Erick’s Blog

We've spent the last week with my parents at their place near Sacramento.  We're packing up a bunch of things we've stored at their house this past year and are going to be loading up a Uhaul truck tomorrow.  On Monday we drive up to Portland and are really looking forward to seeing my sister, brother in law and their kids and setting up our condo.  We've found a number of great furniture items on Craiglist and will really be set without spending much money at all.

I saw the very fun and well-done Iron Man movie last night with my younger brother Matthew.  Ivy and I rented and watched "The Kingdom" a few nights ago via itunes and liked this a lot too.  (It's about an FBI investigation of a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia.  Good, thought-provoking message--especially at the end after all the action.)  Ivy and I really love movies.

Over the next two months I have the honor of being in two weddings for good friends Jesse and Stacey.  (Strangely enough, both of these guys have unisex names...)   Jesse's wedding is in the San Francisco Bay Area and Stacey's is in North Carolina.

Pacific Northwest here we come. 

Yesterday we heard some terrible news.  Tragedy struck our extended family up in Portland and our hearts go out to the immediate family that have to endure what is unimaginably horrible.  A healthy, beautiful young mother of 35 with a two year old at home and who is five months pregnant has been diagnosed--out of the blue--with terminal cancer.  We're praying for them and this has opened our eyes up to genuine suffering and the beauty and brevity of life.

A week ago Ivy and I went hiking up in some hills just outside of Budapest.  We always have good conversations when we go on a long walk or hike though quite often I'm constantly posing questions.  Sometimes I probably should give her a break.  A sampling from last Saturday:

"So when did you first start liking me?"
Answer: "Well...I can't remember not liking you."

"Do you think there are aliens creatures out there in space?"
Answer: "Hmmm.  Maybe there are other worlds filled with humans, rather than weird creatures."
Me: "Very interesting--I like that."

"Under the Frog" is the name of a powerful book Agi and I both just read.  The cover describes it as a "black comedy."  The author (Tibor Fischer) was born in Britain to Hungarian parents who escaped from the Russians in the big Hungarian Revolution of 1956.  He's essentially a British guy but did live in Budapest for two years as a journalist right before the Wall fell and published this book three years later.

He's also one of the most talented writers I've ever read and you could say his sense of humor is devastating--kind of like Kurt Vonnegut.  Agi heard me laughing out loud all the time as I went through it.  I probably wouldn't have loved the book as much if I hadn't lived here but I'd recommend it nonetheless.  It was shortlisted for the Man-Booker prize (the top British and Commonwealth book) back in 1993.

It's pretty amazing in my opinion to be able to call the US from Europe so cheaply with skype.  Inexpensive phone calls, along with the unprecedented scope & power of the internet, are helping us big-time with our efforts to live internationally.

In the last few days from here in Budapest we:  reserved a rental car, found a good dentist in Portland and set up an appointment, reserved a Uhaul truck, called Tech Support for our website a couple times and of course emailed friends and family.  Also, Agi's boss simply calls her on the "skype in" number we've set up (a Portland number that is forwarded to her cell phone here) when they need to talk.  Overall, the sound quality is pretty good with skype.

Something else that I recently signed up for--and am excited about--is "Earth Class Mail."  It's basically a high-tech address and mailbox, perfect for Agi and me.  We've been having my wonderful parents and sister check our mail when it comes in.  This is kind of cumbersome for them and we can't see the important mail ourselves (e.g. those nasty tax forms).  With this new "Earth Class Mail" service, all our mail is now being sent to an address in Oregon and it's scanned for us.  I can now view it all online, have it recycled or shredded or forwarded if necessary.  The founders of the company are robotics experts so that explains how they do it efficiently.

Finally, I read last week on the BBC website about "The Grid."  I hadn't heard of this before--it's basically a bunch of high-powered computers connected with fiber-optic cables that is much faster than the internet.  Apparently The Grid may one day actually replace the internet.  Scientists at universities are already using it a lot.  The article said it takes 1.5 seconds to download a movie over The Grid.  Amazing.

I read a good article today called "Professor Happiness--The Interview.   The professor wrote a book called "Stumbling on Happiness" that I just added to my list.  What he says rings true to me:

"Another thing we know from studies is that people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. So if you have "x" amount of dollars to spend on a vacation or a good meal or movies, it will get you more happiness than a durable good or an object. One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and objects usually aren't... People think a car will last and that's why it will bring you happiness. But it doesn't. It gets old and decays. But experiences don't. You'll "always have Paris" — and that's exactly what Bogart meant when he said it to Ingrid Bergman. But will you always have a washing machine? No."

He also indirectly talks about the "law of diminishing returns" (a helpful Econ 101 topic) in regards to money.  He says, "The data says that with the poor, a little money can buy a lot of happiness. If you're rich, a lot of money can buy you a little more happiness."

Agi and I talk a lot about how communism was simply terrible for Hungarians.  No country or economic system is perfect (market-based capitalism has many problems) but communism was horrendously flawed mainly because it was fundamentally unfair.  Hard-working, talented, productive people were not rewarded for their excellence while mediocre, unproductive people thrived.  The slackers basically lived off the superior efforts of the good workers by re-directing money to themselves--although this was characterized as giving resources to "the people."  You can immediately see why--with these incentives--a country would quickly become unproductive.  However, there were still rich people under communism.  The rich people were the communist party leaders and Orwell, in Animal Farm, summed up their hypocrisy brilliantly:  "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Having this context in mind when living here is crucial to understand why the government is still very inefficient, many "re-habilitated ex-communist" leaders are still corrupt and incompetent, and many Hungarian workers (especially those in their forties and fifties) still adhere to the old communist philosophy: I'll pretend to work while you pretend to pay me. 

And yet this post has a happy ending because I mainly wanted to highlight that things ARE changing for the better.  An excellent case study for this is Agi's brother's wife's dad: Bela.  Bela is a great man who has been a fantastic father and who has built up a company that operates with exceptional integrity.  Ever since the Wall fell, his company (which builds office buildings and houses) has done great work and his reputation for excellence has grown.  He tells each worker that if something isn't perfect, the worker needs to tear it down and start over.  He also only hires guys that don't smoke (because it's truly amazing all the smoke breaks that people take...) and he's been a mentor to many of his young workers regarding how to be a better husband and how to invest their earnings and save up.

Under communism, Bela could not thrive as he is now.  It's encouraging when you see good people rise to the top.  And Bela recently congratulated himself with one of these.

We watched a great imax movie tonight on the International Space Station.  Amazing facts: it orbits the earth every 90 minutes and is traveling at 17,000 miles per hour.  Unfortunately, we didn't see any aliens aboard nor Sigourney Weaver.

We saw "Touching the Void" the other night--an amazing documentary that describes how a young British climber survived a terrible ordeal that would have left most other people dead.  Joe and his climbing buddy Simon went to Peru about fifteen years ago to scale a difficult mountain.  They made it up but then on the way down Joe broke his leg badly right at the knee--incredibly painful.  Simon did his best to help his friend down the mountain by lowering him down 75 feet at a time.  Unfortunately Joe slipped off a cliff, was dangling there helpless and held up only by the rope connected to Simon.  After an hour and a half with both of them in bad shape (a freezing blizzard was going on too), Simon decided to cut the rope or be pulled down himself.

But the story is just getting started.  Joe falls into a crevasse, survives, crawls out and then down the mountain over the next three days with little water and no food.  He loses a third of his body weight in the process. The documentary interviews both Joe and Simon and they give a very candid and eloquent description of what happened and what they were thinking.  Joe's tenacity is inspiring.  He's the Churchill of mountaineering.

Yesterday we took a small commuter train (the "hev") up to a picturesque town north of Budapest called Szentendre (which means "St Andrew").  We brought our books and I finished the very enlightening Guns, Germs and Steel.  Agi and I have been bringing up different points made in this book for the last couple of weeks--it's easy to do because the author touches on an incredibly wide range of subjects.  My conclusion is that this is one of the most remarkable, powerful and illuminating books I've ever read.  It's as if my understanding of a huge number of issues was covered in a hazy fog and he lifted it (or at least part of it).  Here are some of the key questions and issues he hits upon:

- When did civilization start? (About 13,000 years ago.  And in honor of finishing this book Agi and I saw the very entertaining 10,000 BC last night.  I liked it a lot more than she did.  The woolly mammoths are amazing).

- Why did civilization start? (Formal food production by farmers allowed specialization of skills and then required forms of government.  Hunter-gatherers are basically egalitarian in nature but then in order to organize everything as you grow, you move to tribes, then bands, then chiefdoms, then kingdoms then nations then empires.)

- Why did Eurasians become dominant, and not, for example, Native Americans?  (Very briefly, the best plants and animals that could be domesticated existed in the fertile crescent, right near the Mediterranean.  Domesticating plants like wheat and sheep for clothes and food and horses for transportation allowed Eurasian society to develop and grow in population.  Living with or near animals and with many other people caused very vicious germs to develop.  Europeans eventually developed something of a resistance to these germs, but the native Americans didn't have this resistance and so were wiped out by smallpox,etc. when the Euros arrived.  Their horses and guns were crucial too in killing off and conquering the native Americans.

- Why didn't the Chinese develop into the dominant cultural and geographic power, rather than Western Europeans? (Though the Chinese are on their way)   This was very interesting: the reason why is that they may have been too centrally unified, unlike the Western Europeans who were constantly competing with each other for power.  The Chinese were involved in overseas exploration until the 1300s or 1400s I believe but then their emperor decided to shut that off and turn inward instead.  As a result, the Euros continued to compete for power and grow technologically.  Europe has been a volatile region with lots of horrible wars and colonization--but it's also produced remarkable inventions, art and culture.

All right--that's enough!  Also, if you're at all interested in this topic but don't want to read the whole book, simply go to Borders some evening and read the final chapter where he summarizes everything.

Here's some pictures from Szentendre.