I moved to Budapest nine months ago. When I flew home to the United States in August, my grandparents drove three days from Reno, Nevada to Bozeman, Montana just to pick me up from the airport.
These past few years have not been easy for them. Grandma was diagnosed with cancer. Between waiting rooms and chemotherapy sessions, she still sent packages of homemade baked goods to all seven grandkids. She never misses a birthday or forgets a celebration. For every moment I’ve triumphed and every transition I’ve feared, one of Grandma’s cards has arrived on my doorstep at just the right time. She is thoughtful and beautiful, ever-composed.
Grandpa is her greatest champion. He is strong when the rest of the family is scared. I suspect he’s read every cancer study he can find. From mountain hikes to doctor’s offices, he jokes about ‘snakes in the grass’ and racoon-catching. He has this boyish spark combined with the wisdom of a man who’s lived it all. Grandpa is the hardest worker I know, but it’s his characteristic wit and sly warmth that guide the family. He somehow always knows how to make Grandma laugh.
No matter how difficult their week has been, my grandparents first ask how I’m doing. Since they cannot travel to Budapest, they ask me for photos and stories. They do not speak of their pain.
We pray daily that the worst is in the past, that Grandma stays in remission. Still, moving across a parking lot is not easy. Climbing stairs is not easy. They drove across two state lines just to see me.
Most of our summer trip is a blur—Grandpa’s cowboy hat, a Trump rally, the whole family caught in a rainstorm, us shooting BB guns at cans. I counted the days until I could see my family, then, in a moment, my visit was over.
At 24 years old, I moved to Budapest by myself. I had no idea what I was doing—just that my cubicle in America was trying to kill me, life had become gray, and I needed to escape. I’d read about Hungary, so I decided to find a job here and that’s what I did.
When I arrived, my colleagues welcomed me with such kindness that they made my life easy. My Hungarian language teacher took me market-shopping. My fellow Americans accompanied me to church. In Miskolc, one of my students guided me to the train station and sat with me on board until right before my train left. I’ve lost count of the hours spent with friends over coffee.
The magic of this place and its people is manifold. At 9am, Budapest is still sleepy. River cruises lounge upon the Danube and church spires watch shyly from the hills. If there’s time before work, the kind man at the bakery always recognizes me. He sells the best pogácsa.
When grocery labels require Google translate, life is technicolor. My first months in Budapest were like living in an Andy Warhol print. The city is pregnant with beauty, sure, but even the mundane is beautiful when it is somebody else’s mundane.
In July I carried half a watermelon from Buda to Pest. The walk was long, the sun mean. I found it glorious. Were I home, I would have complained. The walk was awful! But I was alone in Europe with a watermelon I’d purchased via pantomime and a few new Hungarian phrases. I was proud.
The catch is that eventually the grocery labels become, if not fully understandable, then at least familiar. Purchasing a watermelon becomes a chore, rather than a triumph. What then? When the sun falls, this question bothers me.
At night sometimes I walk to Liberty Bridge—this green, glowing thing that stretches triumphant between two sprawling cities, Buda and Pest. In the distance, windows flicker like candles. A cross is illuminated in the hills. Close your eyes for a moment and the air smells like the sea. Worse, it smells like the open road in Montana, making me think of long drives with my Mom, Dad, and little brother.
Budapest is light and it is magic, but my family is not waiting behind the windows that glow along the riverbanks. Somewhat ironically, I’ve fallen in love with a city that can never be my home.
These months in Budapest are fleeting, but they have nonetheless taught me to pause—to seek beauty, not just when everything is exciting, but also when it is mundane. If I can lug a watermelon for miles in the heat back home and find it somehow, unexpectedly, glorious, then I will have really triumphed.
When I leave, I will miss my friends. I will miss Budapest’s beauty. I will also miss its mundane. Can I recapture this feeling back home?
Moreover, after months of train rides and walks around foreign cities, can I embrace what is grounded and familiar? Home is not ephemeral. For an American, it is not the German village barely glimpsed from a train window or the unexpected Estonian bar with live music. It’s landing in Montana after months abroad to find my grandparents waiting in arrivals. We were all tired and they took way too many photos, but it didn’t matter. Their welcome home was the highlight of my summer.
Too often, my generation has been taught to prioritize convenience, to strive for the cosmopolitan, and to condemn tradition. I grew up in Ohio, but I’ve lived by myself in Chicago, Washington D.C., Austin, and now Budapest.
Today’s culture teaches that this solitary nomadism is a triumph and homecoming is provincial—as if ‘different’ is always better, land can be spoiled and sold without consequence, and family can be discarded or replaced. These are lies.
Travel and professional success can only be rewarding if I have a home and a family to return to; I was born in a nation to which I am grounded. My home is not for sale or conquest. It is mine. The Hungarians understand this keenly.
Insofar as Budapest will still be Budapest two decades from now—insofar as the Hungarians will raise Hungarians, speak their mother tongue, and practice their traditions on their land—it will be due to those who proudly defend their Hungarian identity and national sovereignty now.
This should be obvious: Hungary without Hungarians is not Hungary. Britain without Brits is not Britain. America without Americans is not America.
Graffiti-laden, rainbow-clad dystopias like the Strasbourg train station don’t make France French. The seat of the European Union has been colonized per the invitation of its traitorous lords.
In contrast, the hit Netflix series Emily in Paris is exactly what it sounds like, detailing the glamorous, drama-ridden life of an American in Paris. Notice that the show never features migrants raping and murdering young Frenchwomen or Islamists stabbing tourists. Emily eats croissants, learns French, falls in love with a Frenchman, and visits the Eiffel Tower. Even by soap opera standards, the show is misleading: the France it depicts is nearing extinction.
While the Biden-Harris administration has overseen the illegal mass invasion of my homeland, Europe’s globalist gentry have done much the same—facilitating a crisis that costs innumerable lives, desecrates culture, and threatens to destroy nations. Soon, there may cease to be a Europe worthy of the name. Home is not ephemeral, but it is destructible.
The Hungarians possess something beautiful. It will take all of their courage and focus to defend their nation against today’s globalist vandals. The fight is existential, the costs of failure too devastating to fathom. Far too many of the Hungarians’ neighbors have already failed.
I pray that when I return to Budapest five months or five years from now, the good will have triumphed. I pray that my friends will put themselves first—that they will protect and keep their home. I will miss them and their country, and I must return home.
In Montana, the sky is so vast it makes the mountains small. Somehow, it puts everything in perspective. You cannot run from the sky, even if it makes you uncomfortable or tells you things you do not want to hear. When God speaks through the sky—when the sky tells you to come home—you listen.
