Budapest

Starting next week, I'll be reporting from Budapest, where I will be teaching U.S. Securities Law in 20 hours over two weeks at Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem (the Faculty of Law at Eötvös Loránd University), where Suffolk University Law School offers an LL.M. in U.S. and Global Business Law.

A couple quick preliminary observations.  I have a reasonable facility with languages.  I had a mother who was born in Germany, took Spanish for four years in high school, spent a number of years getting myself around business Paris, and took a year of Russian in college.  None of them help with Hungarian, a strand of the Finno-Ugric line of the Indo-European languages, unrelated to anything else in Europe, and I know no Finnish.  The only cognate that has looked even remotely familiar so far is the word for street "utca," which I can see is related to the Russian word "ulitsa."  "Sz" is pronounced "ess" and "s" is pronounced "esh".  "Gy" is the "j" sound.  Hence the word we say as Magg - Yar appears to be ma - jar.  We were in Santorini in May, and even saying "efxharisto" (thank you) as an American tourist meant you got a a very warm "parakalo" (please and you're welcome) back in response.  I hope it's similar with Hungarian.

Oh, and currency.  Hungary (officially, Magyarország) doesn't qualify for unification with the Euro, so the currency is the forint, which when I checked yesterday was trading at 195 or so to the dollar.  This is going to take me back to the days of walking down the Via Montenapoleone on a business trip to Milan (it's where Gucci, Versacci, etc. are all headquartered) with a 1,000 lira bill burning a hole in my pocket.  One thousand forints should be good for a cup of coffee in the cafe around the block.  (In 1996, a cup of coffee in the lobby of the ANA Hotel in Tokyo ran me about 1,000 yen, which was ten dollars in the pre-Starbucks era.)

Oh, and shtick.  One thing that was clear back in the days when I was an executive in a big company that had European operations was that Europeans (at least Continental Europeans) by and large hated shtick mixed with business.  It was just a more formal business culture.  I'm assuming, despite fifteen years of U.S. cultural imperialism since then, that between a more formal culture and the language issue, shtick is still a no-no.  So I went back through my class notes for a three-credit securities regulation class, which, at 28 classes times 75 minutes a class is 35 hours, took out all the shtick, and came up with exactly 20 hours worth of material.  Hmm.  That's humbling.