nawl

This city is magical.

Here is a guide to my week.

Math

The actual reason for my visit was the Horizon of Combinatorics summer school held at the Renyi Institute. The talks ranged from bare-hands type graph theory and extremal problems to probabilistic models and geometry.

Most of the world doesn't know it, but Hungary is a great place for math. Joel Spencer says maybe it's the coffee.

Food

Being a vegetarian in Europe is always a challenge. Particularly in Hungary, where waiters roll their eyes when you ask for a vegetarian option, "vegetarian" soups taste of chicken broth, and a dish of pesto pasta tastes mysteriously of bacon fat.

Here are some things to eat:

1. Breaded fried cheese. Most likely the only vegetarian thing on the menu at a restaurant serving up traditional Hungarian food. Probably accompanied by french fries or rice and tartar sauce. If you're lucky, you can cut the grease with some cold fruit soup, which in some incarnations resembles melted ice cream, in others is a sort of spiced fruit juice with chunks of unidentifiable fruit matter.

2. Pizza. The best pizza I had in the week was actually not at any of the usual suspects, but at a tiny little Kávézó-Pizzeria on Kethly Anna tér where the kitchen and the linguistic capacities of the waitresses were completely overwhelmed by a group of nine of us showing up at once. The Olasz mint lemonade was tasty.

3. Goat cheese salad. In this case, somewhere hip-looking on Liszt Ferenc tér while watching the tarted up club bunnies pass by for a pre-clubbing meal. You'd think that with the decor a place like this would have figured out that iceberg lettuce is not to be used without irony.

4. Greek food. Downscale is a 400 ft falafel from a case with flies crawling on it, upscale is some Mediterranean place on Raday where the enormous appetizer platter featured... breaded fried feta.

Language

Hungarian is everyone's favorite non-Indo-European european language. Well, ok, maybe not yours. It's highly agglutinative, meaning that everything you want to say comes in the form of a conjugation or prepositional prefix or suffix. This means that I know a fair number of words, but have difficulty actually forming a sentence.

I had two major language victories during the week in the form of interactions that were not about buying food: I successfully asked for directions and understood a non-trivial answer, and had a halting and awkward conversation with a thirteen year old girl who spoke about as much English as I spoke Hungarian.

Music

On Tuesday we ventured way off the tourist grid to a farm-house museum in Szentendre for a concert by Ghymes, my favorite Hungarian (er, Slovakian) band. Their music is a sort of mishmash of traditional songs performed with saxophone, mandolin, and drums and angsty new-age stuff with electric guitar and synthesizers. The sun set, the stars came out, the air was cool, and we were rapt with hundreds of dedicated Hungarian fans.

On Bastille Day we ended up at Godor Klub, a bar underneath the pond in the middle of Erzsebet tér, watching a very enthusiastic crowd for Beaubourg, a French-Italian rock group that includes a trumpet and a clarinet.

One evening, there was an outdoor classical concert in front of the Szent István Bazilika. We sat on the ground outside of the fenced-off paid enclosure with seats and listened to who-knows-what... Tchaikovsky, I think. Warm summer night, beautiful, lighted basilica, music, laughing and talking from the cafe behind us, beer and spilled Chinese take-out on the ground.

Dance

Thursday evening we went folk dancing at the Szabadido"központ on Almássy tér. It was a great party, hundreds of people talking and laughing, drinking cheap beer and the "house specialty" pálinka, dancing in pairs or in a huge circle, everyone joining hands and shuffling, kicking, jumping, stomping in complicated rhythms. There's no better way to enjoy the music than to jump right in.

And of course, ballroom dancing at Forgách utca and 5 Órai tea, where everyone dances salsa Cuban-style, and swing is "rocky" or "boogie-woogie", and I've never found a happier straight-up ballroom scene anywhere else.

Public Transit

I'm in love with Budapest's public transit system. They have a web site, which probably doesn't properly convey the awesomeness of being able to get anywhere at any time of day or night for cheap. Like from Zuglo to the airport at 5:15 am in three buses and an hour and a half. (Which was partly my stupidity in forgetting to call for a shuttle, and partly my public transit fetish.)

A fair number of things have changed since last year: The construction at Keleti is finished. There are spiffy new tram cars on the 4/6 tram line, and all of the stops have been rebuilt with spiffy new shelters to accomodate them. The reptérbusz has a number, now, 200, and the night bus system has been completely reworked and they all now have numbers in the 900s.

And while we're on the subject of changes, check out this incredibly detailed and totally amazing site about Budapest's old tram lines (via Pestiside). I know you don't speak Hungarian, but if you've ever been to Budapest the pictures are a trip. Trams across Erzsébet híd!

Baths

When I lived in Budapest we always went to Széchényi because the guidebooks assured us it was mixed-gender, and later, because it was familiar. This time we went to Gellért, which is bright and beautiful in a modern sort of way, though less than ideal for a trip to the baths with a bunch of mathematicians because the thermal pools and steam rooms are segregated. I sat on my own among the naked Hungarian ladies and tourists in the sauna before reconvening in the mixed pool room with the boys who were busy speculating about the possible meaning of wearing one's modesty apron in the front or the back.

One night we went to Rudas, which is open and mixed-gender from 10 pm to 4 am on Fridays and Saturdays. On the other side of the wall was some sort of open bar blasting bumpy music, and inside we sat serenely in dimly lit warm pools, contemplating the dome, the 16th century Turkish architecture, the sulfur-smelling water.

Architecture

There's something about the center city, the way rows of magnificent old buildings are gray with soot and crumbling away, neglected, it seems, since they were built. Particular buildings have been cleaned or repainted, and seem to be regressing back to gray just as quickly. The style of the public spaces--either late 19th century Austro-Hungarian empire urban dream or space-age communist urban dream.

The way the city is lit up at night, bridges and river and outdoor cafes and trams, the green phosphorescent bugs that looked ever so much like spilled LEDs along the completely darkened paths up the front of Gellerthegy.

This is the railing of Szabadság híd, a spot that a random passer-by invited me to watch for as we walked across. All of Budapest's bridges were destroyed during WWII and rebuilt by the communists. This is where the original bridge ends and the rebuilt part begins.

Balaton

Ok, Balaton isn't Budapest, but it might as well be. I went to talks, luxuriated on the grassy "beaches", swam in the milky lake, refrained from purchasing a langos.