Hungary From an American Point of View
by Currently I am on a year long exchange in Hungary. The culture here is quite different and the language is one of the hardest in the world. Just for the sake of those who are interested in hearing the differences between certain cultures, I created this article.
I have been living in Hungary for over four months now and I have seen a lot of things that have been very different from my small home town in the US. There are three topics that I would like to bring to your attention to in explaining these differences. These topics are food, traditions and communication.
Food
In my opinion Americans should be the most well prepared nation to experience another country’s normal foods. As I have explained to people here in Hungary, the US was a created nation from the grouping and immigration of other nations. We may have started out a primarily British originated country, but over the years we have been the refuge of other nationalities do to our ‘free’ and sometimes ‘equal’ policies. So when these people came to our country, they brought there foods with them. This naturally morphed our country into having sort of a compilation of foods from different nationalities. In my home we primarily eat a lot of Irish and Italian style cooking (because our family’s cultural back rounds), but I still have eaten from a lot of other styles as well.
So with that said, the normal foods of Hungary I am pretty much well prepared for. The biggest meal of the day is lunch (as opposed to dinner for us). The typical lunch almost always starts with soup, which can range from a chicken to a cabbage base. It is also very common to top off the soup with sour cream or chill pepper. Then is the main coarse of usually meat and a side (Rice or potatoes). And finally some kind of desert, usually cakes. On a comical note, some Hungarian cakes I would classify as cookies, but when explained to me what kind of cake it is in English, they will almost always avoid using the word ‘cookie’. That is because the the word in Hungarian refers to an abnormally small piece of male genitalia. The other meals of the day are more like snacks, and I often find myself eating a sandwich.
The weirder things that I have seen or eaten are just a little bit harder to get down though. Hungarians like to put toppings on EVERYTHING. The most known instance of this is putting ketchup and mayonnaise on their pizza. Hungarians also eat some of the less desirable parts of animals as well. I have eaten pig ears, pig toes, chicken hearts, and chicken livers. But there are also things like bulls penis, cow eyeballs, horse sausage, and chicken testicles. The absolute weirdest thing I had here was this kind of gelatin that contain the ears a toes of a pig.
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