These Are A Few of My Favorite Things

I planned on listing a few of my favorite things in Budapest. The list I ended up writing is a little longer than "a few."

Math

--Complex Analysis - This is my favorite class right now. It's just all so beautiful! The proofs aren't always elegant, but things tend to turn out nicely and the way you think they should.

--Extremal Combinatorics - I love doing the homework for this class. Combinatorics problems are just fun to think about, and while this class feels like a topics class in that we jump around from one thing to each other, the problems manage to build on each other in surprising ways.

--A theorem by Lovasz about perfect graphs - We proved this theorem in Extremal, and it's definitely my favorite proof from all of my classes this semester. At first it just seems like there are too many parts, and then suddenly at the end it all comes together with linear algebra. I remember that we took a break right after finishing the proof, and I just stared at the board in awe because it worked out so beautifully.

--Liouville's Theorem - This is from Complex. Both the statement and the proof are really short and elegant, and this is one of the few statements in Complex that has actually surprised me.

Dance and Music

--Aliya Tanykpayeva - Tanykpayeva is my favorite dancer in the Hungarian National Ballet. I saw her dance Hannah in The Merry Widow, and she's incredible.

--The Merry Widow - I've seen four ballets in Budapest (as well as two outside of Hungary, and I'll see two more here tomorrow night). Of those four, Widow was my favorite. The corps work wasn't perfect, but some of it was amazing, I thought it had good parts for men and women, and the leads were really good. (Also, despite good dancing, the staging of Coppelia was a bit odd, or Coppelia would have won without question.)

--A Zene Az Kell - This is my favorite Hungarian song, and it's about music! I heard a children's choir sing it outside the Opera House a couple of months ago.

--Málna - We've learned a lot of Hungarian's children's songs in Hungarian class, and this is my favorite. The title is the word for raspberry, and the song is about a whale who didn't know how delicious raspberries were. I don't actually like raspberries, but it's a fun song.

--Gryllmus Vilmos - He wrote a lot of the children's songs we've learned, and I like most of them a lot.

Non-dessert Food
--Babgulyás - The two most well-known Hungarian soups are gulyás (goulash) and bableves (bean soup). This is pretty much both in one. There's a restaurant near my apartment that serves it with the perfect amount of paprika.
--Magyaros szűzérmék - This is really well spiced pork, usually served with potato chips and a tomato sauce. This was the very first meal I had in Hungary.
--Milanoi borda - This is more good pork. The pork part is pretty much just schnitzel, but then it comes with pasta with tomato sauce and lots of mushrooms. 
--Debreceni kolbász - This is my favorite Hungarian sausage. It's really flavorful and spiced with a fair bit of paprika.

--Csirkepaprikas - Chicken in paprika sauce, yummm. It's usually served with a type of noodle called galuska.

Desserts
--Ksokis keksz ice cream (sometimes just called Cookies) - This is chocolate chip cookie ice cream - not vanilla ice cream with chocolate chip cookies in it (though there is usually some cookie in it), and not cookie dough ice cream. It's a pretty common flavor here, and it really does taste like chocolate chip cookies in ice cream form. 
--Kakaós csiga - Or maybe I should have listed this as breakfast. A kakaos csiga looks like a giant cinnamon roll, but instead of cinnamon, there's chocolate. At the best bakeries, it's sprinkled with powdered sugar. The name means 'chocolate snail.' It's definitely the most common pastry for BSMers to buy for breakfast.
--Kakaós beigli - This is also dough and chocolate rolled together in layers, but it's more chocolate-y than csiga. Whereas in csiga there's a thin layer of chocolate applied on the dough as the dough is wrapped around, in beigli there's actually a significant amount of chocolate. The dough is a few inches wide, and it's rolled in on both sides, so a beigli is pretty easy to split in half. The poppy and walnut versions are more traditional than the chocolate, but unsurprisingly I like chocolate best.
--Eszterházy torta - There's a pastry shop (not exactly, but that's the best way I know to translate cukrászda) across the street from my apartment, so I've been trying a bunch of different cakes pretty much randomly. This is my favorite. It's a layered cake with walnut meringue dough and vanilla buttercream (or sometimes cognac buttercream; most of the cakes here have alcohol in them).

--Balaton - I've tried a lot of candy here, and Balaton is my favorite. It's just wafers layered with and coated with chocolate, but the dark chocolate version is especially good.

Places
--District VII - I live here and go to school here, and that's probably why I love it, but it's a great part of Pest.

-- Buda, near the river, the castle, and Chain Bridge - I think this is the prettiest part of the city.

--Bite Sausage - Bite has a couple of different restaurants (and trucks that show up at festivals), but the sausage restaurant was right by language school. They had lots of different kinds of sausages, and I usually got sausage, a big piece of bread, and a warm, foamy drink that's sort of like cocoa for under five dollars.
--Cuor di Pasta - This is a little pasta place around the corner from BSM, and the upstairs part of the restaurant is a good place to do work with other BSMers over lunch. Their red and green pestos and four cheese sauces are really good, and they have a huge variety of pastas. I especially like their gnocchi.
--The Cat Cafe - This is definitely my favorite study spot. The cake and drinks are all really good, it's generally a pretty relaxed place, and there are four cats who come and curl up on nearby chairs. Or sometimes on top of my notebook. Very, very occasionally one of them will deign to sit in my lap.

--The papirbolt on Damjanich - Papirbolt means paper store. They're pretty common, and they're little stores that sell paper, notebooks, stationery, and writing utensils. All the pens I brought to Budapest managed to die in about three months, and I ran out of paper (which was less surprising), so I went to the papirbolt. The existence of these stores still makes me smile, and the one nearest to where I live has a really good selection of pens.

--Festival Theater - I've now been to three theaters in Budapest, and while the Opera House is gorgeous, the Festival Theater in the Palace of Arts is wonderful. It's smaller, but it's set up so that in most of the theater it's pretty much impossible to have your view blocked by the person in front of you. There are also great couches and chairs right outside the house. The Palace of Arts is a beautiful building, and it's right on the Danube.