45 Countries Later, Hungary Is Where I Stopped

Movement teaches you to read places quickly. A touring musician sees a country from the inside out, through back doors and late nights and the kindness of strangers, not from the front of a postcard. Do that across more than forty-five countries and you stop collecting sights. You start noticing how people actually live when no one is performing for a visitor.

That habit is the difference between passing through Hungary and staying in it. Most people who come never leave Budapest, and the countryside is exactly the part they skip. It is also the part that explains the rest. Somogy County, the farmland and quiet villages of the southwest below Lake Balaton, does not explain itself to you. It simply goes about its day. Starting there, rather than in the capital, is a slower way in, and a truer one.

Choosing a place is different from landing in one. Before Hungary there was a year in Juína, deep in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, on the frontier of Amazon deforestation, directing a reforestation project in one of the most damaged areas on the map. There was Switzerland. There was the road. Plenty of countries will host you. Far fewer make you want to build something and stay.

Hungary kept pulling, across years of leaving and coming back, until the pattern stopped looking like chance. What it asks of an outsider is attention: to the language, the food, the history, the cost of an ordinary day. That is the whole premise here. Not a tour guide’s voiceover, not a drone shot, but the view of someone who has lived in a lot of places and is still, deliberately, choosing this one. Look closer. That is the idea.