Magyarorszagon!

It appears that since my last post I have traveled ¾ around the world, crossing both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on my way to Hungary--we have a lot of catching up to do! I’m currently in Pecs, a typical Central European town of 150,000 in the south of the country with plenty of pedestrian zones, designer stores (why is it that there’s a Mango store in the smallest European town, while in the States even Boston doesn’t have one?) fruit and vegetable markets, crumbling Soviet bloc apartment buildings, and bureaucratic quirks that make you sigh in desperation. Every country has its own special way of making simple things incredibly complicated; it seems that someone in Hungary decided that buying a cell phone was unnecessarily easy. After all wouldn’t it be ridiculous if anyone could go into a T-Mobile store, buy a cell phone in 15 minutes, and not even give the store their mother’s maiden name? Apparently the telephone companies noticed that cell phone speculation turned in a tidy profit and decided to prevent these clever entrepreneurs from buying too many cell phones. Now foreigners cannot purchase a cell phone without registering their residence with the local authorities. If you show up with a Hungarian friend, however, they will sell you a cell phone in your friend’s name, unless he has already bought more than one cell phone in the past 6 months. Fortunately for me I had already purchased my cell phone in Thailand (where the process is a lot simpler), so all I needed was a SIM card. After much deliberation the T-Mobile store agreed to sell me one even though my address wasn’t registered, but they did copy down all the information in my passport (even clarifying where exactly in Russia I was born since my passport doesn’t give the city), and after asking for my mother’s full maiden name made me sign 6 different sheets of paper (only Szent Istvan knows what they said!). So just an hour after first going into the store I had a Hungarian cell phone number! And the people at the International Studies Center told me I shouldn’t even try it without a Hungarian!

But please don’t judge Hungary too harshly; America may have less bureaucracy, but it takes the people at Radio Shack in Watertown at least an hour to upgrade phone plans anyway. Also, any country with food this good should be allowed a few flaws.