Return to Budapest: Day 3
Photos for Day 2 will be up soon. Future photos may come later, since I'll hit my Flickr update limit eventually.
The day started out with a visit to the flea market way the hell south in Pest, which I'd heard about as a student but never visited.
It was like the world's biggest thrift store, with bric-a-brac mostly in careless piles, every single one of which seemed to contain at least one old-style tumbler lock, a key to same, and a pin from the Socialist brigade. It apparently rewarded persistence and observation - Japheth managed to score several small wooden slide rules at excellent prices - but I was content to mostly just poke around, admiring the chaos and occasional bizarre item; there was one booth with an enormous stamped-metal confederate flag, but more locally offensively, there were several which specialized in (likely fake) Nazi paraphernalia.
Immediately after the flea market, we headed straight up the Duna to the Parliament for a tour. The tour itself was a bit perfunctory, but there was a great deal of sumptuousness to be seen, and it was worth finally seeing the actual crown of St. Stephen (whose inclusion in the modern Hungarian patriotic symbolism is a bit weird, considering the fact that the nation hasn't had a monarchy in centuries, and the last person to try to assert the existence of a monarchy was the monstrous Miklós Horthy [1].
After the Parliament tour, time ended up surprisingly tight before the next scheduled event, so we went back to Batthyány tér, where lunch ended up being at Nagyi Palacsintázója again; fortunately, they've got enough variety to support two consecutive days of lunch. Then we all headed out north on a HÉV to Aquincum, where there's an old Roman settlement. We got a quite interesting tour of the ruins of the bathhouses and market areas, and visited the attached museum which had reconstructions of mosaics and several artifacts found among the ruins, including all the metal parts of a hydraulic organ (as well as the coffin of the organist).
The evening was devoted to recognition of a development near Aquincum, on the site of the old Óbuda gas factory: Graphisoft Park, originally just the campus of the Budapest-based software company Graphisoft, has become a combined technological/research facility, most recently the host of a new exchange program, the Aquincum Institute of Technology, which is modeled on BSM, so the BSM staff and students were invited to celebrate along with them.The site's quite beautiful, with lots of green space along the river, statuary and fountains, and modern buildings which preserve the character and more charming aspects of the gas-plant structures from which they were developed. There were speeches by several dignitaries, and then invited addresses by Laszló Babai and Ernő Rubik on the Rubik's cube, and Miklós Domkos on the "Gömböc", a three-dimensional homogenous convex figure with only 2 equilibium points. Afterwards there was revelry, food, drink, and music to celebrate AIT until it got late enough that we all had to go home.
[1] Famously, Horthy claimed two titles, both of them absurd: he was Admiral of a nation with no navy, and Regent of a nation with no king. The period between the wars was a pretty weird one in Hungary.
The day started out with a visit to the flea market way the hell south in Pest, which I'd heard about as a student but never visited.
It was like the world's biggest thrift store, with bric-a-brac mostly in careless piles, every single one of which seemed to contain at least one old-style tumbler lock, a key to same, and a pin from the Socialist brigade. It apparently rewarded persistence and observation - Japheth managed to score several small wooden slide rules at excellent prices - but I was content to mostly just poke around, admiring the chaos and occasional bizarre item; there was one booth with an enormous stamped-metal confederate flag, but more locally offensively, there were several which specialized in (likely fake) Nazi paraphernalia.
Immediately after the flea market, we headed straight up the Duna to the Parliament for a tour. The tour itself was a bit perfunctory, but there was a great deal of sumptuousness to be seen, and it was worth finally seeing the actual crown of St. Stephen (whose inclusion in the modern Hungarian patriotic symbolism is a bit weird, considering the fact that the nation hasn't had a monarchy in centuries, and the last person to try to assert the existence of a monarchy was the monstrous Miklós Horthy [1].
After the Parliament tour, time ended up surprisingly tight before the next scheduled event, so we went back to Batthyány tér, where lunch ended up being at Nagyi Palacsintázója again; fortunately, they've got enough variety to support two consecutive days of lunch. Then we all headed out north on a HÉV to Aquincum, where there's an old Roman settlement. We got a quite interesting tour of the ruins of the bathhouses and market areas, and visited the attached museum which had reconstructions of mosaics and several artifacts found among the ruins, including all the metal parts of a hydraulic organ (as well as the coffin of the organist).
The evening was devoted to recognition of a development near Aquincum, on the site of the old Óbuda gas factory: Graphisoft Park, originally just the campus of the Budapest-based software company Graphisoft, has become a combined technological/research facility, most recently the host of a new exchange program, the Aquincum Institute of Technology, which is modeled on BSM, so the BSM staff and students were invited to celebrate along with them.The site's quite beautiful, with lots of green space along the river, statuary and fountains, and modern buildings which preserve the character and more charming aspects of the gas-plant structures from which they were developed. There were speeches by several dignitaries, and then invited addresses by Laszló Babai and Ernő Rubik on the Rubik's cube, and Miklós Domkos on the "Gömböc", a three-dimensional homogenous convex figure with only 2 equilibium points. Afterwards there was revelry, food, drink, and music to celebrate AIT until it got late enough that we all had to go home.
[1] Famously, Horthy claimed two titles, both of them absurd: he was Admiral of a nation with no navy, and Regent of a nation with no king. The period between the wars was a pretty weird one in Hungary.