By Zack Butler (USA)
Is the grass always greener on the Buda side? Well, it certainly
was for the U.S. Puzzle Team, as (all suspense aside) we pulled out
of a tight race on the last day of competition to take home the
Puzzle Star for another year.
And now on to the recap. It has recently come to my attention
that what started as time-saving e-mails to friends to let them
know the results and my experiences have become published on the
web and even on paper. But rest assured, this will be the same sort
of rambling virtually unedited stream-of-(semi-) consciousness that
you have come to expect over the years.
Yes, we learned about all the bridges of Budapest, got to ride
on a funicular (or "incline" for those of you from Pittsburgh), and
competed with one of the longer and better sets of puzzles seen at
one of these competitions. Arriving several hours late after
missing a close connection in Frankfurt (and staring at their
flipping train-station-like departures board for several hours) was
not the most auspicious of beginnings, but after getting settled
in, things began to improve. I skipped out on the end of the
opening ceremonies (sorry, Gyorgy) to get some sleep, and awoke to
cold, rainy, Pittsburghian weather. We went sight-seeing in Pest in
the morning and came back to solve puzzles after lunch, the first
time that i can recall that sort of arrangement. It seemed to work
well for us, although it did take (at least for me) a few minutes
to get the brain in gear during the initial team round. Which was
ceremonially opened by Mr. Erno Rubik, an exciting surprise for
puzzle geeks the world over.
After the team round and the first of three grueling 2 1/2 hour
individual solving sessions (actually i don't mind that too much),
we had dinner and i ended up in the bar with Ron, Nick, and a few
Turks to play King(s)/Rifke. (It's a card game.) Ron and I managed
to show our proper respect to the people whose game it is by losing
mightily. But after midnight, I slipped out as Nick did a great
captaining job by sitting in at the table so I could get some
sleep.
The next day was a full (very full) day of puzzles. Which
started out for me as bad as it possibly could have, recovered OK
in the middle, and stumbled a bit at the end. (I should have gotten
the $&^*ing octopus.) Another meat-oriented dinner was followed
by Helene rounding up the Americans for a "meeting" in the room of
the Turkish captain, Nev. This seemed quite odd, especially when
Nev started to give a short speech, but it soon became clear that
this meeting was called to give me a trophy for my finish last
year. Quite unexpected, and of course he (they) did not need to do
this, and so again I must thank him (them?) for their
thoughtfulness. From there, I soon went off for an early bedtime,
after using the handy English-language GTE yellow pages to figure
out how to make a ridiculously expensive call home.
We awoke the next morning to some not-so-good news: the results.
After my morning collapse, I had been able to recover only as far
as 5th (after being 2nd in the first long round), and the team was
barely ahead of the Dutch (who did really well on the @#&ing
octopus, among other things). A good showing in the last long
individual round put us (we thought) far enough ahead that we
needed only to solve the last team puzzle no more than four teams
later than them (to get enough bonus points to keep them at bay).
Hoping to avoid our Croatian collapse/brain-implosion (the story of
which was repeated several times during the course of the week), we
did our best to solve the puzzle in an orderly fashion. Not really
succeding, we did at least do a sort of double-check (unlike the
triple-check that the second team puzzle got), and finished the
puzzle third.
More sightseeing after the puzzles, this time on the Buda side,
with the aforementioned funicular, the Statue of Liberty (no longer
surrounded by statues of Soviet soldiers, which have been "retired"
to a park outside the city, or so said our tour guide), the
Fishermen's Bastion (a fortified wall overlooking the Danube* upon which i bought a piece of art from a
not-particularly-starving artist) and Matthias(?) church (in which
every surface is painted, and quite well at that). Then back for
dinner and the awards ceremony, in between which Will did his
weekly NPR radio show from his room. I was pleasantly surprised to
find that my performance in the last round has lifted me to second
overall, with Wei-Hwa again taking the overall title by a
comfortable margin. Our national anthem was played after the team
prizes were given out (including a personalized bottle of Tokaj for
each team member on the top three teams), although we had to cut it
off as the second verse began.
Then more beer and more cards (did you know that the game
@sshole (censored for those of you with parental controls) is known
and known by that name in several european nations?). Mostly
Canadians at that point, with myself, a German and a Slovenian as
well, and we had a grand time, until about 3:00.
Up for the 9:00 bus to Opusztaszer (more cards, a nap,
Canadians, no beer), where we saw a variety of more-or-less odd
things celebrating the Hungarian landtaking (they seem to be as
excited about the 1000th anniversary of it, celebrated in 1896, as
the actual event itself). Back on the bus, more cards ("Organ Donor
Transplant Hearts"?), and to a horse-show farm/dinner party spot
for the final big party. About which I can best sum up by saying
that you really haven't seen it all until you've been in a building
with a thatch roof at the end of a 2km dirt road watching a
Hungarian country music band (complete with cowboy hats and a pedal
steel guitar) playing "You Can Call Me Al". That followed a very
good horse show (and an impromptu trot through the ring by Jeroen
afterward), a dinner of real gulash, and several glasses of wine.
And was accompanied by dancing by a people from all nations (at one
point I was on the dance floor with two Poles, three Germans, a
Turk, a Romanian, two Finns, a Dutchman, and a Canadian). Finally,
after an encore, an extra short set, and two more encores, we got
back on the bus to return for a short night before flying out. As
always, a good time, not enough time in a new and interesting city,
good friends, and we all promise to meet up again next year. This
time next year is in the New York area, where we will attempt to
use our home-time-zone advantage to hold on to the Puzzle Star for
another year.
