World Tour Part 1 - Europe

Well, we've changed our schedule since we posted it due to weather and other factors mostly out of our control, but we are trying our hardest to make sure we end up doing what we'd planned.

On Saturday, we hid away from the rain by visiting Arena Plaza, a GIANT shopping mall. Picture the biggest mall you've ever seen, then multiply that by at least ten times and that's about the size of it. It has pretty much every store known to Hungary all within one store, along with an IMAX movie theater. Even though it wasn't the most intellectual day possible, it was a good glimpse into Hungarian popular culture. After talking to our hosts, we learned that basically the Hungarians feel that because they were deprived of so many cultural fads during Communism, they should make up for it now by "living it up" now. Every McDonald's here is packed, contrasted with McDonald's back in the U.S., which are barely ever packed. It's definitely interesting to see how even subconsciously they are trying to be as almost American as possible, as if to prove something. It's hard to explain.

We decided to be pretty as touristy as possible on Sunday and took a bus and boat tour of Budapest. The bus took us around to basically every big attraction and gave us the audio background on it; we learned about the Habsburg Castle, the National Museum of Art, the Opera Hall, and more. The tour was not a fantastic way to see the city overall, but gave us a nice background, since almost every stop on the tour is somewhere we have been or are planning on going. However, we did enjoy some of the interesting pronunciations - we could tell the guide was not a native English speaker. The boat ride on the Danube, while beautiful, was cold and too loud to hear any of the narration. We didn't really get anything out of it, but it was a nice view of the Danube.

On Monday, we went back to school for the first time in over a month. Sure, it was in Hungary, but it still counts, right? We met up with our hosts' friend's daughter and she arranged for us to go to three English classes. We also ended up going to a math class, but it was in Hungarian and I have a feeling I wouldn't have understood even in English. In the English classes, the students asked us questions. The classes' knowledge of the language and interest in us varied from "a little interested and good at English" to "not interested in us and okay at English" to "very interested in us but needed their teacher to translate everything". They mostly asked us just some standard questions about our classes, musical preference, state, etc., but we did get a few in one class about some more interesting topics, like how we felt on September 11, 2001.
After a long, hard day of learning (not), we decided to go to the Szuchenyi bath house and relax. It was gorgeous there! There are three giant outdoor pools ranging in temperatures from 34 degrees to 38 degrees Celsius. The 38 degree one is basically just a giant hot tub that you can swim in! In addition to the outdoor pools totaling the size of a football field, there are dozens and dozens of indoor pools. Those range from 20 degrees (freezing! I didn't even want to put my foot in it!) to 38 degrees and saunas at temperatures between 40 degrees and 70 degrees. We didn't even want to venture into those, since the coldest was about the temperature of the desert in the summer. Either way, we had a great time and left pruny, but relaxed.

Yesterday (Tuedsay) was a museum day for us and we chose the National Art Museum. We only saw the temporary exhibit, called Degas to Picasso, but that was where all the paintings we mentioned before were. It was so wonderful! Here is a list of only some of the paintings we saw by some of the better-known artists, but we saw a lot more! Also, I apologize for any spelling mistakes, our notes are hard to read.
The Prison Courtyard by Vincent Van Gogh
Flowers in a White Vase by Henri Matisse
The Muse Inspiring the Poet by Henri Rousseau
The Two Saltimbanques by Pablo Ruiz Picasso
Head of a Woman by Marie Laurencin

We got off to a great start today at our first stop of the day: Market Hall. It's basically a really large indoor food market with tons of fresh bread, fruits and vegetables along with meats, cheeses, fresh-cooked Hungarian food and more. We played it safe and went for bread, cheese and fruit, but it was delicious! We sat at a nice table overlooking the rest of the market and enjoyed our feast.
After that, we were off to the Hungarian National Museum. The museum covered every bit of history from around the 13th century to today. Thanks to our architectural knowledge from American studies, we recognized the building as Neo-Classical and could point out so many architectural features, such as the Corinthian columns, pillasters, a potico, and a pediment. Inside even just the landing area on the stairs, there were murals all around made by Karoly Lotz and Mor Than, two well-known Hungarian artists whose work we also saw at the Hungarian Art Museum in the Habsburg castle.
The exhibitions in the museum were really great. Even though all of the artifact descriptions were in Hungarian, they still had such a good array, from Habsburg-worn clothes to Arpad jewelry. There were English historical-background descriptions all around, so we did get a chance to learn about the history. Hungary has, probably like most countries, a really interesting history. Its ruling has basically been transferred through the years between smaller dynasties, the Ottomans, the Habsburg's Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Soviet Republic to today's Parliamentary government. Since it would take too long to recount everything we saw in and learned from the museum, I'll leave it at that.

As for our schedule, it's very tentatively looking like this:
Thurdsay - Szentendra
Friday - Jewish section, Parliament
Saturday - Orava castle
Sunday - Vienna
Monday - shopping (not the most intellectual option, but hey, we need to relax and look at designer clothes sometime, right?)
Tuesday - fly to Spain

That's all for now, we will probably start with Hungary's weekly requirements soon!
Ariel