● IT’S A STRANGE, almost paradoxical life, working as a journalist in a foreign country, as both Jake Adelstein and I can attest. While Adelstein was based in Tokyo in the 1990s I spent much of my journalistic career living in Budapest, covering central Europe and the Balkans.
I moved temporarily to Berlin and Paris, but that shining city on the Danube kept pulling me back. I immersed myself in Hungarian culture and politics, shopped at the same supermarkets, drank in the same bars, ate in the same restaurants as the locals.
