular recently. In my opinion buying second hand items is a good way to combat capitalism, consumerism and climate change. It is definitely more sustainable than the other “new” app Temu.
I was also surprised to find the large range of vegan products that provide alternatives to the ingredients used in Hungarian dishes. Such as vegan sour cream, spreads, butter, “túró rudi”, topping cream and so on…
“Kaláka” - joint voluntary work
I learned this Hungarian word “kaláka” in elementary school or so. It notes the idea of when family, friends or neighbors come together to work voluntarily together on something. When I was a kid, I thought this is a thing of the past but as I think back of my childhood I can think of several memories that could be examples of this. And this is also what I happened to get into during the first week of my return to Hungary. That is, I helped my friend to lay the new wooden floor in the home of his girlfriend’s mom.
Contributing to OpenStreetMap
Already when I was in China, I was thinking about contributing to OpenStreetMap (OSM, an open source map), only to find out that that is illegal to do so as a foreigner. So when I got back home I was eager to try the app called StreetComplete which allows one to contribute to OSM without any experience with OSM. My motivation to contribute to OSM came from the will to get independent from large US-based basically-monopolies like Google.
Planning my trip to the Camino de Santiago
There are many online resources that tell you what to pack, how to prepare for the Camino de Santiago. However, I want to share a bit different part of it here. Namely, how to get to the starting point (Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, route francés) sustainably and for cheap from Budapest, as in my case. Usually trains have the lowest carbon footprint, followed by buses then flights have the highest CO2 equivalent emissions1.
As a comparison for prices, there is a direct RyanAir flight from Budapest to Toulouse for around 40 euros or 80 with one luggage. The Hungarian railways has quite a few international connections as of now. There are two relevant to me: one going to Stuttgart or nearby and another one going to Zürich. Cheapest (seat, not bed) tickets for night trains cost 39 euros for both. Continuing my journey with train would have turned out to be quite expensive though. The route would be something like Stuttgart to Paris to Bayonne to St-Jean-Pied-de-Port for around 240-280 euros (french trains can be fast and expensive at the same time). It is true that there are cheaper train tickets in France, but then I would need to travel for several days and it still wouldn’t be too cheap because of the accommodation costs. That’s when I found that there is a direct bus from Zürich to Orthez (near the starting point of el Camino) for as low as 60 euros. That summed up would cost be 100-120 euros to get to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port sustainably. Although the bus takes 18 hours, that is the route I will try to take.