Tari’s Busy Week

A Slow Start.
We took a walk on Sunday afternoon. Our son had mentioned that during his semester abroad in Budapest in the mid 1990s, he liked eating and studying at a small café behind the US Embassy. So we walked around the area looking for the place. We saw a couple that might be the right one. The neighborhood is very nice and has a park in front of the Embassy. Then we rode the No. 2 Tram along the Danube back towards our apartment. We decide to stay on and ride to the end of the line and discovered the Palace of Arts is right on that line. As we rode back home we looked for Corvinus University where we had a meeting on Thursday.

On Monday Tari only had a trip to the post office and the vegetable stand planned. She went to the post office to pay the heating bill and send postcards to the grandsons. There is a street underpass in front of our building that has several small shops in it. Tari had decided to become a regular at the vegetable stand and purchase fruits, vegetables and eggs there instead of at the bigger chain stores. The stand has cabbages, potatoes, onions, oranges zucchini and tomatoes (paradicsom which sounds sort of like paradise. Are tomatoes from the Garden of Eden?). He occasionally has a head of lettuce.


Ceramicist's Shop
On Tuesday, as part of a NAWA program, Tari went to a ceramicist's studio and shop located in Buda. She took the metro to Moszkva ter and figured out where to catch the bus which would stop across the street from the studio. Crossing the street after she got off the bus, she slipped on some ice and landed on her knee. No lasting damage but it got a bit swollen and has since turned a lovely black and blue. The ceramicist, Edit Bukran, spoke about her background and her career in ceramics. She uses several techniques to make her bowls, vases and boxes. One method is to pour a very liquid form of clay into a mold. How long you wait before pouring the excess liquid clay out of the mold determines the thickness of the wall of the piece. Another technique with the molds is to shape small bits of clay into balls, "worms", spirals and other shapes. These are pressed into the bowl shaped molds to form a design and then painted and fired several times. The resulting bowl has a pebbly looking surface on the inside and outside. This has become a trademark of Bukran's current work. Bukran's attitude is that you should be having fun when you make your pots. Tari bought a small bowl and a pendant.

Book Club
Wednesday and another NAWA program, this one was for the Book Club. The book for the month was Julia Child's My Life in France. The meeting was held in a rather unique restaurant called "The Kitchen". The diner picks the meat and accompaniments from the menu and specifies how they wish the items prepared (e.g.. grilled or roasted). Of course the wait staff is well versed in possibilities just in case. No, it's not a Hungarian version of the Mongolian Grill. The restaurant provided a demonstration of how to make Hollandaise sauce and how to bone a duck. For lunch they had beef bourguignon in honor of Julia Child and wok fried vegetables with Hollandaise. The beef was very tender and the whole meal was delicious. The book discussion focused on how Julia adjusted to Paris and how the women in the group had adjusted to Budapest.


Lunch at Corvinus
Corvinus University has an exchange program with Michigan State. Gitta had been at MSU in January to discuss expanding the program. By chance Brett, our house sitter, is head of international studies at MSU and identified Harry as "our man in Budapest." So Harry contacted Gitta and set up a meeting. Gitta and Zita, the head of the program director for International Studies, took us to lunch at Fatal, a very nice Hungarian restaurant just off Vaci Utca. For the most part it was a "getting to know you" lunch with very little business conducted. At the very beginning Zita gave Harry a list of contacts at Corvinus, mentioning that he could possibly give a presentation or meet with some classes. At the very end Harry asked about the international exchange program and was told we would set up another meeting. The rest of the time was a friendly discussion about our past trips to Budapest, where else in Hungary we should try to visit, our general housing and travel plans. The three women got into cooking, child rearing, family etc. They told us about the American Corner, one of several places in Hungary where people could come to learn about America, read books, watch DVDs, and practice their English. It was having a get together later that day. We said we were free and Gitta sent us some info via email after the lunch. The American Corner in Budapest was celebrating its one year anniversary that evening with a brief reception and a talk by Michael Simmons on the Freedom Riders trip during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's. It was interesting and informative.

Friday
Friday was the monthly NAWA meeting. The theme was A Taste of Hungary and there were varieties of cheeses, cold cuts and pastries to sample. Tari even brought some home for Harry. One of the women was leaving Budapest and brought many of her books for the charity sale. Tari bought a novel and a food and restaurant guide. Tari chatted with two of the women we had met at the Friday evening get together two weeks earlier. She also talked with a woman she had met at the first NAWA meeting in January about perhaps going for walks together.

Friday evening we had tickets to the ballet. We saw La Bayadere, or The Temple Dancer. It was a new ballet for us. We had forgotten to look it up on the internet before we went but were able to follow the story enough to get by. Although set in India the original and current versions were not culturally or historically accurate. For example in the opening scene, Festival of Fire, the fakirs were dressed as Amazonian Indians who might have crept out of Le Sacre de Printemps (The Rites of Spring). The plot, such as it was, concerned a Temple Dancer caught in several love triangles that ended tragically. We almost left after the second act when she died, but no one else was going for their coats. The third act didn't seem to add anything to the story. We found out later that The Kingdom of the Shades is a famous set piece, a grand pas classique. Harry thinks he saw Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn dance it in the 1960s.

Harry’s less active week.
He attended the faculty meeting for the English language medical school program and also met with Helga on the 1948 British Health Care Act. The class on Wednesday was cancelled. He was able to do the power point for next week and then spent the week working on the major presentation on the Clinton – Obama health plans. It turned out that the web had lots of information on what went wrong with the Clinton plan but very little on what was actually in it. He finally found enough to include in the power points. In contrast there was almost too much on the events of the past year, but it was still a moving, if slow, target.