Culture Shock! Hungary: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (Culture Shock! Guides) (Cultureshock Hungary: A Survival Guide to Customs & Etiquette)

I am an American born son of a Hungarian mother and had grown up with Hungarian grandparents. They raised me bilingually and exposed me to Hungarian culture. Once my grandparents passed away, I started to lose my connection to my ethnic roots. A trip to Hungary this summer reignited my interest in both the language and culture. When I returned from the trip I was eager to consume as much material on Hungary as I had the time for. I heard about "Culture Shocked!", so I picked it up and read it in just a few days. Once I finished, I found it was one of those books that I was very sad to put down. It is a very well written, insightful, and delivered with a healthy dose of humor. It not only helped me make sense of the Hungarians I have know in my life, but it also helped me understand some of my idiosyncratic ways that I do not share with my fellow American's. Well, I found out that in Hungary, my idiosyncratic ways are quite the norm. Recommend this for anyone interested in...Read more

I was planning a two-week trip to Hungary, so I thought I would read this to get more insight into the culture. It was okay. I think it would be more valuable if you are planning to live and work in Hungary. To give you an idea, some of the chapter titles include "Socialising," "Settling In," "Leisure and Pleasure," "Language," and "Working in Hungary." Also, I sometimes found the writing confusing. There is a lot of humor in the book, but at times I could not tell whether the writer was being serious or sarcastic. It is important to be able to distinguish between these, for if serious, that is the point she is trying to make, and if sarcastic, the complete opposite! By the way, Budapest was fabulous!

Over the past 15 years, my wife and I have purchased six of the Culture Shock books (Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic, Hungary). We have found them to be very useful in providing information not in the typical travelogue tour guides. However, CS-Hungary was not up to the standards established by the series. There was, in some cases, too much detail, rather than a good overview (where we could choose to further dig in with our own research elsewhere).

Might be that CS-Hungary was written by an ex-pat Hungarian, rather than a foreigner to the subject country (which I think is more commonly the case for the series). I think that the better perspective of a book intended for foreigners considering travel to a country is to learn about it from the perspective of a well-acculturated foreigner; not a native (ex-pat or otherwise) who wants to tell us everything she knows, rather than what WE want to know.