What moving my family to Budapest has taught me about America



We are a few weeks into our travel experience: long enough to form basic impressions, but not quite long enough to develop confident insights into what all this means for our family. Still, I think that the basic impressions are worth documenting, even if I’m someday surprised by future changes or reversals.

The first thing that stands out to me about life here in Budapest is the near-universal respect for public space, be it public school, public parks, or public transportation. Cleanliness and accessibility in all these areas add a basic ease to our day-to-day life here that just isn’t present in America.

Like a boiled frog, I think I’ve grown accustomed to certain experiences in America’s public spaces, coming to regard them as inevitable, as 'part and parcel' of living in a major city.

My eldest had her first (ever) day of school here in Budapest. It is a public school formed by a basic Montessori philosophy, which means the schedules are almost entirely play-based. Upon entering the school, children put on their “inside shoes,” wash their hands, and say good morning to their teachers. They play outside, then inside, where they are taught to put their toys away after finishing.

They garden, they do arts and crafts, and they are fed nutritious meals and snacks throughout the day, which cost me less than $15.00 per month. Teachers are gentle and empathetic; during the first weeks, parents may stay as long as necessary so that the child can acclimate, and children may freely take “mommy days” off of school, free instead to be with family.

Parents can pick their children up any time after lunch. Any ideological activism regarding gender and sexuality is punishable by law, but the people involved would never think of such a thing in the first place. From what I can tell, these provisions were made preventively by conservative Hungarians in Parliament who see America and the rest of the West as a petri dish for self-destructive mind viruses.

I’m truly startled by the high quality and low cost of early childhood development programs. Beyond school, these are present in every museum, the opera, and other artistic hubs. The playground situation is similarly, wonderfully surprising. Almost every block has a well-maintained, safe, enclosed, and well-lit playground with segments dedicated to various age groups. Vagrancy and criminality exist but are relatively rare; I have not yet seen or encountered a violently mentally ill person accosting another pedestrian. It isn’t uncommon for families to gather at playgrounds after dark, something that is basically unthinkable in America.

Getting to wherever we want to go — the zoo, playgrounds, museums, etc. — is basically seamless. Public transportation is similarly clean, free of dubious characters, and accessible. Trams, buses, and metros almost always have handicap and stroller-accessible doors and spaces to store even a huge stroller.

The people of Budapest are as family-friendly as their infrastructure. It is not uncommon for an elderly lady to smile and sit patiently with a stranger’s child on the tram. I have not received any scathing glances from passersby. I truly feel a spirit of understanding and patience for children. They can eat at restaurants and be kids without fear of reprimand.

Like a boiled frog, I think I’ve grown accustomed to certain experiences in America’s public spaces, coming to regard them as inevitable, as "part and parcel” of living in a major city. But the endless chain of instance after instance after instance of unsavory, antisocial behavior contributes to an underlying anxiety, rage, and sense of being trapped at home, especially as a mother of young children. In Charlotte, my husband and I basically stopped going downtown for date nights after being accosted by vagrants and followed to our car on one unfortunate anniversary.

Legal, technical freedom may be enshrined in our founding documents. But not a city in America today can boast that its citizens are free to walk past nightfall without fear of violence. In the past few years, major cities across America have experienced serious increases in violent crime as well as major spikes in traffic fatalities due to recklessness.

I felt it in Charlotte before we left. Despite increased enforcement from officers, our police department saw an 8% increase in violent crimes in 2024. This includes homicides (+36%), aggravated assaults (+9%), and juvenile property crime (+19%), among other things. In D.C., my old stomping grounds, violent crime also spiked nearly 40%, driven largely by a surge of murder, armed robberies, and carjackings, many of them also perpetrated by kids.

That this most basic quality of freedom — as a mode of being in the world, rather than its legal iteration — would make daily life better seems like such an obvious point. It stands out because of the irony in the comparison to a country that has been ruled by communist dictatorship in recent history. Of course, the contours of criminality in America are a third rail, politicized beyond the bounds of polite conversation. This is a tragedy, too, not least because our prissy delay of plain justice just leaves the problem to our children. An object in motion stays in motion.

It hasn’t been long, but living here in Budapest, I get the sense that a more peaceful life is possible — for ourselves and for our posterity.

Pistachio cream: Hungary's sweet and versatile staple



A seemingly endless variety of quaint cafes pepper the pedestrian street where Saint Michael’s Church peeks over downtown Budapest. Bells and smells make the area too sweet to resist, especially on Sunday after mass. It was there, yesterday, where my husband and I sat down for a coffee and chimney cake — a classic Hungarian pastry — with our children.

I ordered one filled with pistachio cream; everyone was absolutely delighted by the taste and texture. We don’t typically find that in America, but here, it’s a sweet staple.

I thought I’d share, for novelty’s sake! Pistachio cream in particular has lots of use in the kitchen. You can spread it on a slice of bread or use it to garnish desserts, cakes, and biscuits. My favorite might just be to include it in homemade ice cream.

Of course, we can’t delude ourselves about excessive sugar intake, but pistachios have surprising health benefits that do something to mitigate the indulgence.

They stimulate a good mood and fight stress. They are good for longevity. They protect eyesight. They help the health of bones and teeth. They fight high blood pressure thanks to the potassium content. They prevent type II diabetes: high levels of phosphorus keep the level of glucose in the blood under control and break down amino acids. They lower bad cholesterol. They have anticancer properties thanks to beta carotene, which helps prevent tumors. They help anemia, thanks to high copper levels. They fight infections and strengthen the immune system. Mineral salts such as zinc, selenium, lutein, and vitamin H are a boon to beauty. Finally, they contain Omega 3 and Omega 6, ideal during pregnancy for the correct development of the fetal nervous system.

With the following simple ingredients, you can prepare a genuine pistachio nutella, far healthier and better for you than supermarket products (just check the ingredients on the labels).

Ingredients

  • 200g pistachios (unroasted, unsalted)
  • 150g of good quality white chocolate
  • 100g of brown sugar
  • 30g of butter
  • 80ml of whole milk

Instructions

  1. Bring an inch or two of water in a saucepan to a boil.
  1. Add 200 grams of pistachios and let them boil for a maximum of 8-10 minutes. In doing this, the external purple skin will detach from the grain.
  1. Drain the pistachios, and put them to dry on a clean cloth, preferably cotton or otherwise soft and without lint.
  1. Arrange the pistachios in the center of the cloth and close the ends, trying to form a sort of bag. Now, holding the handle, shake the bag until all the purple cuticles detach from the grain. Remove the remaining purple coating with your hands. Dry the pistachios well in order to have them ready to use.
  1. Once dry, mill the pistachios to a fine grain in a blender.
  1. Melt the 150 grams of white chocolate in a saucepan.
  1. Add 30 grams of butter and then also 80 ml of milk. Stir gently until you reach a creamy consistency.
  1. As soon as the chocolate has reached the right density, add the milled pistachio and 100 grams of brown sugar. Mix everything until you get a creamy mousse.
  1. If, during the process, you find that the mixture is too thick, add a little more milk.
  1. Pour the pistachio cream into a glass container (previously sterilized with boiling water). Leave to cool naturally.
  1. Store in the refrigerator.

To save civilization, become a happy warrior



I used to find myself quietly, yet haughtily, indignant about other people’s unwillingness to have more kids. This is a sentence that should make the reader cringe. It certainly has that effect on the writer.

Our society’s drastically declining birth rate (starkly represented as a precariously top-heavy, upside-down pyramid) and its potential consequences inspire anxiety.

At times, wallowing in doom and gloom seems preferable to facing up to the massive responsibility of raising the children I birthed.

Who will be there to run all the critical functions of an advanced society? Who will be there to take care of the elderly?

Who will be there to maintain our Western traditions and unspoken moral codes before wave after wave of immigrants from high birthrate societies arrive, immigrants largely unwilling to assimilate and unconcerned with becoming productive citizens?

Who will save us from ourselves?

Cleaning our room

When I discovered Jordan Peterson in 2015, I was a junior in college. By then, campus leftism was dialing up in ways that had begun to grate my conscience — even as a standard-issue lib.

I didn’t like the fact that the administration had begun sending surveys requesting my pronouns, asking how it could better accommodate social contagions that were a strange minority, almost universally rejected by the student body.

There was one guy who wore dresses. I once found myself alone in a bathroom with him and left as soon as I noticed we were alone, the hair on my neck bristling.

Peterson’s now infamous exhortation to “clean your room” spoke to me. He invited students who concerned themselves too intensely with the state of the world — be it the impending climate apocalypse or their peers’ “transphobic” use of standard English — to turn their attention to more immediate, personal responsibilities.

Instantiate order in all the small ways first, he said. If you aren’t capable of the small, you’ll never be capable of the large things that currently overwhelm you. The message, simple as it was (our mothers had been saying something similar for years), was revolutionary. For those with ears to hear, it was liberating.

New specters

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

The liberation was short-lived. While I no longer feared the prevailing liberal bugaboos, other specters emerged to haunt me. Enthralled by my new “dissident” stance, it didn’t occur to me that I had simply swapped one distraction for another. Surely, I was nothing like those misguided activist-students Peterson humbled in those iconic YouTube videos.

This habit of mind — seeing every political dispute in the most totalizing, civilization-threatening terms possible — has been hard to shake, especially given my flair for the dramatic.

For the most part, I’ve successfully confined my political despair to my online interactions. But lately, I’ve noticed it bleeding into my real life. My despair distracts me. Opening X first thing in the morning sets the day up for failure. Have I become addicted to upsetting myself? Is this any way to live?

'Hath much to love'

Wordsworth’s “Character of the Happy Warrior” comes to mind:

—He who, though thus endued as with a sense

And faculty for storm and turbulence,

Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans

To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes;

Sweet images! which, wheresoe'er he be,

Are at his heart; and such fidelity

It is his darling passion to approve;

More brave for this, that he hath much to love:—

Can we maintain a sense of civilizational purpose without indulging despairing images of the future we strive to avoid?

What optimism requires

We can — and must. In fact, this is essential to the character of the happy warrior: hope without fear, courage without anger, purpose without despair.

Collapse — however we imagine it — may still be imminent. My concerns are still valid; the denial of base reality at the heart of transgender ideology, for example, remains dangerous.

But I can acknowledge this truth without letting it overwhelm me. Our family’s recent move to Budapest from suburban South Carolina has included all the expected challenges, as well as some unexpected ones.

At times, wallowing in gloom and doom seems preferable to facing up to the massive responsibility of raising the children I birthed, and I realize that I’m no less tempted by such negative escapism than I was as a liberal.

What optimism requires is far more tedious and labor-intensive. Here, as in much of life, the “fidelity” Wordsworth mentions makes all the difference. The “homefelt pleasures and ... gentle scenes” of domestic life aren’t distractions from some larger battle but the very foundation of any civilization worth saving.

How to survive international travel with 3 kids under 3



Richard Hanania recently posted a frank and excellent essay called The Opportunity Costs of Having Kids, where he quoted Otto von Bismarck, sympathizing with one of the world’s great statesman’s disdain for traveling with young ones. Bismarck wrote:

The nearer it comes the more I see this as a ticket to the madhouse or to the Upper Chamber of parliament for life. I see myself with children on the platform at Genthin station, then in the compartment where both satisfy their needs ruthlessly and emit an evil stink, the surrounding society holding its nose. Johanna too embarrassed to give the baby the breast so he screams himself blue, the battle with the crowd, the inn, screaming children on Stettin station and in Angermünde 1 hour waiting for horses, packing up, and how do we get from Kröchlendorf to Külz? If we had to spend the night in Stettin, that would be terrible. I went through that last year with Marie and her screaming … I am, I feel, somebody to whom a dreadful injustice has been done. Next year I shall have to travel with three cradles, three nurses, nappies for three, bed clothes; I wake at 6 in the morning in a gentle rage and cannot sleep at night because I am haunted by all sorts of travel pictures, which my fantasy paints in the blackest hues, right to the picnics in the dune of Stolpmünde. And if there were only daily payments for this but instead it causes the ruin of a once flourishing fortune by traveling with infants — I am very unhappy.

Oh, dear. I’m sorry to say the truth of the matter is indeed as brutal as Bismarck describes, and like so many things about kids, there’s really no way around the brutality other than through with your chin held high, despite it all.

Peace — at least the kind you once enjoyed as a single person — is one of the casualties of parenthood, and no quantity of ethereal tradwife reels on Instagram are likely to change that.

My expectations were low, and they were met! Clementine screamed at the top of her lungs the entire way through security! Fortunately, I'd had the foresight to prepare for the worst; or, as I like to call it: front loading grace.

Before I get into the nitty gritty details, let me also recommend cultivating patience — both with your children and with yourself. It takes time to adjust.

As for my family, now that we’re adjusting to a sleep schedule, things are improving, and I’m confident that once we get our sea legs, we will enjoy ourselves more than we don’t. We are learning how to be in a new place, while the kids are simply learning to be civilized human beings. It takes time.

The following are some items that really helped. If there’s anything notable here, it’s that we don’t have iPads. That said, we relied on the provided screens, and yes, my 3-year-old watched three movies.

Wonderfold Wagon

I hope I can meme a sponsorship into existence here, because I could sing the praises of the Wonderfold Wagon all day long.

Americans have been some of the greatest innovators in the field of child transportation, partially of necessity. The Wonderfold, designed and manufactured in California, lives up to the hype.

This wagon is heavy, but it holds our kids and, in the airport, much of our luggage. We checked a bag for each person, had carry-ons, and personal bags. The wagon held the carry-ons and the kids comfortably. At the airport, you can request to check the bag at the gate. If your flight is especially full, you can also check carry-ons for free, so be sure to ask about that and make sure you keep your necessities in the personal bags if so.

Since we’ve been here, the wagon has been amazing for keeping the children contained. Because it’s so big with a flat bottom, they can even nap inside. It truly doubles as a pack-and-play for the baby.

We have the W4 Luxe model. It comes with all sorts of accoutrements, and some are sold separately: removable seats with seatbelts, a cupholder, a tray, a canopy. I bought this wagon cover for checking it, and it was not even remotely damaged (I saw two other families with broken strollers at the end of the day).

You will check the wagon at the gate and can request if you have layovers (as we did, one in Munich) to receive it again at each stop.

If you are a reasonable person who spaced their children in a more reasonable manner, then this might not be necessary, but none of ours are yet capable of self-government, so this portable jailhouse is just perfect for us!

Annie's Homegrown snacks

Snacks are a time-honored way of keeping toddlers on an even keel. My requirements are that they be relatively healthy and leave a minimal mess — the latter especially important within the confines of a typical airplane seat. As usual, my go-to purveyor was Annie’s Homegrown, founded by Connecticut farmer and entrepreneur Annie Withey in 1989.

I bought variety packs of cheddar bunnies, bunny grahams, fruit leather, and fruit snacks. These were excellent ways to curb meltdowns at various junctures and were small enough to fit into their surprise backpacks (see section three).

Surprise backpacks

Novelty is also an efficient way to stave off restlessness. So I packed each child a backpack with new toys that they could use on the plane. They included:

This worked really well! The Bluey camera proved to be an especially good investment. My mother-in-law recently got me a camera, and my eldest, who is my shadow, is especially excited to learn photography in her own way, too. Plus, I’ll enjoy seeing life through her eyes on the camera roll when all is said and done.

First aid kit

My baby has allergies, and I was worried about being able to find his OTC Zyrtec overseas. Also, the prospect of pouring liquid medicine on a cramped plane while they were crawling all over me was daunting. So I found some single-use, premeasured vials of various medications: Diphenhydramine for allergy relief (and to induce drowsiness ...) as well as acetaminophen for fevers and guaifenesin for cough and congestion. The brand, DrKids, is a subsidiary of the Calm Company, out of Sarasota, Floridaa.

I randomly grabbed Band-Aids and antibiotic ointment to go with the rest of George’s eczema kit, and I’m glad I did, because not three minutes into the trip, he bumped his eyebrow on the stroller and broke skin. Welly bandages are my favorite. Cute and, most importantly, effective.

Lollipops

Lollipops help with the air-pressure changes. 10/10. And these taste great with no artificial nonsense.

Honorable mentions because the European lack of air conditioning feels like hell: a 100% cotton change of clothes, a portable fan, and cooling wipes.

I plan on publishing a guide every week on whatever I learn along the way, because I’m learning a lot. The hard way, most times.

A traditional Hungarian dish gives a warm welcome to Budapest ​



We arrived in Hungary this week!

My guide to travel with young kids is forthcoming. Suffice it to say, I understand why people don’t: The challenges of jet lag and culture shock are amplified with very young children in the mix.

That said, the inconvenience and discomfort that comes with relocating an entire family does give way to unique moments of beauty and stillness when you least expect it. We have to take these moments as they come.

On our first day, after the worst sleep of our lives, we thought we’d take it easy with a casual stroll in the park. We came upon Hemingway Terrace. I asked the host for a classic Hungarian meal, whatever that looked like.

He brought cold cucumber soup, cantaloupe soup, and brassói aprópecsenye: crispy fried potatoes tossed through a mix of onions, garlic, bacon, and soft pork tenderloin. It was divine. My babies couldn’t get enough. Everyone ate in silence. That’s how you know it’s good! I asked him how he made it; the recipe follows. This was served with cold, miniature dill pickles on the side.

Ingredients

  • 400g (4 x 6-7cm or 2½") potatoes
  • 150g (1 cup) onion
  • 1 medium (100g) tomato
  • 1 small (100-125g) green pepper
  • 4 garlic cloves
  • 75g (2½ oz) finely chopped bacon
  • 300g (11oz) pork tenderloin
  • 1 tsp sweet paprika
  • ½ tsp caraway seeds
  • ½ tsp dried marjoram or oregano
  • 1 tsp coarse sea salt (plus extra to boil the potatoes)
  • ½ tsp black pepper
  • 3 tbsp tallow or olive oil
  • Parsley and green onion to garnish

Instructions

  1. Bring an 8" saucepan of water to a boil and add 1 teaspoon of salt, then toss in the potatoes and boil them with the skin on for 20 minutes. Then drain the potatoes and cool them for 10 minutes.
  1. Dice the onion and tomato.
  1. Deseed the green pepper and cut it into a ¼ inch dice.
  1. Peel the garlic cloves and chop them as finely as you can.
  1. Cut the pork tenderloin into 1-inch cubes.
  1. 5 minutes before you drain the potatoes, heat a 12" frying pan over a medium-high heat. When it is hot, add 1 tablespoon of the tallow or oil. When it has melted, throw in the bacon and cook until it is golden. This will take 2-3 minutes depending on the heat.
  1. Add the caraway seeds, give them a stir to combine.
  1. Add the onion, green pepper, and tomato and cook for 15-20 minutes. Stir this every 2-3 minutes, and keep an eye on it. If it begins to darken too much, reduce the heat a little.
  1. When the potatoes have cooled for 10 minutes, peel them and cut them into a dice roughly the same size as the pork.
  1. Heat the remaining tallow/oil over a medium-high heat in a second 12" frying pan. When it shimmers, add the diced potatoes and cook them until they are crispy and golden. Stir them carefully to prevent falling apart. This will take around 12-15 minutes.
  1. Around 5 minutes, before the potatoes are ready, turn the heat under the onions to high, add the pork, garlic, marjoram, black pepper, and salt then cook for 5-6 minutes stirring constantly.
  1. Sprinkle over the paprika and toss to coat. Then throw in the crispy potatoes, toss to coat, and serve immediately. Garnish with parsley and green onion!
Joel Carillet/Getty Images

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