Xpat Interview 2: Anne Zwack, Author

  • 22 Dec 2014 11:00 AM
Xpat Interview 2: Anne Zwack, Author
1. What’s been happening at work and at home since your first Xpat Interview?

Click here to read her first interview

I am missing my husband and we have had to face challenges with the new regulations regarding alcoholic beverages

2. What will be your greatest challenges in the next 6 months?
More of the same

3. What hidden talents do you have?
I am good at Christmas

4. What do you like most and least about living in Hungary?
Hungary is a country in constant evolution unlike the other countries I know where things have remained very much the same over the last decades and that makes it very stimulating. What I like less is that in Hungary I can never be completely and uninhibitedly myself

5. What was the most interesting travel trip you have ever taken?
India was a revelation to me

6. What’s your most treasured possession?
A poem written by my grandson that I always carry with me

7. Which characteristics in yourself do you like most and least?
My first boyfriend said that there was no crisis in my life so daunting that it could not be resolved with a good plate of pasta. The flip side of that is that I have very little will power when it comes to pasta or anything else

8. What’s the last book you read, and movie you watched?
I am reading the Harry Quebert Affair. The last time I went to the cinema I saw that lovely film with Helen Mirren about the Indian chef who becomes a star in France. I like feel good movies

9. If someone wrote a biography about you, what would the title be?
The Lady is a Tramp

10. What is the perfect pizza topping combination for you?
I like pizza with nothing on it at all, as in focaccia

11. In case you could trade places with any other person for a week, real or fictional, with whom would it be?
Melinda Gates

12. What was the luckiest moment in your life so far?
Meeting my husband in 1972

13. How do you relax?
A glass of wine and a cigarette

14. What’s the best website you’ve ever visited, and why?
I don’t look at websites

15. What has made the biggest impact on your life so far, and why?
Returning to Hungary in 1988. It profoundly changed our lives

16. If you won USD 30 million, what would you do with the money?
I always fantasize how I would like to give it away anonymously, just little amounts at a time to make somebody’s life unexpectedly better

17. Who do you admire the most, and why?
Erwin Laszlo who has devoted his life to trying to protect our planet from itself

18. What’s the best party you’ve been to in Hungary, and why?
My sixtieth birthday party because it was the first real birthday party I had ever had and everyone I had ever known came from all over the world and there was great music. I love to dance

19. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you choose?
India

20. What question(s) would you ask last if you interviewed yourself?
Another time round would you do everything exactly the same and next time would you rather be a man or a woman?

  • How does this interview make you feel?