What it is.

I've been really busy this weekend, filling out the 7 REU applications that I've procrastinated on before now, but I thought I should write a little update.

Unfortunately, the BSM group is starting to get clique-ish. It was bound to happen, because out of practicality it's tough for people to hang out in groups of 20-30 people all the time (believe me, we've tried it a few times), and when groups start to form it's tough to stay as a nomad between groups. That said, everyone in the program is friendly to one another, and there are groups I like to think of as subsets of bigger groups, you know, subgroups. And it's just outside of class that people tend to clump up.

So, this week, I've mainly been hanging out with Ivan, Tom, Anna, Lauren, Kira, and Caroline, give or take a few others. Last week we took a trip to Statue Park outside Budapest, where someone collected all the old statues and monuments from the Hungarian Communist era and put them in one place. It's pretty cool and kinda eerie, especially considering these icons would have been all over Budapest just 20 years ago. Also, it's interesting to see the previous names of the locations that the statues were taken from: for instance, the busy present-day square of Oktagon was known as Lenin Square in very recent history. Unfortunately, Statue Park is in the middle of nowhere outside Budapest, and it took some complicated transportation to get there--however, the games we played on the bus made the journey quite enjoyable.

The Budapest challenges: this is an idea that just arose naturally out of some of the adventures we've been having in Budapest. Instead of trying to explain what these are, I think I'll name a couple of the ideas we've come up with:
Racing the Yellow Line: The yellow metro line in Budapest is the oldest subway in continental Europe, and as such it's a little inefficient, stopping every few blocks as it runs about 20 feet below Budapest's main boulevard, Andrassy ut, Considering the number of stops the trains have to take, we decided that it would be a worthy challenge to go head-to-head against the Yellow line in a race. We've made one trial run, from Oktagon to Heroes Square (4 stops, about 1 km) with Tom and I running and Ivan taking the metro. We actually beat him, but considering he had to wait 45 seconds for a train, he beat us time-wise by about 30 seconds. However, it was icy out, and I was out of shape/tired, and so this looks to be a great challenge to master at some point this semester.
Eating the Mountain of Food: There's an Italian restaurant on Moszkva tér that serves a certain Hungarian Dish for Two, better known to us as the Mountain of Food. Ivan and I split the dish the first time we went--it's a mass of four types of meat, rice, potatoes, onions, and pickled vegetables--and we BARELY finished the meal, working together. So we returned this week, and expecting another challenge, we were sorry to find that the dish seemed diminished in volume slightly (although it still filled us up.) However, this prompted us to introduce the most difficult Budapest challenge to date: eating the Mountain of Food SOLO. I don't think it can be done.
There have been more ideas, including running up the down escalator at Moszkva tér metro station (this escalator is the biggest I've ever seen, and takes about 2 minutes to ride, standing still). This is what it takes to become a Budapest Champion.

Tom is originally from London, but lives in Des Moines and Iowa City (it's actually quite amazing how many BSM 2006 students have Iowa ties) and goes to Rice in Texas. He's a cool guy, and also a runner--we've been trying to get out and run together as much as possible. For our greatest run thus far--and perhaps the highlight of my activities the past week--we rode out to the Buda Hills and met up with Alex and Peter (both of Gustavus Adolphus) who live there in the suburbs. Those two have been running on the multitude of hiking trails out there all the time, and they took us on a steep, slippery trail up to Budapest's highest point--Janós Hill. There's a tower at the top which you can climb to the very top of and get rewarded with an amazing view of Budapest and the nearby countryside. The run was about 8 miles through mud and icy snow/slush, but it was exhilarating once we gave into the cold and muck--sprinting and sliding down the hill in the snow was great.

I've been spending some time figuring out travel plans for the next few months, and it's very exciting! Here's what is planned:
Weekend trips to Prague, Vienna, Krakow (?)
Late March date in London with Julia
Spring Break vacation to Rome, Cinque Terre (Italian coastline), and Venice
Family visit in May after classes end, trip to Ljubljana, Slovenia (?)



Statue Park


Ivan, doing his posing


Lenin, doing his posing


Getting pumped up for the Mountain of Food.