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?