I’ve been in Budapest for just over four months, seeing autumn into an unseasonably and certainly unCanadianly mild winter. Though my Hungarian language skills are still lacking, I don’t consume nearly enough pork (i.e. almost none) to manage Hungarian dishes, and my Hungarian travels outside of Budapest number only two, I have been soaking in the ebb and flow of Hungarian life. In these days, I’ve begun to distill a few things that are, to me, uniquely Hungarian.
You Say Goodbye, and I Say Hello
But we both mean ‘see you later’. I did a number of double takes as I would leave a shop or a restaurant and say “goodbye” or “viszlát”, and they would reply with “hello!”. In Hungarian, the greeting ‘szia!’ is similar to ciao and aloha in that it can be used for greeting or parting. Hungarians have adopted the most popular English-language greeting ‘hello’ into their own daily language with the same dual use. Though it takes some getting used to, it makes it really easy to pretend I speak Hungarian when entering anywhere in Budapest.
