A Thanksgiving in Budapest

This Thanksgiving differed from all the rest.  

Thanksgiving isn't one day, but five. Yes, five.  Five days off from school, be it high school or college or graduate school.  

The schedule?

Wednesday is for traveling and relaxing.

Thursday is for dinner at my mom's house with food food food and relaxing because of the food food food.  The past few years, Thursday has been for an additional dinner of food food food at Ben's grandma's or mom's house.  And sweatpants.

Friday is for my brother to pester me to go Black Friday shopping with him, and me occasionally relenting.  Friday is also for my mom to say, "Isn't it time to put up the Christmas tree?" and for my brother and I to spend a good portion of the afternoon rearranging the living room to make room for said tree, and for carrying cardboard boxes filled with tree parts up our narrow basement stairs.  And turkey sandwiches.  

Saturday is for a get-together with my oldest and dearest friends.  We usually pick for our Secret Santa, eat cookies, pose for mini-photoshoots, and talk A LOT.

Sunday is for packing, driving, and preparing for the next week of school.

But, as I said, this Thanksgiving different from all of the rest.

How?

I could go on and on about how it was my first Thanksgiving spent without my immediate family, in a country that doesn't celebrate the holiday (obviously), without having a reunion with friends, etc.

It was, however, our first Thanksgiving as a married couple and my first Thanksgiving traveling!  And, we are so fortunate to have family close by.  A six hour train ride and this Thanksgiving was spent with my cousin and her family in Budapest, Hungary.  

Some Budapest highlights:

At the Christmas Market, we shared a Kürtőskalács.  It's a traditional pastry from Transylvania, which used to be part of Hungary.  It was warm, cinnamon-coated goodness, and plenty for all of us to share.   

Street performers entertained us.  The white bird, the gold guy, the xylophone player... What can I even say?  After the xylophone player finished playing a little Mozart (we can't escape him), my little cousin yelled to the crowd, "Give him mon-ey! Give him mon-ey!"  I loved it.  And, some people listened.  Also, I love the two girls in these photos.  The one looked at the gold guy so thoughtfully and the other in the white hat couldn't take the noise.  She may have affected how much money people gave.

Budapest at night is beautiful.  We had a delicious dinner at Vár A Speiz in the Castle District.  Now, I can confidently say that what Americans call goulash is not goulash.  Forever, I thought I hated it, but now I know better. And the paprika sauce? So indescribably good.  And, I even tried the grey stuff from this song.   

Before dinner, we walked to Fishermen's Bastion to see the city lit-up.  Next to us rose Mathias Church and across the Danube stood imposing Parliament. 
 

  

The next day, we did the Hop On-Hop Off bus tour of Budapest, opting not to do the exclusive, private boat tour they also offered. :) It was terribly grey outside during all three days, so my photos didn't turn out well.  Like, the glorious Parliament building:

A bit more impressive at night.

The highlight was hopping off to go to the Bazilica Cafe and Restaurant for some good margherita pizza and good conversation. After, we visited St. Stephen's Basilica.  

 

 That led us to a flea market with some interesting wares.   

But, my favorite part of the long Thanksgiving weekend may have been playing with the kids, and watching Ben play with the kids.  When Ben played Pushing (an anti-bullying game) and Blue's Clues (complete with the handy, dandy notebook), my heart may have grown a little bit larger.  

They cooked us a full Thanksgiving dinner on Friday night.  The ingredients for the meal aren't the easiest to come by in Hungary, but somehow they made it happen.  I didn't get any photos because I was too busy feasting, but trust that it was delicious.

Although we are far from New York, we aren't far from home after all.

Festung Hohensalzburg

So, you know that fortress that's in all of my photos?  WE WENT THERE.  We've been having lovely fall weather, consistently in the 50s for as long as I can remember, so we made the trek to Festung Hohensalzburg before the weather turns.



First, we thought we would take the funicular up to the fortress, but the little holding room was overrun with people.  We overheard an American tourist, when asked how long the walk was, say "too far."  We knew then that we had to walk it.  And, walking saved about four Euros and I'm not one to turn down a savings.   

Admittedly, I wasn't the happiest of walkers.  We didn't capture that for posterity, thankfully.  My foot-gear wasn't particularly suited for the climb, but in less than fifteen minutes, we were feasting our eyes on all of the medieval splendor.

If you want the history on the place, click the link.  Although all of the information in the fortress' museums is translated into English, much of it wasn't absorbed.  War and sieges don't really do it for me, so looking at room after room of military uniforms and weapons left me feeling a little numb.  Maybe it's because I'm fortunate enough to feel disconnected from it.  It's difficult to imagine war, whether it happened in medieval times or yesterday.  And it's difficult to imagine it here, where everything seems so pristine.  Fortunately, the fortress' museums covered more than just the defense aspect of the site. 

What made it worth it for me were the details and textures.  Also, mimicking amazement as I glanced out a window while my face was stuffed with a secret, verboten chocolate bar.  Security was coming, or so I thought, and in my defense, the "no food" rule should only apply for food carried by hand, not by mouth.

 

You know when you go places and you're not sure if you can take pictures?  There's the awkward "Do I? Don't I?" battle.  Well, in this part of the war/defense museum, there was a sign with a drawing of a camera with a flash with the ol' red circle and line through it.  Did that mean no flash photography?  I decided that was what it communicated TO ME, but I was still a bit uncomfortable, hence the smug smile.  But, THAT DOOR. 

Ben felt connected to this man. 

Another museum in the fortress featured torture devices, like this chastity belt and this mouth-pryer-opener.  Not a torture device?  The serpent horn.  

Another Salzburg site checked off our list.

It was because of Adventure.

Yesterday, we decided to tackle one of the items on our to-do list: hike up Kapuzinerberg to frolic and enjoy ourselves in the fall fancy.  "Hike" overstates our trek as we just walked up some stone stairs, and I feel like I need to tell you this because I want there to be a bit of transparency.  And, if you ever visit Salzburg, know that although the walk up is rather tame, venturing elsewhere requires sturdy walking shoes.  And a heart as solid as steel, as I shall explain.

Like many places in Austria, Kapuzinerberg has religious affiliations.  Monks still live on the mountain as they have for centuries.  We decided, however, that instead of visiting the monastery gardens, the bust of Mozart, and the Wohnhaus of writer Stefan Zweig, we would walk around the perimeter of the mountain.  

First stop: A scenic overlook.  Salzburg's old town is across the river on the western side and the new side of town ("new," of course, used loosely) is in the foreground here on the eastern side.  Much has been said about the old town, but let's take a second to admire the new!  

 In the last photo, you can see some of the hedges of Mirabell Gardens.  That place is extensive.  And, yes, I am in love with that dome.  Ben and I have a thing for cupolas.

After taking in the view, we walked on.  We came to a sign that offered us several options, none of which we took, because Adventure.  Adventure required that we took the side path with the sign promising that Salzburg would not be responsible if we hurt ourselves in our aimless wanderings because they no longer maintain that path.  How could we resist?

We walked.  We talked.  We laughed.  The sun made its slow descent.  No paths down the mountain presented themselves.  We worried.

Here, Ben points out a natural shelter we can use if we don't make it off the mountain.

We found mushrooms.  This is one of them.  There were no Alice's Adventures in Wonderland moments.  At least, none that we remember.  

 

 But! The trees were spectacular, putting on their fall best!  They lured us further and further in...

These lookouts sprang up several times on our walk.  We noticed blankets pushed into the windows of one and discovered that it was someone's home.  "Brisk" would be a good word to describe our walking pace from then on. "Lightning-fast" would properly describe our pace after we found a dismantled tent and some plastic bags on the side of the path.  Just kidding, we took pictures next to it because the leaves and colors were just TOO good.  Then we ran.

These two photos were admittedly taken after the fact, today actually.  I didn't take a picture of the little home for fear that we would disturb the homeowner. 

Then Ben had a Mistah Kurtz moment in which he felt he had dominion over the mountain.  

I saved him by telling him there was another overlook ahead.

We made it to another lookout and took more pictures.  This is the Museum der Moderne where we saw the Chuck Close exhibit.  People have criticized the building, calling it something like "a big, concrete block" since it doesn't really fit in with the classic architecture of Salzburg.  There isn't one dominating architectural style in the city, but this certainly stands out.  

   
And more photos of the old town.  It's stupid pretty.

In the end, we ran out of sunlight and knew that we had to turn around.  We walked all of the way back to the sign that suggested "approved" walking routes and took more stone steps that led into a shopping street.

 From Adventure to Safety, all within Salzburg.

Chuck Close and A Liberal Arts Education

In keeping with my posts about fall excursions, ART.  Yes, art.

A little background: My undergraduate university requires all students to earn a certain number of credits in various disciplines to be eligible to graduate.  It's part of the university's liberal arts, general education curriculum that strives to make its graduates well-rounded young adults.  Now, it's been a little while since I was a freshman in college, so I may or may not be making some of this stuff up.  Reader, prepare to have your Disbelief suspended. 

Fine Arts is one of the disciplines in the liberal arts curriculum.  I just checked, and my university requires students to take three credit hours in Fine Arts.  See, this is where it gets a little bit murky; I sort of believe that I needed to have six credit hours in Fine Arts.  Did they change the requirements?  Am I becoming forgetful in the twilight of my twenties?  Does it really matter?    

We're going to go with my belief that I had to take six credit hours.  For my first course in Fine Arts, I chose Theatre 100: Introduction to the Theatre, a class with approximately 200 students set in a lecture hall with an overabundance of the color orange.  The class was taught by a woman with wildly curly hair and a penchant for tea-length plaid skirts.  Her stage crew of five to six TAs always sat at the front of the lecture hall, but they are all but forgotten.  50% of students never came to class unless there was an exam; 25% came in sweatpants, tried to pay attention because they needed the class to graduate, but texted and doodled away; and then there was the final 25% - the serious kids.  We either wanted to become actors or wanted to read some plays.  I fell into the latter group.  It was in this class that I first read A Raisin in the Sun, A Doll's House, Bertolt Brecht, and Suzan-Lori Parks.  I haven't thought of this before, but I think Theater 100 inadvertently helped me realize that I was fooling myself in thinking I could study anything besides literature.  When I handed in my Change of Major form the next semester, I felt like a weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.  All in all, without taking this class as part of my liberal arts education, I may not have come to realize my destiny so quickly.  And yes, this is an epic tale so I can talk about my destiny.

For my second course in Fine Arts, I decided on Art History 173: History of Western Art: Neoclassic to Contemporary.  Why?  My thoughts when choosing to register for the course were probably, "Oh, it would be boring to learn about stones, so prehistoric art is out.  Rococo?  Like the clock says in Beauty and the Beast? Nah...  Wait!  ARTH 173 has ten spots left until it's filled!  Totally gonna register for THAT."  The course-registering-power of underclassmen at my university was pitiful.  We basically took what we could get, even when it was an eight AM lab or a course given by a professor with the worst ratings on Rate My Professors.

Art History 173 followed the same format for every hour and fifteen minute class: we took down the artist name, date, title of the piece, medium, and whatever else, and possibly eked out one, max two bullets about the sociocultural context of the piece before the professor moved her PowerPoint to the next slide.  Rinse, wash, repeat.

Rote memorization is not my idea of learning, but it was the professor's idea of assessing.  Plenty of nights were spent doing my laundry in the basement of my dorm with my art history notebook keeping me company.  I needed to earn a good grade, since hey, I needed this course to graduate, so I crammed my young, impressionable head with silly facts that I've completely forgotten.  Who cares about the messages the artists were trying to convey when I needed to know whether the canvas was rather small or rather large, and yes, it surely was 1917 when Duchamp created "Fountain." *  Never mind how people reacted to Picasso painting the human form from multiple perspectives in the same painting.  But, students, where is the painting located?  Facts. Facts. Facts.

*It's really scary that when I looked up the year after typing 1917, it was 1917.  You see what useless space this professor has laid claim to in my brain!

During one class, the professor showed some paintings that fell into the movement/genre/category of Photo Realism.  I loved, loved Richard Estes, and Chuck Close sounded all sorts of interesting because his portraits were BIG and very detailed.

Well, Salzburg recently opened an exhibit, "Chuck Close: Multiple Portraits," and when I heard that, I figured that we would go to Museum der Moderne and take a look.

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Guys?  The portraits were BIG.  Very big.  But that is not what I am going to remember about Chuck Close this time.  Now, I will remember the amount of work and pain-staking detail Close puts into each of his paintings and prints to make them either as clear as a photograph or as trippy as a trip in a boat on a river.  The exhibit features multiple portraits by Close, as the name of the exhibit promises, but also a play-by-play of how the portraits were created.  In one room, there were maybe ten paintings that showed the progression of one portrait, and I can imagine dozens more of in-between stages.  Another room had some preparatory materials that Close gathered to create a self-portrait, like color swatches from the paint department of a home improvement store, and a piece of paper drawn into a grid with a few hundred squares with numbers written in each of them.

If there's anything to come away with, it's that behind great works, there's an awful lot of skill, preparation, and time spent.  And that's not something I could have learned in an Art History lecture.     
I leave you with a quote (and let's not even get into the parallels between Close's art and the process of writing, dear future students):

          "All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself."
          - Chuck Close

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We had to take the Mönchsbergaufzug, the elevator through the mountain, to reach MDM.

Faces.

 

Here are some of the mountains seen from the scenic overlook at MDM.

Kommunalfriedhof

Before we visited the communal cemetery in Salzburg, I thought that its impressive size would be the only thing it had going for it.   

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.