It'sh Pronounched "Budapesht."

I have to be honest, the travel entries aren't my favorites. I love doing the "research" necessary to create them - touring Budapest with Lisa, Molly, Katie, and Ann was lots of fun - but as I said last time, the plot feels a bit thin on these and the pictures tell it best.

So, here are the pictures. And here are a few quick thoughts.

The entry title: In Hungarian, "s" defaults to what English speakers would call the "sh" sound. You need an "sz" to get what English calls the original recipe "s" sound. So, I walked around this city hearing a good deal of words spoken in the voice of a former teacher who used to jokingly swap in "sh" for "s." That was very weird.

Architecturally, Budapest is awesome. All I ever really do in cities I visit is walk around, eat good food if I can find it, and snap photos of cool buildings (and shit that makes no sense... usually in advertisements). Budapest has some very impressive churches and government buildings, but even normal office buildings, banks, apartments, etc. have really cool flourishes. You never know what you'll find next, which is always a fun feeling to have when you tour a city.

I have discovered some karmic balance, I'm relieved to say, in the world of currency exchange. Yes, the Dollar's had a significant disadvantage against the Euro for over two years, and that's not even mentioning the Pound. So, you learn to stop thinking about how many U.S. Dollars you're spending when you buy basic goods and services in Europe, 'cause otherwise you go insane. Until you arrive in Hungary, home of the Hungarian Forint. Coming from the Euro, I can say that it is uniquely satisfying to take a list price in Forints, divide it by about 300, and THEN decide if you want to pay it. And even coming from the Dollar, dividing by 220(ish) is still a lot of fun.

Recommendations include:

--The cafe at the flagship Alexandra bookstore chain (information and location here). It's an impressive bookstore, a breathtaking cafe, and their cake, coffee, etc. are all quite good.

--The Szechenyi baths are a must-do... quite the unique experience, reasonable price of admittance for basic baths/steamroom/sauna/showers access on their extensive, beautiful grounds. Located here.

--The Szimpla ruin bar (here) is a great nightlife spot.

--Centrale Cafe is a very classy old cafe with high ceilings and more good cake. I'm pretty sure this is the address.

--Művész Restaurant and Café (here) had great goulash, a newly renovated room, and taste-bud-opening (that's gonna' be a thing from now on) desserts.

--The Central Market (here) is pretty good for souvenir shopping and good old market-y experiences.

...I also went to the opera while I was there. It was gorgeous, and I had never seen Tosca. It was a good production with great sets and performers. Of course, I probably should have thought more carefully before buying a ticket to an Italian opera with Hungarian subtitles, but hey - the program had an English summary, so it all worked out.

Next stop on this blogging marathon: Krakow.

Classic

Backtracking: GO!

About three weeks ago, Amy, a fellow primary school English assistant, had a great idea. We went to Nice for "C'est pas Classique," a classical music festival taking place all over the city. Free concerts all over the city, from squares to churches to the big events inside the 'Acropolis' (DC folks: pretend the Kennedy Center was built in Nice in 1970s concrete). We saw all sorts of groups: little string quartets, choirs who were rehearsing, a 20+piece band, the Nice Philharmonic Orchestra accompanied by soprano Barbara Hendricks, a French gospel choir...

Yeah. American gospel music sung by French people. Complete with clapping. And robes. And thrown in pump-up ad-libs (in French), with "hallelujahs" (in... whatever the language is). Yeah. Actually, I was pleasantly surprised-- the festival had not advertised a comedy hour, and yet here we were.

I don't know much about classical music, but I liked what I heard. Seeing the Nice Philharmonic (and for free!) was a real treat. Amy and I had a great time touring around Nice stumbling onto the various bands. I should also note that that included a band on wheels (which included a piano on wheels) in Place Masséna and a chamber orchestra performance of Vivaldi's 'The Four Seasons' back at the Acropolis on the Sunday.

That's really about it. I only have two other details to add:

1.) Double-click on this sentence to see my photos from the weekend.

2.) The event name "C'est pas Classique" is, technically speaking, grammatically incorrect. To negate a verb in French, you put "ne" before (or "n'" in the event of a vowel) and "pas" after. The correct version would have been "Ce n'est pas Classique," but casual spoken French tends to do away with the "ne." I'm still not sure why they called the weekend that, since almost all the music we heard was classical, and I typically think of France as being very proud of its language, rules and all.