It is an amazing cultural and social cavalcade. It is neither too big, nor too small, it is neither in the center of all the attentions, but yet appreciated by the connoisseurs. It is a place where beautiful historical features are mixed with nightlife hot-spots, where you can shout and jump at one of the biggest music festivals of the region or practise modern dance, go to the weirdest contemporary art performance, stand in a 2-hour line to see Klimt’s canvases, or attend a lecture of the Dalai Lama.

I never thought about what Budapest was missing.

But now I know:

you

Budapest is missing all of your 45 faces and names and cultures and smiles and tears and laughs and dances and colours and dreams and love-hearts.

You all went home to recover from the past very intense months, and Budapest has never been so empty. But I am full with you.

Thank you!

“You have 30 days to grow a moustache!” shouted Adrian through 609 on the first day of November and waved a little box aimed to gather the 500 forints fine for resistance to the MOvement. Day after day I saw our guys become hairier and hairier, some of them hiding their mos behind beards, some keeping them low profile, but some wearing them proudly. Soon MOvember became the flagship project of our Department and even our teachers joined the action, not to mention the ladies who came together to create their own MOs for the big day. In the last week, our class was the happy box of CEU. We couldn’t talk to each other without laughing at the MOs surrounding us, waiting for them to gain their final form.

However MOvember is not only about growing funny facial hair and impressing girls around you. MOvember is a worldwide charity event to raise funds and awareness about men’s health, especially prostate and testicular cancer. Testicular cancer has the highest cure rate of all cancers if diagnosed in time, prostate cancer however is unfortunately the second leading cause of death after lung cancer among men, mainly because of lack of knowledge and consciousness. Early diagnosis is the key to all cancers and that was the main message of MOvember in CEU.

On 30 November, the Octagon area was inundated with MOs, fake and real ones, truck driver and comrade style, discrete ones and the-only-thing-you-can-see, small and big ones, shy and brave ones. We spread the voice on MOvember, we held a MO contest and voted for the best CEU MO ever, and ultimately we collected over 100 euros that were offered for The Prostate Cancer Charity.

On 1 December, I had a strange feeling when entering the class. Something had changed. It took me several minutes to realize that our guys somehow became younger and more ‘proper’. The moustaches were gone. It’s time to get back to work and prepare for the exams… Guys, I miss your MOs!

• 1.4 million children die every year as a result of diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation.This is about 4,000 deaths a day.
• Washing hands with soap can reduce the risk of diarrhoeal diseases by up to 47%.
• The daily drinking water requirement per person is 2-4 litres, but it takes 2 000 to 5 000 litres of water to produce one person’s daily food.
• It takes 1 000-3 000 litres of water to produce just 1kg of rice and 13 000 to 15 000 litres to produce 1kg of grain-fed beef.

• Every day, 2 million tons of human waste are disposed of in water courses.
• In developing countries, 70% of industrial wastes are dumped untreated into waters where they pollute the usable water supply.

• 24% of the bottled water on the market is tap water repackaged.
• In the USA only, people throw out 38 billion empty water bottles a year, more than $1 billion worth of plastic.

• By 2025, 1 800 million people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could be under stress conditions.

To read more water facts, click here.

Nine people – including a little baby who slipped out of her mother’s hands and an old woman doing gardening around her house – died, taken away by the sudden flood. More than hundred people were injured, mostly by the burning effects of the mug having a PH of 13, and several hundreds of them had to be relocated as their house and village became uninhabitable.

Ecologically speaking the area is ruined too and although lands could be cleaned up, rivers may never recover from this catastrophe.

The red sludge is the largest volume of toxic waste in Hungary.  Taking into consideration that it is an amazingly lucrative business, it is likely to continue, however we should keep in mind that for one tonne of alumina, around two tonnes of toxic waste are produced, most of them stored in similar reservoirs, subject to similar catastrophes.

(Photos borrowed from the media.)

On 8 October 2010, as a warm up event for the international 10.10.10 climate change campaign, the Sustainable Campus Initiative (SCI) run by first-year Environmental Sciences and Policy students, organized the first ever Sustainability Festival at CEU. Their motto„I CEU Green” speaks for itself: they want to see their university environment as sustainable as it can be, and for this purpose they are ready to raise their collective voice and take actions.

SCI’s aim is to institutionalize and implement a sustainable development strategy at CEU on a long term basis, involving both faculty and staff members.

Check out and get involved!

More about the competition and the winners here.

You might think that these are absolutely unimportant details. Or it may sound interesting to you however you are terribly sorry, but you really don’t have time for this. And perhaps some of you are just curiously trying to map those places in your mind, trying to visualize the Freedom Bridge, some buildings of the Vaci street or that Svejk-looking guy near the Basilica.

However you are in a hurry every morning to catch your bus, to arrive on time to work or to school. You are always in a hurry to have lunch, meet your friends, or to get home and switch on the TV. In the meantime you are certainly also fed up with endless traffic jams stealing several hours of your days, with those stupid drivers who never give you the priority which make you always arriving 5 minutes after the closure of the supermarket. That’s life, isn’t it?

You are probably right and I sometimes feel the same. However, consciously or intuitively, some days I simply take my time in the morning to have a walk across the city instead of jumping in the crowded bus, and I just observe the fascinating shapes of our bridges, I look at the façades and try to find unseen details on them, I pop in open doorways and exchange a smile with the people I find there, and most of all I simply let those remote urban narrators tell me their neverending stories.

This is just another way to start the day.

Sitting just a couple of meters from him, I was imbibing his every words and movements. This was one of those moments that happen only once in a life time, therefore I tried hard to put into practice everything I previously learned from Buddhism and meditation, namely being present in the actual moment.

Of course my mind was not always following my determination: I remembered Piros, my grandfather, whose room was full of buddhist relics and books, Otti, my grandmother, who has been my best teacher of patience and peacefulness. I took some quick pics with my mobile, then, again submerged myself in his presence.

Being surrounded by us, he feels young again for a while, he said smilingly and remembered some of the main events of his time. He emphasized how our role is important in shaping the 21st Century in which we are facing such urging problems as violence, climate change and overpopulation. By the way, this latter could be solved if there were more monks and nuns, he added and laughed at his joke as a kid.

„No matter what you are doing, always be aware of the motivation behind your acts” he emphasized several times. Right motivation, peace, compassionate love and holistic view versus hatred, violence, attachment and selfishness, simple messages but yet so difficult to put into action on the global stage. However if only 1 people starts to spread the voice, he encouraged us, that reaches 10 others, then 100, 1000, and so on, and finally the message crosses the world.

This man – who has been living in exile for more than 50 years – is the absolute icon of thoughtfulness and respect, love and happiness. With his only presence he shows the way to follow. After receiving his teachings and initiation with 10.000 other people at the Papp Laszlo Stadium on Sunday, yesterday I was awarded the gift to feel his close presence, and that was one of the most powerful experiences of my life so far.

While all students and teachers were escorting him to his car, I shook his hand, look at his smiling face and try to put all my feelings and thoughts in those two simple words: thank you.