Fast Cars, Fast Women, and the Revenge of Uncle George

Just when Hungary had begun to patch things up with Romania, Slovakia and its other Magyar-phobic neighbors, officials of another country are charging that Budapest served as a forward base for members of a group which recently staged a coup d'etat in their homeland.

The story goes back to October of last year, when the long-time President of the Republic of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze, was forced from office by Mikhail Saakashvili, a youthful lawyer who went on to have his rule ratified by a Soviet-style margin of 96 percent of the vote on January 4. At the time, Shevardnadze, who is best known as the cotton-topped sidekick of former Soviet supremo Mikhail Gorbachev, said his downfall had been planned and orchestrated in New York, at the behest of George Soros, Budapest's richest and most famous son, and the paymaster for much of Eastern Europe's NGO-industrial complex. Here's where Hungary comes in. On January 13, a young man with the easy-to-remember name of Irakli Rekhviashvili returned in Tbilisi from a long exile abroad, to be sworn in the next day as the country's new minister of Minister of Economics, Industry and Trade.

In an almost comic confirmation of Shevardnadze's charges of string-pulling by Soros, it turns out that Rekhviashvili had been biding his time in Budapest, working for one of the megaspeculator's local NGOs. Best of all, he is barely old enough to drive to his new job, being all of 28, and is thus the perfect patsy for whatever bad happens during what local critics are already calling the "Sorosization" of the Georgian economy.

"He has been living in Budapest for years on Soros projects and on our expectations, he is going to sell out whatever has remained unsold over Shevardnadze's era, later the blame to go to his young age, not to the inefficiency of the government to easily veil the crime," one leader of the breakaway Autonomous Republics of Ajaria howled last week, according to the always indispensable Ajarian news service BatumiNews. (Ajaria is not to be confused with Abkazia or South Ossetia, Georgia's other leading renegade provinces.)

While I am generally loath to intervene in the politics of any country in which beheading is considered simple assault, from what I hear the angry Ajarian may have a point. According to those who have had face-time with Rekhviashvili, the new boy is not exactly ministerial material. In fact, they way some of his former colleagues describe him reminds me of the old joke about the finance minister who defects from Romania to Bulgaria - and raises the credit rating of both countries.

While some are pointing fingers at Soros's political adventures, others are wagging tongues at the billionaire's personal exploits. Last Tuesday's New York Post led its immensely popular "Page Six" gossip column with an exclusive entitled "Soros Snacking on Side Dishes," which charged that the "frisky financier" was seeing younger women while at the same time trying to restart things with his estranged (second) wife, Susan.

Of course, none of this is anybody's business. But local Sorosistas curious about the boss's lifestyle may be interested to know he recently bought the house next door to his family estate in Bedford, apparently to be closer to the wife and kids without having to actually live with them. No definitive word on what the supposedly ascetic Soros paid for his new "home away from home," but the 19-room, 63-acre property was put on the market last year for $21.5 million. (In case you're wondering, that translates into Ft 4.5 billion, even after the recent "Sorosization" of the greenback.) Sure beats sleeping on the couch.

While the primary "respondent" named by the Post is some violinist I've never heard of, conspiracy theorists will be intrigued to know that one of the other dishes mentioned is a certain Anna Malova, who just happens to have been Miss Russia back in 1998.

Yes, that's right, as in the 1998 Russian financial crisis...

According to Josey Walker, one of the partners in Budapest Weekends, a stag-party-planning service mostly aimed at the UK market, the revelry involved a dozen young lads from Austin, Texas, who stopped in Hungary on their way from Amsterdam to Bangkok.

Just in case you didn't already think Texans were outlandish, consider the following: The boys, all of whom are under 35, were late in arriving in Budapest because they decided to circle the airport in their customized Boeing 737 for an extra hour in order to finish their steak lunches. During their brief stay, they took over Tom-George restaurant for dinner, commandeered a boat, ran up a bar tab of over Ft 300,000 in just over an hour at Club 7, and had what I can only imagine was a positively Roman experience at the Király Baths. Best of all, they brought along with them a sommelier (yes, that's a wine taster) and five professional strippers - "just to make sure that at all times they would have strippers on hand," according to Walker.

Unsurprisingly, after dropping their wad at Club 7, the boys caught the attention of several local ladies, who ended up back at party's suite at the Castle Hilton at dawn, enjoying what used to be called "unnatural relations" in front of everyone still able to stand, of whom there apparently included several random patrons of the aforementioned bar. Seems like the only things missing were superstar socialite strumpet Paris Hilton and that donkey from the Tom Hanks movie "Bachelor Party." Oink.

Still, whenever I hear about stuff like this, I'm reminded of Suetonius' famous tell-all on Caligula, and what little progress we've made over the past 20 centuries to advance the art of debauchery. I'll admit that Caligula never kept a jet circling at 10,000 meters to finish his steak, or buy cocktails for everyone at Club 7. But he did bathe in perfume, drink pearls dissolved in vinegar, serve food made of gold, have people killed at the dinner table just for fun, and, according to Suetonius, enjoyed unnatural relations with more than half the citizens and slaves of Rome, including the pantomimic actor Mnester and "certain hostages." Then again, Caligula wasn't on a budget, or spending Sorosized dollars. Apparently the boys from Texas only had $400,000 to blow on their fun. Poor dears.

In related news, some folks in the local media are reporting that the Economist magazine's celebrated Big Mac index now shows the Hungarian forint to be 20% undervalued vis-à-vis the US dollar. I've always been a fan of the BMI, which cleverly uses an identical basket of goods (two all-beef patties, lettuce, tomato, etc.) and the theory of purchasing-power-parity to predict exchange-rate movements. But this result suggests to me that the Economist may need to update its methodology, at least in the case of Hungary. In fact, if they want a truly accurate gauge of Hungary's price level as measured in dollars, I would recommend replacing the "Big Mac" index with what you might call the "Pink Leroy Index." Under this system, you take an average American (i.e. not George Soros, or one of the stags from Texas) over to the new, festively-painted branch of Leroy restaurant on St. István tér, and watch how pink their face turns as they look at the prices on the menu.

Next to the relentless rise in prices for chichi meals, one of the most commonly-heard complains by expats living in Hungary is that, despite being supposedly located right smack in the centre of Central Europe, it seems to be far from everywhere, especially by car.