The
promised cold front has not come through yet so the heat
goes on. By the time I get to the Botanical Department on
the overcrowded hot train and almost as hot metro my
little bag lunch gets almost cooked. The apricots are
ripe to begin with and banging around in the heat is
turning them to juice before I get to eat them with my
lunch. Peaches are starting to be in season too, though
they don't seem on the verge of world domination like the
apricots.
One change in Budakeszi, the town
not the herbarium, that I didn't mention yesterday is the
new rotary and huge gas station under construction. Last
time I was out there the sides of the road were dug up
because the phone company was laying fiber optic cables.
This previously small suburban almost rural town is
modernizing faster than Budapest. István told me
that some developers are planning to create the "Silicon
Valley of Central Europe" in Budakeszi. There are even
plans for a big highway. Not such good news for the
forest or the arboretum.
There's already a concentration of
high-tech firms on the outskirts of Budapest: Axelero,
IBM, HP, etc. I pointed that out to István and
said "There's already a Silicon Valley here." "But
where's the valley?" he asked. Hmm... "silicon flat
place... no, I've got it the Silicon Puszta!" We laughed
for quite some time over that. But seriously, those
developers are in for a rude shock if they think some
kind of silicon puszta is going to be a great economic
boon to Budapest (or Budakeszi). Information technology
jobs are on the decline in the US, and will soon be on
the decline in Europe because the work can be done so
much more cheaply in India and/or in Russia. Pretty soon
we can add China to that list. Even though labor is
cheaper in Hungary than in the US, it's not cheaper than
India, Russia, or China. Oddly, just as I'm having those
thoughts, there's an article on the CNN website about IT
jobs migrating to India. Evidently greater minds than
mine have thought of this.
