Posted by Erik Bolt, January 10, 2009.

Jo napot kívanok*, blog readers,

This spring, it will be seven years since I last won a National Geographic Bee competition, so quite a lot has happened since my direct involvement in the Bee came to a close. For those who don’t know me, I represented Indiana in the 2001 and 2002 NGBs and made a bigger splash in 2006 with another geography competition, the AAA Travel High School Challenge, which tragically is no longer running. I’m a junior in college now, and no, I’m not a geography major, but once the pursuit of geography takes hold of you, it never lets go. My major instead is Classical Studies, in which I study the complete package of Greco-Roman civilization – the study of historical geography is still a substantial part of my life.

Geography is important to anyone who wants to be a responsible citizen and steward of the world we live in, because knowing about the locations and histories of other cultures and countries is essential to understanding the people who live in them. Of course, anyone who has won a state Geographic Bee and gone to the nationals knows more than the basic information about each country in the world; we probably know not only their names, locations, and capitals, but also their mountain ranges and rivers, their ethnic groups and languages, and the important events that have shaped them. But sometimes, geography can seem like a lot of empty trivia if we forget why it’s worth learning. Every place in the inhabited world, no matter how far away it is or how weird its name sounds, is somewhere where real people live. That may sound obvious, but it comes to mean something more with more experience traveling. When you read about a place in a book, you might think that living there would be a lot like living “here”, just with different scenery. When you actually visit a place and run into people who live there, you get more of a sense of what it would really be like to live there. Probably most of us know that from experience.

Actually living somewhere else, however, is more educational than any amount of studying. That’s why I took my first chance at studying abroad, during the first half of my sophomore year. For three and a half months from late August to mid-December 2007, I lived in Budapest, Hungary, and saw firsthand what living in a very different place is like. Many Americans have been to Budapest on vacation – perhaps quite a few of you reading this blog have been there – but living in the city, week after week, making it into the place you identify with, sinks its teeth into you more than a vacation can. I did not learn to speak Hungarian fluently, but I did learn how to think like a Hungarian, to live like a Hungarian. It’s hard to explain much more clearly than that; cultural immersion is something you have to do. The point is, knowing about geography is good, but experiencing geography firsthand is even better.

• So, some little tidbits about Hungary, in descending order of obviousness:
• Hungary is in central Europe, between Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria
• The capital is Budapest, which formed from the merger of Buda (on the west side of the Danube) and Pest (on the east side). Buda is hilly and Pest is flat
• The “s” in “Budapest” is pronounced like a “sh” in English
• The Danube, the longest European river outside of Russia, splits Hungary pretty much in half
• Hungary was about twice as big as it currently is before World War I. Most of the lost territory is in Romania today. It’s known as Transylvania, but Hungarians traditionally call it Erdely
• Hungarians are known as Magyars in their own language, which is called Magyarul. The “gy” is pronounced like the “dg” in “budget” or “fudge”, so it’s more like “mah-jar” than “mag-yar”
• Lake Balaton, in the western part of Hungary, is one of the biggest lakes in Europe outside of Russia. It’s surrounded by beaches and spas
• Hungarians are ethnically and linguistically separate from all other Europeans except Finns. The Magyars arrived in 895 AD from modern Kazakhstan, and were distantly related to the Huns and the Mongolian tribes
• Like in China, Japan, and Korea, a person’s name in Hungary is written with the family name first and the personal name second
• The Romans conquered about two-thirds of modern Hungary and founded the city of Aquincum, which later grew into Buda. Some of its ruins can be visited today
• Hungarians are among the most pessimistic nations in the world, due to their long history of being conquered and mistreated by Imperial Austria, Nazi Germany, and the USSR
• Yet they are also proud of being the country that finally beat back the Turks when they invaded Europe in the late Middle Ages. The town of Eger, in the northeast, has a castle that could be called the Hungarian version of Helm’s Deep, where a small army of villagers fought off a huge army of some of the most technologically advanced soldiers in the world
• The symbol of the Hungarian nation is a giant eagle called the turul (pronounced like “tour-rule”), which supposedly stole King Arpad’s sword and dropped it onto the site of modern Buda
• Other than the countries surrounding Hungary, the largest population of ethnic Hungarians outside of the country is in the American Midwest, including Indiana, where I’m from. Last names like Molnar, Nagy, and Nemeth are quite common in northern Indiana, and those are the three most common family names in Hungary
• Famous Hungarians include Saint Stephen (not the one in the Bible; the Hungarian one was an early medieval king), King Matyas Corvinus (who lived during the Renaissance and founded Hungary’s first university, which is named after him), and the composer Bela Bartok. Additionally, many foreign nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composers made their homes in Budapest

*Literally “have a good day”, the standard Hungarian greeting.