Free day!

Also, before I get into today's free day, I would also like to bring your attention to the place where we ate dinner last night: the Frank Zappa Cafe. This cafe used to be called something else, and was famous in Hungary for being THE hard rock/alternative place to be, and also started one of the first alternative radio stations here. The Frank Zappa thing came about when Frank visited the cafe and a mural of New York City was painted inside in his honor; this mural is now the youngest protected monument in Hungary.

Today, however, I did not take Liz's suggestion to go to Vienna (one day, Liz! I only had ONE DAY!) but I did take her suggestion to walk around the city and see the inside of the Gresham Palace/Four Seasons Hotel which was recently restored and is just about the swankiest place to stay in Budapest.I went in and asked the nice people to see the hotel staircases, which apparently the get asked a lot--the stairs are original from 1904 and very lovely.

After that, I hiked (walked) Gellért Hill, which is right next to the Gellért baths and how the baths got their name. This is the monument on top: It has a story. Apparently, during WWII when Hungary saw that the Axis powers were going to lose (the side they were on), a polician (or was it a general? I don't remember) sent his son to fly a secret mission to the Russians to make peace and a way out for Hungary. The Germans found out and shot the plane down, and afterwards the father wanted to make a monument to his fallen son. He started making the shape of the woman you see here and planned to put a broken airplane wing in her hands, but the statue was never finished. Then, when the Russians 'liberated' Hungary after the war, they wanted to make a monument to, well, themselves and decided this lovely half-finished statue would work perfectly with the addition of a laurel leaf.

The view from the top of Gellért Hill:

After the Hill, I met part of the group at Vörösmarty Tér (the center of all tourist activity in Budapest) for lunch. We did meet there, but then quickly moved down the street to an underground vegetarian Indian place (former Flinns will remember Ghandi's, which is now Govinda's, underneath the IIE offices) and then headed to wine tasting at the House of Hungarian Wines right by Buda Castle. Very touristy and mildly expensive, but we each got a 'free' souvenire wine glass with our purchase which makes it ok? :/ This place is like those 'drink around the world' bars, except with Hungary. And wine, not beer. You go into little alcoves, each representing an area of the country, and pretend to know things about how wine should taste. It was fun!

And then, back to the Radio Inn where all the Flinnlets got picked up by Hungarian students for a homestay tonight. BJ and I have the night off, as it were. And so we're back online.

Interesting Things:
The coffee-maker-cum-toaster in my hotel room.

The cappucino I spilled today. This was after the wine tasting. I'd like to think that the spilling and the wine tasting were in no way related... By the way, I've started drinking coffee. Mostly because I like the idea of European coffee house culture.

A sign for 'The Producers' in the Kelvin tér metro stop on the blue line (for those of you who know where this is). And can I say that everyone should see the Hungarian movie 'Kontroll'? We watched it yesterday. It's generally about the metros here, but it's also about many other things and it's one of the best movies I've ever seen. See it! It also makes me slightly afraid to use the blue and red line metros here. But you should still see the movie!

Also--we leave tomorrow morning to head out to non-Budapest Hungary and Romania for about 16 days, during which I will not have much internet. So I'll try to update (since it helps me process everything we've been doing as well as letting all you out there in internet-land find out what's going on here!) but...who knows?

A few more days in Hungary

On an average day in Budapest, I wake up and groggily wander downstairs to our hotel breakfast. At this point there will be about 5 of the 16 students already there eating, and the rest will rush down at the last minute before we have to leave to make it to our lectures on time while BJ and I worry that they've slept through their alarms. Then there will be some sort of activity for the rest of the day. Yesterday we headed to the Parliament for a tour. Sorry about the tram electric lines in the picture, I'll attempt to get a better one tomorrow when we have a FREE DAY, yessss. Inside the parliament, I met Chinese people who were on the tour as well, chatted with them for a while, and saw the amazing cigar holders that are numbered for easy reuniting of cigar with owner. Also, the building itself is quite elaborate. Apparently the gold leaf on everything turns brown every thirty years so the government is constantly in the process of replacing it so as not to go bankrupt by doing it all at once.

After visiting the Parliament building, we walked across the Danube on a beautiful day to the Gellért baths. Here is what the day looked like: Hungary has a tradition of large bathhouses, a leftover from centuries of Ottoman Turk rule. Sometimes your Hungarian doctor will prescribe visits to such baths, and these visits will be completely covered by your Hungarian insurance. Sweet. The Gellért baths are the swankest baths in the country with a wave pool that dates to the 1920s and porcelin tile everywhere.

In between all this, we do a lot of eating. This is a typical meal for the Flinn folk...these meals involve very long tables and much 'ok, now who's a vegetarian again?'

And look! I'm here!

That night, after the baths, I headed out to the suburbs with a few of the group to a two-violin and piano concert, which was absolutely amazing! The musicians rearranged the progam at the last minute to let the pianist play two Liszt pieces, which was appropriate considering Liszt is Hungarian and that the pianist was very talented!

And after that...out dancing! And it was 'Classics' night at Club Cha Cha Cha on Margit Island. Yeah! This meant that we got anything from 'Pretty Woman' to Hungarian stuff that everyone else knew to the grand finale...'I Love Rock and Roll!'

Finally a free moment to post!

So it's been a little busier now that the Chaperoning has started. I have to get up, early, get everyone else up early and make sure no one's lost. Have we misplaced anyone yet, you ask? Um...yeah, actually. No more than about 4 hours into the trip 3 of the boys were 'misplaced.' And, since they had just gotten here, they didn't have maps, money, anything! Way to start chaperoning on the right foot...they made it back to the hotel eventually, though.

But BJ (the other chaperone) and I haven't lost anyone since, so I count everything as going just fine. The place that we're having most of our seminars while in Budapest is incredible! (So far we've had seminars on the Hungarian language, one on higher education, and one on US-Hungarian relations, more or less.) Those former Flinns reading this won't believe that there are 16 computers for us to use (we had ONE that worked sometimes before) in a swank new student center that was built for all the students in Hungary to use. It's actually in a renovated palace, and part of it looks like this:

Anyhoo, I promised several people I'd post pictures of the city, and fortunately we went on a walking tour yesterday so...first we have the First Communist McDonalds. It opened in 1987 and was the first ever to serve the Big Mac in a communist country. The communism in Hungary was not as strict as it was in many other places, and the area that this McDonalds is in is where people from all over the Soviet bloc came to buy things like blue jeans and nylons, from what I hear.

There's been much economic development since I was here last (note the big student center we're using), but also more graffiti. Strange. I asked a Hungarian about it, and she said 'well no one understands it anyways, and it's colorful!' This is inside of a reeeally nice market that no one uses anymore. Mostly Budapest is not like this though! This was special. I've also seen some stencils around, if there are any good one's I'll post them!

We also walked by the old Conservative temple, which is very beautiful and marks the beginning of the old Jewish ghetto. This area of town is now really hip, with nightclubs and bars next to the Orthodox temples and wig shops.

What does this mean? Suggestions?

Today we also went out of town to the Pazmany Peter Catholic University Faculty of Humanities campus to hear about Hungarian higher education (which is going through many changes in order to make it better mesh with the rest of Europe's educational system) and also to see the campus, which was designed by a famous Hungarian architect in a very organic style. When you're inside the buildings they give the feeling of being outside. Or that's the idea. This is the concert hall:

And this is the same hall from the outside:

And here are the people I'm chaperoning interacting in a very college-brochure fashion with some of the Hungarian students at the university:

Budapest

Safe and sound and yes, still raining. Sigh. Back to words with so many consonates in a row that my mind freezes. And now back to the hotel where I am going to pick up the rest of the group from the airport!

Back in London!

I made it back to London safely for all of you that were concerned.

Funny story--so yesterday there was some big football match, Arsenal versus Barcelona (maybe? I know someone will correct me on this). In any case, I assume it took place in Paris because there were a billion drunk Englishmen all over the city yesterday dressed in Arsenal red. I took the early, cheap easyJet flight back to London today--and practically the entire plane consisted guys looking worn out from the revels of the night before (Arsenal lost by the way, London is a sad place today). I've never been on such a gender-imbalanced plane before! There were honestly like 5 women on the entire thing. That, and no one had checked luggage since they were just there for the day--most of the plane made a beeline through the British citizen section of customs past the luggage carousels and out the door.

I meant to do so much today...

I started out the morning with high hopes. I was going to find the modern art museum (because the building is supposed to be cool) and stroll around the Jewish quarter because its winding streets are old and filled with atmosphere (or so they say. One of Ashley's guide books that we agreed has a penchant for adjective overuse said the Jewish quarter has 'effervescent' streets. Wow. Must be some streets). To top it off, I was going to hit the Rodin museum on the way home because it is literally around the corner from Ashley's flat.

Yeah, none of this happened.

I didn't get out of the apartment until, oh, 2:30pm because I decided I was sick of walking around seeing things. I roused myself enough to get to the Rodin museum since it was so close, only to find that there was some sort of protest (this IS Paris, after all) going on in the street in front it and that the police had barricaded the street just in front of the entrance to the Rodin museum. Apparently, between yesterday's Picasso fiasco and today's lack of Rodin, I'm not meant to see any more museums in Paris. There was a lovely view of Invalid on the way to the museum, though:

After that, I had a brilliant idea!

So the new, cool thing to do in Paris is...rollerblade, naturally. According to this article, which you all should read because it's funny and great,

"Le roller is not only the pleasure of skating together, but a philosophy and a social phenomenon," sums up Boris Belohlavek, a 27-year-old computer engineer and the president of Pari-Roller...

Ashley has a pair of blades that this flat's former resident left here, and they fit me perfectly. Granted, I haven't roller-bladed since like middle school, but it's like riding a bike, right?

Not exactly. I was definitely wobbly and had this distinct problem of not being able to stop. Then I remembered that maybe it wasn't a problem of just forgetting how to do these things since I was little, maybe it was the fact that I didn't really know how to stop (without running into something, that is) when I was little either! Also, there are cobblestones in Paris. Also, there are slopes that send you in the direction of large groups of tourists. Also, there are French people to laugh at you as you grab on to walls to slow yourself when going downhill.

I ended up having a slightly nerve-wracking but perfectly great two hours, and I made it from Invalid to near Notre Dame and back again (although I had to walk part of the way, I can't figure out how people can blade on cobblestones). Here's the view over the Seine looking back towards Ashley's aparment. Not that you can see her apartment from this picture. But it's back there, I promise.

And as for what I reeeeally did in Paris, here's me sitting in front of Ashley's computer. Check out how close the wall I'm facing is to the one reflected in the mirror! and that's the front door behind me. But what more do you need as a student, right?

Tomorrow morning I leave for London again, where I know the computers don't like my camera so you won't be getting any pictures for a bit. Then Saturday I head to Budapest to prepare to meet the Flinn kids on Sunday. So with a tear, say goodbye to this daily photoblog posting. I'll try my best to post the best of the best, though, when I get a chance! So this isn't an excuse to stop checking ;)

I like Paris!

I've decided that I'm OK with Paris. I think I still like London more, as large cities go, but today's journey outside the central part of Paris showed me that it's not half bad, once you get out of the grandiose boulevard section. Today, on Ashley's suggestion, I headed to the Sacre Coeur which is a church on a hill in the northern part of the city (close to Moulin Rouge, actually, which according to Ashley is a small thing and a dissappointment, so I didn't bother trying to find it).You weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but it has a lovely mosiac on the ceiling over the alter that someone else broke the rules to take a picture of, see below.

The area around the church is a great mess of old, narrow streets that are currently filled with tourist cafes and portrait artists, also for tourists. It was still great to walk around, though, and surreptitiously listen to music coming from the piano bars. One guy had a pretty good stride jazz style going for a while.

After that, there was much metro-ing around the city to find out that a) the Picasso museum is closed on Tuesdays and b) the modern art museum is hard to find at the end of the day when you're sick of finding things (I'll try again tomorrow). I did find a Chinese-area-studies and Chinese-language bookstore, though, so I took a break in there for a while to be around things that I understood for a change! They had an English version of the Cambridge History of China in one volume, very nice...but I figured that it's definitely not something I wanted to be lugging around Europe for the rest of my trip. That, and it was a 91 euro that I didn't need to spend :)

Museum of the Middle Ages

Today's post comes with many thanks to Katherine--she was the one who told me about the Museum of the Middle Ages, and it really was, as she had promised, amazing. Versailles is nice, and I guess everyone should go, but I really do prefer the smaller, more intimate museums. I also like the museums that are managable in size so that you don't get Sun King/portrate/modern art overload by the time you leave.

The Museum of the Middle Ages is famous because its collection includes many many ancient tapestries, the most famous of which is 'The Lady and the Unicorn' tapestry set, which the museum has in a special round room to display all six (huge) pieces.

Here is a detail of one of the tapestries, and if you want to know more about them click on the link above, their history is quite interesting.

The museum also holds some lovely illuminated manuscripts, which I always love, and is housed partially on the site of the old Roman baths, dating from before Paris was Paris! The little chapel inside was also stunning:

After that, I did the Famous Sites in Paris loop. The Museum of the Middle Ages is very close to Notre Dame, so I started there and then continued along the Left Bank until I got to the bridge the crosses over to the Louvre. You then walk from the Louvre down the Champs-Elysées to the famous obelisk that France stole from Egypt a while back ;) and then continue along the tree-lined boulevard until you get to the Arc de Triumph, which is further away than it looks because it's so big, and just swarming with tourists. Then you can walk from there to the Eiffel Tower, which I already took care of yesterday, so after passing under it I headed home to Ashley's, even though I could have continued and hit Invalid today as well.

And to prove that I was there, here is a stunning lets-use-the-digital-camera-turny-screen-to-take-a-picture-of-yourself picture:

Oui Oui Paris

Sorry to have missed a day everyone, but I'm afraid this will become more common as I get closer to the chaperone part of my travels. Here in Paris the challenge is that Ashley has an internet connection, but, since she's a student and all, she has to use her computer herself most of the time! Jeez.

But yesterday I did manage to get out to Varsailles: It was a lot easier to get to than I thought it would be--you just take the suburban train all the way out, which from where Ashley lives in the middle of the city was only like a half and hour. Very nice. But you get there, and proceed to get extremely confused about which ticket does what--does the A ticket get out in to everything, or is it the B ticket, or is it the B-to-the-power-of-2 ticket (I'm not kidding, that's what it said). I wandered around for a while and then, like a burst of sunshine in the rain, I heard the dulcet tones of Mandarin Chinese coming from the couple next door to me. And the female of the couple spoke French! I proceeded to follow them around for a bit until the man noticed that my purse had Chinese characters on it, which opened up the conversation between us. He works for HP in Beijing and she lives in France, and why don't you see the museum with us? It was wonderful! When we were getting our audio guides for the tour, the woman even asked me if I wanted mine in Chinese or English, how sweet. English please. (By the way, you have to pay freaking 20 euro to see freaking Versailles. Jeez. And no student discount!)

Versailles is big and impressive, very what you would think of as Louis the 14th French. This is the King's bedroom, of the elaborate getting-up ceremony fame.

And it is VERY ornately embellished with gold, everywhere.

The tallest building on site is the church, which I liked. Mostly for the organ. Which is mostly the reason I like any church.

This is the famous Hall of Mirrors, which was supposed to have had no rival in all the world in its day. Guests were taken through here with the sole purpose of being impressed with the Sun King.

The ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors, incredible. Actually, the art all over the palace is quite amazing, and almost every ceiling in all of Versailles resembles this one, only with different themes. The King had seven antechambers, each with the theme of a different Roman god painted on the ceiling. The room right before you got the the King featured Apollo, as befits the Sun King.

The Queen's Bedroom. I know the picture isn't the greatest, but see that door in the lower left? That's the 'secret door' through which Marie Antoinette fled the rioters before the Terror. (An aside: and when I say before the Terror, I mean this in a very general way--I don't remember the dates for any of this, Ashley I were just able to come up with the idea that Marie had to flee the palace sometime before it. It's the best we've got.)

The gardens outside Versailles are HUGE. Also very French in that everything is symmetrical and orderly and just so. Ashley says the French think English gardens, which to me are extremely structured, are crazily wild. Go figure.

At certain times of the day, the museum will broadcast music from the period that Versailles was in use over the gardens and turn on all the fountains. Very impressive.

I particularly liked this one--it's the god Poseidon, can you see? Water is shooting from his mouth in the middle, and you can see a hand in the front right and a knee in the front left.

Today I slept basically the entire day, but I'm ok with that, I'm on holiday. Ashley and I did walk down to the Eiffel Tower, however, during a break from my napping and a break from her writing. And so, the obligatory Eiffel Tower picture!