Woke up around 10:30, rolled down for breakfast. Hung out with Amar and Mishu, the two Algerian guys from the previous evening, over some cereal and eggs. They looked pretty fried, but prepared to go out on a bus tour. We had some good camaraderie :D
Maria, also from the preceding evening, came down and joined us, and then asked me if I wanted to join forces with her in exploring the city. We agreed to meet up in a bit, and did after some freshening up. This hostel is so nice! They must clean the bathroom every two hours, and the showers are really nice.
We went out, crossed a bridge to get to an island in the river. The island was freezing as a cryostat but pretty. Upon encountering a bike rental thingymbob and performing a rudimentary scam check, we decided to rent bikes (I’d never done that before!) We had to go through a lengthy registration process with a touchscreen that was hilariously dysfunctional–sometimes you’d hit the space bar while trying to hit the @ symbol, then you’d hit delete, but you couldn’t tell whether delete had taken effect because there was no cursor, so you had to go back one more character, retype the previous character and the @. It took a while to register, and then we had to put down a bit deposit, but we went for it. We got our PIN for the day’s rental by email (I had to use her data to check mine) and then had to punch our phone numbers and PIN’s into a much better keypad at the back of the bike.
At last, it worked! We took our bikes on a spin around the island, and then made our way across the rest of the bridge to the Buda side of the river. Dodging and weaving around pedestrians (Maria is a gutsy biker) and occasionally venturing out into the road, which I did not like so much, we made our way to a restaurant I’d found on Google reviews. It was indeed awesome; I got the day’s special soup and meal for about $6 (although of course I had to get a beer for $4 and split a dessert for $2.5). The soup was a creamy meatball thingy and the meal was amazing; it was catfish paprikash over a mix of zucchini and noodles. Learned a bit more about Maria’s life and family. The most hilarious thing about the meal was that the restaurant had an awesome beer glass that had S-shaped sides. When you poured the beer back and forth, it made a waterfall between the base and the upper cave of the S. I quickly noticed that the system exhibited hysteresis–that is, the distribution of beer in the glass was not just a function of the present tilt angle \(\theta(t_0)\) of the glass, but of the whole sequence of previous angles \(\theta(t), \quad t < t_0\). I wondered about more complicated glasses, and eventually fell so much in love with the glass that I negotiated to buy one from the restaurant for $4. (It was also super well balanced for the rotation that had the cool property above.)
After the restaurant, we set out for Buda Castle. (We saw the parliament building from across the river, which was super beautiful!) On the way, we saw the spire of a huge cathedral peeking out from over some buildings and decided to investigate. After many flights of stairs, we came upon a dream scene–an old wall with towers and rampart overlooking the city. We heard violin music and went up to the rampart, where an old man was playing rambunctiously, holding a cigarette in the same hand as his bow.
The cathedral was magnificent; its roof tiles had the coolest pattern. It was ostensibly closed but Maria decided to ask and got us in for a few minutes anyway. The interior was just incredible. It was all tiled in deep rich colors that made the place feel alive, a place of earthly magical power rather than an ostentatious pointer to the heavens. We only spent a few minutes there, but I was struck by how many different artistic patterns there were in the same cathedral–almost like it developed organically, even though it had to be built in a top down manner. Wonder how that worked.
After that, Buda Castle was a bit of a letdown, even though it was cool! The palace building was standing on top of the castle walls, so you couldn’t really see the castle walls and the palace at the same time :P And everything was closed! We wandered around for a while (fittingly) trying to find the entrance to a system of caves with a cool history called the Labrynth, but after we found it we decided not to drop $12. So we went back into town and hit up the universally recommended “ruined bars”. We took the bus, which worked out really neatly–on the way, Maria told me about her experiences couchsurfing (I gotta get into this for my traveling period after exams!) It looked like the gorgeous Cathedral of Junk in Texas, but made into a real live bar. The skeleton was an old building ravaged in WWII, and on that skeleton was draped an unbelievable variety of exotic decorations, from a series of old cathode ray TVs playing trippy patterns, to a moving zombie-robot trapped in a phone booth, to incredible arrays of neon lights… it was, quite really, legendary. We were freezing, so we huddled by a big heat lamp and drank some cider.
On the way back to the hostel, we hit up a Thai restaurant that looked cheap and tasty. It was! We barely got a table. The food was too spicy for Maria (Spaniards are spice wimps wrt Mexicans).
Finally, we arrived back at the hostel, and I buckled down, reading old Putnam solutions, learning obscure theorems in geometry. Grace and I had planned to Skype, but I screwed up the logistics and she apologized, so we got into a war of apologia and praising of each other’s apologizing skills. Grace warned me not to bring a sorry-gun to a knife fight, to which I replied,
Well I can say this / If there existed a sorry-knife, no swordsman in the world would wield it more efficiently than thee / It’d take a sorry-army to forestall your fearsome advance / My poor farmer self, sitting out on my private apology ranch with my sorry-gun defending my cowtows wouldn’t stand a chance / (Entirely true!)
After a couple of hours of math, I hit the hay.