Evidently I'm really bad at picking meeting points because it happened to be the day of the Budapest Marathon, and the finish line was right in front of the monument. Oops.
The Chimney Cake Festival mostly consists of a lot of booths selling different varieties of chimney cakes. There's not much to do other than wait in line, get food, and eat, so the lines were very long. The chimney cakes were delicious and definitely worth it, though.
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| Hannah, Philippe, and I with our mini chimney cakes. |
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| This was the regular (vanilla/sugar) one; I also got one with cinnamon. Note that this is about half the length of a normal chimney cake, and the diameter is smaller than normal, too. |
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The Hungarian National Ballet performed The Merry Widow by Ronald Hynd last weekend. It's a comedy and was lots of fun. Aliya Tanykpayeva and Adrienn Pap were incredible both as dancers and as actors in the two leading women's parts. While the men's corps was inconsistent in terms of being together, their dance in Act II was perfect, and if there could only be one perfect men's corps part, that was the right one. I also loved the sets and costumes; they were pretty different in all three acts, but still managed to go together coherently and fit the story.
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There are eight of us in Spectral Theory, but two people left early for the long weekend this Wednesday, which left six students. Spectral is inquiry-based, which means that our class period mostly consists of us presenting our solutions to each other. For two hours before our three hour class this week, three of us were in the BSM building's basement, trying to solve a couple of problems we'd been stuck on. We spent a long time on one problem, trying to split it into cases and solve the uglier case with half-remembered abstract algebra.
And then, about ten minutes before class started, one of us wrote something on the blackboard, and we all realized that we'd found a one line solution to the entire problem, using nothing complicated at all.
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Yesterday was October 23rd, which is a holiday in memory of the 1956 revolution. Someone at church had recommended Szabadság, Szerelem (Children of Glory in English, which is so indirect a translation as to not really be a translation) as a good movie related to the revolution, so I watched it. The protagonist is on the national water polo team, and the movie ends with the "Blood in the Water" match, Hungary vs. the Soviet Union at the Melbourne Olympics, so I ended up then watching Freedom's Fury, a documentary about the revolution, the water polo team, and that match.
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I went grocery shopping today. I have now been in Hungary long enough that "grocery shopping" involves three stops: Spar (the big chain grocery store), a bakery, and a fruits/vegetables store. There's a Spar five to ten minutes from my apartment, and the vegetables store is on the way. There are several bakeries on that street.
My favorite bakery, however, is 15-20 minutes from my apartment and in a different direction. (And yes, I have a favorite bakery.)
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