A Week of Extremes

Hello again,
It's been a rather crazy week for me here, with a lot of intense good and bad things happening--there's a lot to catch up on. I'll start with the good news and work forward from there. As usual, photos will be included in a separate post uploaded not long after this one. Last Thursday, I was able to attend a workshop about the usage of Poly-Universe tiles in math education. Poly-Universe tiles are these sets of colored tiles (circles, squares, and triangles), that are designed with some interesting symmetries that allow students to play around with a variety of patterns and structures. I honestly don't know a lot about them, but we were allowed to mess with the tiles for a couple of hours and it was a lot of fun! It's a cool intersection of art and math, which I'm always a fan of, and making the coolest patterns requires the participants to think well about symmetry and combinatorics. It was a great time. :)

By far the best thing to happen recently is that my good friends Grace and Meg came to visit me! They're both studying in Vienna this semester, which is not too far away, so they were able to take a bus down Friday night and stayed in my neighborhood until Sunday evening. I hadn't seen either of them in almost four months, and it was amazing to get to spend quality time together in Budapest. On Friday night I took them out to have lángos at a good place I know, and then we wandered through some of the downtown area on the way back to our apartments. We spent the night hanging out in the apartment together talking and having a "spa night." We all had a stressful week, so we lit candles, did face masks, and painted our nails while enjoying each other's company.

We stayed up fairly late talking, and then met up around 9:00 the next morning to tour the city. Our first stop was Market Hall, where we found some great souvenirs--I bought a beautiful scarf, and we also found some cool lavender things (I'm a big fan of lavender because it's very purple). After leaving the market, we crossed Liberty Bridge and hiked up Gellért Hill, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago when I visited it with my roommate. It was even more beautiful than last time, and we had great fun running around the paths and admiring dramatic views of the city. On the way up, we stopped to visit a church that was built into the network of caves within the hill, which was awesome! We made it to the top and enjoyed the Citadel for a while before walking back down the hill and along the Danube towards Buda Castle Hill, our next major destination.

More specifically, we headed for the labyrinth winding underneath the castle. The tunnels were very pleasantly dark and spooky, and we spent a long time being sure we explored every crevice of them before leaving. Along the way, we found several magic wands, pirate and witch hats, shiny pebbles, and a tiara that pranksters seemed to have left around, so we collected them as "treasure" for ourselves. When we emerged from the labyrinth, we found a beautiful square by the Fisherman's Bastion to eat the bread we had packed and watch a wedding taking place nearby. While we were eating, some Hungarian students offered us túró rudi (an excellent Hungarian chocolate/cheese candy thing) in exchange for us doing a survey with them, which was fun. We spent a while poking around the shops in the area before hopping on a tram to St. Stephen's Basilica, where I introduced Meg and Grace to the best gelato in the city. We also entered the basilica briefly, but another wedding was occurring inside so we weren't able to access much of the building. We had a nice dinner together, then stopped off at our apartments briefly to regroup and change before heading to the Széchenyi Baths in City Park. On the way there, we stumbled across a huge Bryan Adams concert, which mostly confused us at the time but was cool in retrospect. The baths were very fancy and a little bit overwhelming! We spent about 90 minutes there, trying out the different hot and cold baths in various rooms, both indoors and outdoors. We even tried one of the saunas, which was intense but very relaxing. After the baths closed we walked back to our apartments and watched some television together before going to sleep.

The three of us met up again around 9:30 on Sunday morning and devoted most of the day to shopping. We started out by visiting Szimpla, one of the most famous ruin pubs in Budapest, which hosts a lovely farmer's market on Sunday mornings. The aesthetic of the bar is amazingly chaotic, especially with all of the farmers selling their various foods in the middle of the space, and we had a wonderful time. We also did some gift shopping in the store next door. After that, we went clothes shopping in some awesome vintage stores in the neighborhood, most notably a place called Szputnyik, where we found some amazing skirts and earrings to buy. We spent a couple of hours exploring and trying out various outfits before getting lunch at a nearby pizzeria. In the afternoon, we went back to the gelato shop one last time and walked around to enjoy the scenery. Meg and Grace got a couple of souvenirs, and then it was time for them to go. I escorted them to the bus stop in the early evening, and then returned to my apartment to finish up my Monday.

Overall my weekend was fantastic, but unfortunately this week has also contained some seriously bad news. Zac Presberg, one of my good friends from Lawrence, died suddenly in a car crash last Tuesday. Zac was one of my CORE leaders, which meant he provided mentorship for me when I was struggling to adjust to life in college winter term. We sang together in a church choir for the past two years, and he was the RLA for the loft where I've been living at Lawrence. I've seen so many people posting on social media about what he meant to them, and I don't think I can say anything that hasn't been said already, but I'll try anyway. Zac was a friend that I could dance along to "Africa" with at 4:20 AM during Trivia, but also a mentor figure who recommended classes for me and talked me through problems whenever I needed it. He led our trips to the thrift store where we bought baby shoes as loft decorations, and he had serious conversations with me about politics and how he hoped to bring about a better future. He was one of the most genuinely kind and hopeful people I've had the pleasure of knowing, and the world feels darker without knowing he's around to spread his light. Zac had a huge impact on so many people, both at Lawrence and beyond, and he continually inspires me to be a warmer, kinder, and more open person. Rest in peace.