Report from the Forest

Well, things have been going well.

I slept for almost 11 hours both Friday and Saturday night. Clearly, I was just completely exhausted. On Saturday I wandered around the castle district, which was quite pretty and contained café Roszwurm, which had the best cake I had in Budapest. A chocolate and almond cake with light, moist chocolate cake and a chocolate cream with almost pieces as a filling. Amazingly good. Unfortunately, my trip was cut a bit short by a torrential downpour. I took refuge in a café, but I was lured out when it stopped and then it started again when I had nowhere to go to. The picture of the partially-destroyed cathedral is from my trip through the storm.

On Sunday I went to the fine arts museum, which I was a bit disappointed by. But oh well. I then came to Piliscsaba, where this reading group is being held. It’s about 20 miles outside of Budapest – 45 minutes by commuter train – in the middle of the woods. It’s a quite pretty setting and the (Catholic) university is quite interesting as well. It is a fairly small campus built in 1993 in a very postmodern style that somehow works quite well. You can see pictures at the end of this.

Yesterday was rather intense. 3 two-hour reading sessions, that started with a 40 minute presentation of a short piece of text followed by intense discussion about everything from grammatical points, questions about the accuracy of the text to major philosophical questions. Quite stimulating, but also quite exhausting, especially given that interacting with people went on from Breakfast to 11 PM.

Today is a bit more calm. They’ve left the afternoon free to go in to Budapest, but I’m tired and starting to worry about the class I’m teaching next week, so I am staying here and I’ll take a hike through the woods. Tomorrow there will be three sessions. Then I’ll have half a night’s sleep before I take the 4:20 AM train to Budapest to catch my 8 AM flight to London so that I can get back to LA Thursday at around 2:30 PM.

-- David