More baths, more coffee, more culture

 

So anyway, things have been going fairly well.  I slept for 16 hours Wednesday night and then 6 hours last night -- hopefully I can get my sleep schedule a bit more normal...

 

I have been exploring Budapest awesome cafe-cum-cake-shops.  The cappuccino taste great here.  I read somewhere that the milk in Hungary is special and I think that's right.  All the milk products I've had have been incredible.

 

I've been reading Hippocratic texts in preparation for the seminar.  Those guys are really weird.  For example, in one text I read, "On Flesh," the author goes on a long rant against philosophers and their useless postulations and then goes on to declare that he is of the opinion that fire is all knowing and all perceiving...  But anyway, the reading has been going quite well, which is good.  I volunteered to give a presentation (they want about half of the students to give one) and I ended up getting one of the first two slots, so I'll be going next Tuesday.  It'll be a 20 minute presentation on my dissertation and then 20 minutes for questions.

 

I've been in a rather strange mood.  I took an hour long walk a the crack of dawn this morning to head to a different Turkish bath.  It turns out that the guidebooks had old information on what day men were allowed to bath there.  So I tried going to a different bath -- the biggest of them, a huge 19th century complex.  I don't know, it was pretty, but it kind of felt like a large US public pool with warm water pools in addition to cold and surrounded by a Victorian building instead of a wire mesh fence.  The Turkish bath had so much atmosphere and this... I don't know, it struck me the wrong way.  I didn't find it that relaxing.

 

Pretty much all of the food I've had so far has been fried.  I picked up a flier for a place with hummous -- that sounds perfect right now.  I've had so much rich food I almost don't want to eat any more cake...

 

It turns out 75 cents is about average for raspberries -- I got a better pint for 45 cents.  I've similarly got a cappuccino for that much.

 

I've bought tickets to a Hungarian folk music concert tonight by one of the national Hungarian troops that has an emphasis on Gypsy music.  I have seen number of Gypsies around playing music in the street and in restaurants.  I also bought a ticket to the Opera for the night before I leave.  I went in to the Opera house to look around.  It was $7 for the tour or $10 for a concert -- not a hard choice.  They are performing a selection of works from their upcoming late summer season including a fair amount of Verdi.

 

Today I visited the largest synagogue in Europe.  It's big.  The outside is quite pretty, with a sort of Moorish design.  The inside is... well, nothing special.  It was preserved because the Nazi's set up camp there for running the Ghetto knowing that the Allies wouldn't bomb a synagogue.  There was also a really nice museum with Jewish artifacts from throughout Europe.  I was the only gentile on the tour so I don't really understand much of it "Well, this was used in Yom Kimpor... you know, in the normal way...  You guys can read Hebrew right -- what's strange about these scrolls" but still, it was interesting and there were some quite beautiful things.  I guess the collection was preserved through the World War II by one of the curators of the local national museum.  Another thing I didn't know is that the Hungarian government tried hard to not let the Nazi's kill the Jews or put them in ghettos, although they did pass a number of anti-semetic laws.  It wasn't until late in 1944 that the Nazi's came in and started rounding up the Jews.  Over the course of three months they killed almost all of the Jews outside of Budapest -- almost half a million (out of a population of ten million).  About two thirds of those in Budapest survived because the Russians liberated  Budapest in time.

 

Well, that's more or less it.  Till next time...

 

David