BUDAPEST, HUNGARY After a day walking and sight seeing - the Royal Palace in Buda, another museum, and gallery - the sweltering heat forced me to retreat to the hotel early for a late afternoon nap. I zonked out thinking how nice it would be to go fishing for a week rather than see another museum or gallery. By the way, I need to clarify an earlier statement, Budapest was originally two cities, Buda and Pest. No one so far has been able to tell me what the names mean, but their histories were quite different. Buda, where the Royal Palace and where a number of other prominant sights are, is on the hilly north side of the Danube; Pest, the heart of the city, is on the flat south side of the Danube. Often people just refer to Buda or Pest depending which part of the city they're referring. The main train station and my hotel are located in Pest about a 45-minute walk to Buda. I wonder if someone decided to make the two cities one because the name has such a quixotic ring to it - imagine Pest the capital of Hungary?
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| The Danube at Night |
I've been thinking about how hard it is to write accurate descriptions of what I'm seeing or experiencing. Often first impressions are wrong and, with time, they change. It's difficult to descibe without being subjective. How many times can one use the words, awsome, spectacular, beautiful, cheap, expensive, etc. What word should I choose to describe a walk along the Danube on a warm Saturday night? All relative depending on a point of view at a particular point in time. What you choose to describe is subjective too, why talk about the Royal Castle, when you could describe the haircut you got at a salon for $5.5 not much more than the price of the two-minute ride on the funicular to the Royal Castle. In the end, can you really capture what you saw or felt and is it the truth? I'm learning the task of a roving anthropologist is a difficult one.
