A few hours later, I set foot on continental Europe for the first time, in Amsterdam. With the flight getting in early, we had almost a five hour layover, so Lee and I caught a train to Central Station and spent a couple of hours walking around downtown Amsterdam.
Amsterdam is a wonderful place, very international and cosmopolitan,
yet folksy and Dutch at the same time. There is more integration of
different races than I've seen almost anywhere else (except maybe
Hawaii). Africans and Chinese speaking German to each other, for
instance, very neat to see.
There are tourist trails that lead you around the downtown area, color
coded, which makes navigating very easy. Traffic is nuts, though.
Cars and bikes sometimes have separate lanes, but sometimes share one
narrow lane, but always going very fast. They don't leave a whole lot
of room for pedestrians! Also we were there at about 9 in the morning
on a workday, so lots of vans and trucks pulled up on the sidewalk to
load and unload stuff. Here I am in front of one of the canals.
The canals are amazing. Amsterdam has more canals than Venice! Loads
of tourist boats cruising up and down, and also lots of floating real
estate, both boxy rafts of greenhouses, and venerable riverboats with
massive rudders moored to the quay side, complete with front yards and
mailboxes. At least one had apartments available for rent. What a
great way to live. I saw a group of residents on one long boat,
yawning and pouring the coffee, waking up for the day. What fun.
Most all of the bridges are tall enough for boats to go under, but
there are several draw bridges, operated by hand windlass. This must
be a job for someone either extremely traditional or extremely
dedicated.
The architecture of Amsterdam is great fun. It makes me think of gingerbread and candy. Rows of canal houses, looking like they came right out of Hans Brinker, each with a boom over the topmost window for hauling things upstairs with block and tackle (I guess). Ornate sculpted figures, faces, and ornaments adorn almost every building, like marzipan on cake. The big government buildings (including the train station) are so ornate that it fades into an impression of fuzzy complexity, like lace. Carillons sound melodies every quarter hour, lovely to hear.
Lee and I got back to the airport in plenty of time (we could have
stayed longer!) and got the plane to Budapest, after no more than the
typical amount of waiting around. We took the airport shuttle bus
(good deal! much better than taxis) to the Peregrinus hotel. This
place has all modern appointments, and a very nice and helpful staff.
The building is only a few centuries old! Huge tall windows and
incredibly high ceilings. After napping a bit to catch up on sleep,
we ventured out into the Hungarian twilight. This church is across the
street from the Peregrinus.
If Amsterdam is frosted gingerbread, Budapest is hearty meat pie.
Mostly gray stone and concrete, it feels much more solid and heavy,
although it still has lots of decoration on most all buildings.
The Peregrinus is on
Szerb utca (road), it's near the Szabadsag bridge, so we walked across
to view the city at twilight. It is beatiful. In addition to Castle
Hill, there's a "Citadella" carved out of a cliff, with medeival
battlements and walls added, as if crenellations and battlements
sprout from the native rock. This picture overlooks the Szabadsag bridge
and downtown Pest.
Anyway, we decided to spend at least part of the weekend up in the Danube Bend area, north of Budapest, so we checked out of the Peregrinus, leaving bags of extra clothes and stuff to be picked up later. In addition to basic clothing and toiletries, I kept all my business stuff, because I wasn't prepared to let it out of my sight until the conference. This includes the poster I will be presenting as well as the laptop computer, on which I'm typing this journal. Heavy, but as I said, I intend to keep it with me.
After checking the boat schedule (leaving at 14:00), we went over the
Szabadsag bridge to Gellert Hill, which is covered with hiking trails.
It's lots of fun to hike up. We visited the St Paul grotto (a little
chapel in a cave, overlooking the river), several parks with
neoclassical and Art Deco statuary, and made it to the Citadella on
top of the hill. This fort was built by the Austrian empire, was a
much hated symbol of foreign dominion in its time, and has lots of
impressive bullet holes and shell craters all over it. It's also the
site of the Revolutionary Memorial, typically Soviet
neoromantic lady holding a laurel branch high. There are muscular
male nudes doing dramatic things on either side too, and here's Lee
doing her best to imitate one of them.
These pictures are taken from above the St Paul grotto, looking
east over the Szabadsag bridge, over the Danube towards Pest. The
weather was moderate and overcast, but very humid, so we got pretty
sweaty hiking. And I was carrying my paperwork and computer too! I
got a bunch of postcards here, and we shared a bottle of Amstel bock and
a tiny pizza at the outdoor snack shack.After coming back down, we stopped at the huge market building (at the end of Vaci Street) and bought fruit and bread, mostly with sign language. Then we went back to the boat station to catch the boat upriver, only to find out that the afternoon boat was not running. Thanks for telling us earlier guys!
The next couple of hours were my least favorite kind of traveling experience, trying to find a bus, going to the wrong station, getting on the Metro and finding that we're on the wrong line, getting onto a surface tram to get back on the right Metro line, then trying to find the bus station, and ordering tickets clumsily from agents who spoke no English at all. A tense and unhappy time, but we did manage it, and even bought a nice big beer right there in the station while waiting. I will note at this point that Eastern European fuel and emissions standards are very lax compared to ours. Diesel exhaust smells astonishingly foul and sulphurous, like a bad fart.
The bus ride was uneventful, but very bouncy and wild. It takes maybe an hour to go the 25 km to Visegrad, the former capital of Hungary that is now a sleepy little village (the Turks razed it down to nothing during the invasion). The chief sights are the Royal Palace, rediscovered during World War II and still being excavated and restored, and the Citadel high on a hilltop, overlooking the Danube Bend.
We wandered on foot to Hotel Matthias (Matyas, the name of the great king who built the palace during the Hungarian Renaissance, 15th century) which is right next to the palace ruins. By this time it was about 18:00, too late to see the ruins or anything, so Lee and I took a nice long walk along the bank of the Danube. This was just enchanting. Lazy little villages along the river with many church bells pealing out the quarter hours, some bike riders, and a lovely sunset through wracked clouds. We wanted to have dinner at the "Black Crow" restaurant and beerhouse, but they were closed (renovations, apparently).
So we ate instead at the Siraly (Seagull), famed for its vegetarian fare. I had "soysteak" which turned out to be like fried kofta balls, but in minty mayonnaise sauce, with veggies, rice and potatoes. Lee had venison with nut stuffing, in amazing dark sauce. A bottle of Merlot to start, and chocolate pancakes with nuts to finish, made the best meal I've had in quite a while, in a fine restaurant overlooking the Danube, for under 3800 forints (about $15) all told!
Afterwards we strolled home through the sleepy side streets, past local kids looking for a party, all with the Citadel lit up in bright yellow, hanging high in the sky like a dream castle in the clouds.
Back at the hotel, Lee and I met the caretaker for breakfast. All the other guests at the place straggled in, all speaking German. As far as I could tell, not a single person in this town speaks any English at all, but it doesn't really matter. Breakfast was thin slices of deli meat (this must be a German custom), bread and cheese, tomato and yellow pepper slices, and tea with honey (no orange juice this morning).
After checking out of the room, I went to the bus stop to check the schedule (always double check!) and found that buses to Esztergom were pretty frequent during the day. Armed with this knowledge, we stored our packs in a closet (with the help of the pretty brunette girl who helps run the place) and headed for the Citadel. This was the first sunny day of the trip, by the way.
We hiked up a steep cobblestone road, through a cluster of little hotels and restaurants, to the Lower Castle, which is really just one tower with outlying walls and barbican (gate house), and portcullises at both ends. Continuing on, the road climbs up the north side of the hill, at a moderate grade. We took the first hiking trail we could find, and climbed though an enchanting forest hillside, with yellow and purple flowers everywhere, and big red berries as well as blackberries just becoming ripe. I was ready to see knights on horseback pounding along the trail, or a friar on a donkey coming by.
The trail was steep in places, but not a difficult hike. At the top,
we found a picnic area just below the Citadel parking lot. Since this
was a weekend, we had to share the place with several tour buses, but
it wasn't too bad. They have a yard with displays of medeival
weapons, a bow-and-arrow shooting range, and a throne with costumes.
Lee and I had to go for the cheesecake photos wearing royal robes.
Goofy, but fun! They had an assortment of medeival weapons too.
I was about to ask for a broadsword, and show off my
moves, but it didn't look like there was enough room to swing it
around, and I didn't want to cause any liability problems, so I
didn't.
But the Citadel is dramatic and stunning. Perched over 1000 feet
above the Danube, it was the stronghold of the Magyar empire for
hundreds of years. The views of the river and surrounding area are
fantastic, as you can see, and there are half a dozen reconstructed rooms
inside the castle keep showing daily life, hunting and feasting,
fishing and construction methods. I found it all enchanting, the
ancient stonework and drawbridges and crenellations and stuff.
We hiked back down the trail, and from there we went to the Royal
Palace, right next to our hotel. This was where the Magyar kings
lived for several hundred years, most notably Matyas Karoli (King
Matthias) who expanded and fixed up the place in the late 15th
century. It was all trashed by the Turks in their invasion, and
rediscovered only around World War I, and is still being excavated and
reconstructed. So there's lots of scaffolding and construction lumber
around, in addition to the little old ladies stationed in various
places to tell you about the ruins and point you where to go next.
(As I said, none of them speak any English, but we got the main
ideas.) This picture shows a magnificent fountain of red marble,
carved in detail by artists imported from the Italian Renaissance.
Tiny skinks (lizards, like geckos) scamper over the ancient stones.
We took our packs and caught the bus to Esztergom, which was right on time, and got us there without incident. From the bus station, we had to walk back to the Hotel Esztergom (about 10 minutes), and we had no map, but between the guidebook and signs in the street, we found it easily. I was quite pleased with myself, feeling very capable and worldly, for finding the place in a strange city without even a map.
Esztergom seems like a big city after the sleepy village of Visegrad. It's a working class city, big enough to get lost in, but not big enough to have extensive tourist facilities, sort of like Worcester with 1000 years of history. Esztergom was the original capital of Hungary, founded by Saint Stephen, and is still the spiritual center of Hungary (the bishop's seat is here, for instance).
Our hotel is on a little island on the Danube bank, just over the
bridge from Castle Hill, with its huge Basilica (the biggest church in
Hungary). This picture is taken on the bridge, looking from our hotel
towards the Basilica. You can see the twin spires of an "ordinary"
church right behind me, and the huge green dome of the Basilica
looming over it. Watch for this church in the pictures that follow.
This picture (looking down from the Basilica) shows the same church
with the twin spires (on the right) and the bridge just behind it.
Our hotel is just on the far side of the bridge, on the left, mostly
obscured by trees.
In the river you can see the pilings of a bridge that was bombed out
during World War II. It has never been rebuilt, maybe because the
other side is Slovakia!
I led Lee around the cathedral, looking at relics and describing the saints and symbolism and so forth. The cathedral is very dramatic, with a huge cupola overhead showering light through its many windows. Although there's lots of ornate carving and decoration, the overall impression is of rather spare space, not heavily encrusted gingerbread like some Italian churches.
The richness and grandeur did touch my heart. I lit a candle and made prayers for the people who are served by this church, and crossed myself with holy water on the way out. Lee was curious and pressed me about this, and I explained as best I could how the Church supported me when I had nowhere else to turn during my childhood and adolescence. To me, it was like finding the security blanket from my infancy, pressing it to my face and remembering the smell and feel of it, valuing it for what it meant to me then. It doesn't mean that I'm about to keep the blanket and start sucking my thumb again! "When I was a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put aside childish things."
From the Basilica, we wandered down to the waterfront, delighting in the tiny narrow streets of cobblestone, nuns waving to me from windows, dogs chasing and wrestling each other on the parkway lawn, and sour faced Frenchmen returning to their tour boat (jeez, lighten up guys). The Danube looks especially romantic at sunset, with the sky over the Slovak republic (on the far bank!) smeared with red and orange clouds.
We had dinner at Szalma Csarda on the island, a very quiet place with open air dining. We split a bottle of Egri Bikaver, which is fast becoming my favorite dry Hungarian red wine, like a strong Burgundy. Lee had lamb with rosemary, and I had roasted carp with potatoes (good tasting but very boney, hard to eat). We started with garlic soup (great!) and for dessert we had mashed chestnuts with whipped cream, sort of like marzipan but gamier (I think they put liquer in it). An okay meal but not great.
The place was deserted, I had thought that Saturday night would be jammed. Back at the hotel, the bars were closed, nothing happening at all. This place is deader than the village of Visegrad! So we raided the minibar in our room (a stocked cube fridge) for nightcaps.
We had breakfast in the hotel restaurant. In addition to the standard cold cuts, cheese, and bread, they had hard boiled eggs, and I had three, I was so glad to have eggs! Also Earl Grey tea, quite good. I pointed out a sudden water drip from the ceiling, and the hotel staff milled around putting buckets under it and so forth, trying to deal. I guess someone upstairs let the bathtub run over.
Picture perfect weather, sunny and nice with light clouds. This
picture is taken from the Castle Museum grounds, angled up towards the
Basilica dome.
We went to the Castle Museum, and enjoyed the displays of Bronze Age,
Roman, Medeival, Renaissance, and Gothic artifacts. I know the
history of all these things from books, but it's something else to see
it in the place where it all actually happened! Lots of vaulted
chambers, including toilets that overhang the cliff (figure it out),
beautiful frescoes on the chamber walls, and ornate metalwork of many
cultures (Persian, Saracen, Hussar, etc) in the weapons room.
These pictures are taken on a little plaza on the roof of the Museum.
The first shot shows the great dome of the Basilica in the background.
There are people walking along the cupola walkway, you can just barely
make them out at the base of the dome.
The second picture shows a funky little guard tower, with a view to
the south. I can't imagine standing guard in this little thing on a
cold winter day! Hopefully one would have a warm cloak and a flask of
something strong.
These pictures are taken in one of the museum rooms, silhouetted
against a window grating overlooking the lower city. Through the
window in the first picture, you can see the same neighborhood church
(with twin spires) as in yesterday's pictures.
The Castle Museum is right next to the Basilica, and Sunday services
were going on. After admiring the clouds of swallows wheeling around
the outside, I dragged Lee up to the cupola of the cathedral. This
involves climbing several spiral staircases, very narrow. By pure bad
luck, we found ourselves in the middle of a big group of Russian and
French tourists, a human traffic jam, which made the staircases pretty
claustrophobic, especially when we had to pass people coming down.
On top of the cupola, it's instant agoraphobia standing on a tiny
walkway many hundreds of feet above the city. Could have been better,
but the views were truly fantastic, and I did get this amazing shot,
looking down on that same church with the twin spires (on the right),
and the bridge (where our hotel is) just visible past it towards the
upper left. At the left, you can see the polygonal plaza on the roof
of the Museum, where we took the earlier pictures, and even that funky
little guard tower. What a breathtaking vista.
We got a light lunch at the hotel, lemonade and goulash (pasta and vegetable stew with meat and peppers in it). The goulash comes with hot peppers (paprika), very zingy! Then we grabbed our packs and caught the boat back to Budapest. Once again, I impressed myself with easy negotiation for the tickets without any English.
The boat from Esztergom to Budapest is downstream, therefore faster
than the other way (about four hours). It was a gorgeous, leisurely
ride down the Danube, enjoying the vistas of mountains and riverbanks.
I got a picture of the Esztergom Basilica as we were leaving. I
wanted the family in the foreground to just be there in silhouette,
but they saw my taking the picture and squeezed down to get out of the
way (except for the little girl, who seemed very happy to have her
picture taken).
I got this shot of the Citadel at Visegrad, as we were passing by.
Mostly we just lazed on the top deck and watched the land roll by.
This is a lovely way to travel, and I highly recommend it to anyone
who has the chance.
After checking in, we wandered down to Bela Bartok Street for food. We found a funky little cafeteria that serves Middle Eastern food, had curried chicken over long grain and wild rice, with huge cheap beers. The clientele are mostly locals and students meeting each other for the fall term, fun. Unfortunately I stepped in some very potent dog poop along the way, so I spent some time scraping and washing my sandal. Conference begins tomorrow, and I don't want to gross people out. Trials of the bohemian lifestyle!
After registration madness, opening ceremonies were actually kind of fun, with little Hungarian girls in costume singing a song, and a musical interlude by two guitars and a flute, to contrast the speeches. The Secretary of State was there, and gave a welcome! It was supposed to be the Prime Minister, but he was busy.
I will write about the technical aspects of the conference in a separate document here.
For lunch, I took Ariel and a bunch of people from Nuance (commercial speech recognition shop in San Francisco) back to the cafeteria that I'd tried last night. One of them was Su-Lin Wu ("call me Tweaky") with whom I'd corresponded about syllable detection algorithms some months ago. Good to meet her in person.
It was a bright sunny day, but that turned the posters area (really a long hallway under a glassed in roof) into a steaming sauna, very difficult to deal with. I hope it's not this hot Thursday afternoon, when I'm presenting!
Networking with new people was OK but not easy. I always have a tough time reaching out and making contact with people, especially when most of them are hardcore techies, and even more socially inept than I am! Emotion hit me a couple of times, the feeling of being alone in a crowd. I did my best to ride over it.
At the end of the day they had a welcoming reception. This was fun, I got to sample several different types of Hungarian drinks: sweet liquers, sour and bitter dark brandy things, champagne, and wines.
Afterwards, Ariel and I went to Beckett's, an Irish bar uptown, and apparently the prime expatriate hangout for English speakers. This was great fun. Guinness on draft is like a taste of home. We had guacamole (brown, but tasted fine) and french fries, for the fun of it. By this time I had started to get the hang of the Metro and tram system, so navigating around the city is no big deal.
Technical aspects of the conference are here.
At lunchtime I tried to find the campus store, hoping to buy logo wear. I asked a couple of staff members and a couple of students, but no one seemed to know whether one exists or where it might be. This seems rather strange. I guess I'll try again tomorrow.
For lunch I went to the Chinese restaurant on Karinthy Frigyes, and ended up eating with three Danes who work at Bang & Olufsen. I regaled them with stories about working for Bose, and about learning taiji at the temple in Toronto. Food was quite good, but more expensive than the student places -- still it's cheap compared to Boston: about 1500 forint with tip, or $6, and I was stuffed!
The afternoon posters were again very hot under the greenhouse roof. I had to bug out a little early (from some interesting ones) to go to the Tai Chi Society club. I had no more than the expected amount of confusion finding the place. However, I arrived in the middle of a demonstration because they're starting new classes, which was a bit awkward, and afterwards they had question & answer time, so I just hung out and caught up on my notes.
We didn't get to practice, but I did get to swing by a funky little bar with Natalie and several others for a beer. These are the first regular Hungarians that I've gotten to know (except Natalie, who came here from Ottawa). They seem like good earnest folk, working hard to make the club run and grow. Good for them! We talked some about my experiences teaching in Boston and compared notes. This night ended early, so I just went back to the hostel to catch up on my writing.
Morning sessions at the conference went well. Technical aspects of the conference are here.
I met Lee at the hotel after the morning sessions, changed, and went
for lunch to the Chinese restaurant again, very nice.
For the afternoon, we took the conference-run bus tour of the city,
and it was a very nice change to be driven around and have
knowledgable people tell us what everything is! We went to Heroes'
Square, which has many statues of kings, military leaders, and other
big names of Hungarian history. This is also the location of the 1956
uprising against the Soviets.
Here we are in front of the central column, with Gabriel on the top
and Magyar nomads arriving in Carpathia for the first time, all around
the bottom. This column is really big, the mounted statues of the
Magyar chieftans around its base are larger than life size!
We saw many other sights of the city, including Parliament, several
bridges, and Margaret Island. The most impressive and famous place is
Castle Hill, on the Buda side overlooking the Danube. A majestic set
of stairways called Fisherman's Bastion leads up the hill, where this
zither player was improvising on Dr Zhivago tunes. The
instrument is similar to a large dulcimer, but with damper pedals and
an intricate sounding board. He was really good.
The Matyas (Matthias) church is a fantastic cathedral, very ornate and
covered with Italian influenced statuary (outside) and Arabic looking
lacework and wall painting (inside). The effect is very rich and
heavy, not like the airiness of the Basilica. Organ music
reverberates wonderfully in the vaulted ceilings.
The Fisherman's Bastion is covered with lots of ornate stonework, and
I particularly liked this little castle with a beer garden and
etterem (restaurant).
The bus dropped us off at the Gellert Hotel, and we walked down Bela Bartok Street to a pub where we had a refreshing beer. I bought several bottles of Egri Bikaver, my default choice for Hungarian red wine so far.
From here, we walked back to the university conference center, where I changed into my dress shirt and jacket. The conferees assembled on the Danube side of the building, and right about sunset (beautiful sky) we were ushered onto three tour boats, which took us up the river to Margaret Island. This is a beautiful park island, over 2 km long with no cars allowed.
Here was a huge festival tent with long tables (there must have been at least 500 people at this event) with jugs of wine and meat salads laid out. I tried all the different kinds of meat things, mostly weird processed salamis with mysterious items embedded in them, but I preferred the wheat bread with paprika spread, nice and spicy. We also had tiny glasses of akvavit (or some other kind of flavored ethanol).
We were greeted by a bevy of cute girls in folk costumes. One posed for a picture with us, taken by a professional photographer. (They were doing this with everyone in the audience.) Later in the evening, they presented us with plates with our pictures on them. Of course they cost extra (2000 forint) but Lee bought ours!
Dinner was many courses, including a rich goulash (chicken, meatball, and noodle soup) which Lee ladled out with enthusiasm, a chicken leg with paprika glazing bedded on a little salad plate, and stewed beef with millet (?) which was very rich and filling. Dessert was several kinds of filled pastry, with nuts and cheese.
All the while, the folk music troupe is playing a variety of dance songs and Gypsy music. They also had dancers, which was great fun. The traditional dances seem to be monstly for the men, involving lots of rhythmic boot work like Irish dance, but also boot slapping and clapping, very vigorous. Often the women are on the sidelines, chanting or whooping. When the women dance, it tends to be standard pair dances like a waltz (but in 2/4). It's funny to see pretty girls in frocks wearing big klunky Wellington boots. There were also a few modern numbers, Michael Flatley style, and one number with sticks like Morris dance (originally done with swords, to judge from the moves).
All in all it was a great time. Around 23:30 we got the word that we could either take the boat back, or take a chartered bus. So Lee and I walked to the boat, which was shut down for the night, and not going anywhere -- then we went to the bus, which wasn't there. We walked to the end of the island to the Margaret Bridge, and took the tram into Pest (the trams run all night long), but the transport system was so slow and convoluted that we ended up taking a taxi from there back to the hotel.
I was particularly irked by this because I had to give my poster the next day, and they keep emphasizing that all presenters must attend a meeting at 8:15 in the morning, for some kind of orientation. Since the hotel starts serving breakfast at 8:00 and it's a 15-20 minute walk away from the university conference center, this means I will miss breakfast tomorrow, and now I'll be short on sleep too. Feh.
The 8:15 meeting turned out to be a nearly total waste of time, except that they did give us coffee and tea (real tea for a change!), and little cookies. Everyone in my session but me was really late, and the session chair didn't have anything to say except that we should have the posters up 10 minutes before the session begins, and take them down promptly when it ends (which hd already been announced several times). He didn't even know which location was ours, I had to tell him! And then at the keynote speech, the conference chair said put the posters up as early as possible and keep them up as late as possible, so all I got out of the meeting rush was tea and cakes.
At lunchtime I went again to the student union building, hoping to
find T shirts, but they were all out (next printing will be in a
couple of months). I roamed around a while to try to find the other
office that might have had some, but couldn't find it and gave up.
Grabbed lunch at the cafeteria, and changed into my dress shirt and
tie at the hotel.
My poster presentation went well, check the
technical review for details. Here are a couple of pictures of
the poster. You can see the sweat staining my shirt, and I wasn't
working hard or anything, it was just that hot in there.
Ariel assembled a bunch of MIT people (including Grace Chung and
several other folks from
Victor's lab) and, after collecting a few more folks at the beer
garden, strolled over the bridge in search of dinner. As happens so
often, especially in these techie groups, we followed the people in
front of us for a while before they said that they weren't leading and
didn't know where we were going (sound familiar?). So I ended up
leading them to the Thai restaurant at the south end of Vaci. They
liked it, and it was a good dinner. This picture is courtesy of
Karen Livescu (thanks Karen!) and she has lots more pictures
here. After this, some of us went to the Irish "Cat House" bar, but it was crowded and loud, and I left after one Guiness. Trammed it home, I'm getting pretty comfortable with the public transport.
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