Political/social stuff no one else is interested in...

I feel like the comments are stopping... You people should do something about that.

OK so I've been talking to different people, and learning, you know, things and stuff:

1) Foster care in Hungary
The foster care system in Hungary is even more fucked up than the one in the United States. A lot of kids are placed in these dormitories (the girl I was talking to kept referring to them as colleges, but I think this is what she means), places that make group homes look like livin' it up. Some kids live there from birth until they turn 18, and this is often not because there's no one who wants to adopt them, but because there's so much red tape that kids constantly get lost in the system.

At these dormitories, one nurse has 20 kids/babies to tend to, and this is the closest thing to a parental figure that any of the kids grow up with. There's a similar teacher-to-kid ratio, and I got the impression that they all go to school together instead of being integrated into schools with kids in normal family situations. I didn't have time to ask too many questions because the bus was leaving. In any case I'm sure these schools get about as much funding as my toe.

Anyway a huge segment of kids who can't get adopted are gypsies, the largest minority in Hungary and the most discriminated against. There are about 10 million people living in Hungary, and half a million of them are gypsies. But gypsies are often poor, many live without water and electricity, and people tend to stay out of their parts of town.

2) Healthcare in Hungary/Poland
Doctors in both Poland and Hungary generally get paid shit. But in France at least, money is still among the benefits to becoming a doctor (the other is prestige). Since France has universal healthcare, the way these doctors make money is through tips. Huge tips. This means if you have a $20,000 operation, you tip $5,000. If you don't, next time you get sick... well, just don't get sick again.

That's why there's a push to privatize healthcare in Hungary, to reel in the money-grubbing doctors, but we all know that presents a whole new set of problems.

So basically, it seems that even with universal healthcare, the poor people are the ones getting screwed. I feel like the system in England is better, though... UK Paul, any thoughts?

3) Education in France
Teachers in France who work in the poorer public schools actually get paid more than the ones who work at middle-class schools. Initially, that sounded like a really good idea to me because I thought the bad schools might be able to retain good teachers and sort of narrow the gap.

But it doesn't work that way.

The young teachers generally work at the poorer schools because that's the only job they can get, and then they move on as quickly as they can. Since salary is based on a sort of sliding scale (similar to how they do it in California, with increases based on experience and education, but in France it also takes into account the neighborhood of the school), young teachers are able to move to wealthier schools and not lose money because their salary increases with experience anyway.

In France you get your first sort of degree at 14, then at 16 and then the high school diploma at 18, and at the poorer schools only about 5 percent of kids even receive the first degree.

So...
I guess that's it for my social issues. I'd elaborate more but a) I'm limited in time, b) I don't want to bore you *too* much, and c) I don't know all that much about this stuff, since all my conversations have been relatively short and I couldn't learn everything I wanted to.

But if you're interested (haha), you can always look it up and tell me more stuff.

And finally...
I never told my arriving-in-Budapest story and I feel it merits a short blurb.

I took an overnight train from Prague and arrived an hour late, which stressed me out because for the first time this trip, someone was actually meeting with me at a tram stop. I hate doing this because things always go wrong and I'd rather have as much time as I need, since there are always delays and I often run into problems when I get into a new country.

So I got to the train station, all stressed out and grumpy anyway since I never sleep well on the overnight trains, and I needed to withdraw money from the ATM. Hungary uses forints and I was coming from the Czech Republic, which uses crowns. Well the first ATM I found, on the train platform (I knew that was too easy) was locked in a glass box. Then I found one downstairs, but it spit my card back out at me and said I couldn't use it since I wasn't a customer of a specific bank. I finally walked a couple of blocks out of the station and found one. But at this point I was so flustered that I wasn't thinking straight and couldn't figure out how much to withdraw (one forint is about 200 dollars). Suddenly I felt pressured to choose an amount, so I pushed a button and immediately became terrified that I'd withdrawn the equivalent of 1,000 euros (I hadn't, but it took me a few hours before I was sure of this). Now the thing about ATMs in Europe is they tend to give you the Biggest Bills Possible.

So now I had a 20,000-forint bill.

I waited in line at the ticket booth for the metro, placed my 20,000-forint bill in the little spinny thing that allows you to pass things through the glass window, and acted out "one ticket" for her. She promptly pointed to the bill, spun it back to me and sternly said NO, or whatever the Hungarian equivalent of 'no' is.

I tried to tell her this was all I had, but she a) didn't understand and b) didn't care. So I then tried to act out, "Where can I get change?" But she just kept saying NO and then punched some numbers into her calculator, apparently to show me NO. After telling me NO a couple more times she brushed me off and called for the next person in the line, which was not a short line.

Well, I was frustrated. And grumpy. And at this point very, very indignant.

So I bitched her out. Screamed at her, cursed at her (of course, she understood none of it, and still really didn't care), and in the course of my little rampage spun the spinny-thing as hard as I could while yelling "FUCKING BITCH!" and really hurt my nail.

Then I stormed off.

And was actually so stirred up that it took about 20 minutes (about as long as it took for me to figure out where to get change) to become really embarrassed by how ridiculous I'd been. I actually tried to change my appearance when I went back again half an hour later to buy my metro ticket with a smaller bill, but she'd been so indifferent throughout the whole process that she wouldn't have recognized me anyway.

So that's my story...