The scheduled activity for this day was a round of activities on the Hungarian prarie, known as the puszta, about which I'd known nothing. We drove on out to Bugac, where we were provided with a shepherd's breakfast, which is apparently pálinka and flatbread with sour cream and pork-fat. Afterwards we took a cart ride out through the meadows to a ( Read more... )

Day 2 photos are mostly up. Enjoy!

( Two places which are not Budapest (but fun anyways) )

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.

( We never get more than a quarter-mile from the Duna, but we move from south to north. )

Today was largely a tourism day. We all got up early for a tour given by the architect of the Ráczfurdő renovation. I'd never been to the Rácz before, but it's an interesting collection of interconnected sections from different periods. The tour was interesting although it got hung up on some details and dragged in places (the danger of getting an ( Read more... )

At midday on Thursday I got on a plane to Detroit. And then a plane to JFK. And then a plane to Budapest. Other than inexplicable screw-ups and incompetence on the DTW-JFK leg, this mostly worked out. I got a bit of sleep on the JFK-BUD leg, and had a decent conversation with my seatmate, a physics studunt traveling with a group of colleagues for a ( Read more... )

So I never did finish telling Boston travel stories. Not that there's much "story" there: I went all over the place hanging out with old friends and connected with some of the new blood at APO, Random, and ET. I really must get back to Boston more often than once every 7 years (I'll actually be back in September!). The last night I managed to ( Read more... )

Bostonians whom I have not seen: I'm back, briefly! I'm in town through the morning of July 6th (my flight is at 1 PM, and add in transit and usual buffer times, so unless I can meet someone for breakfast or somesuch, I'm probably not going to be doing anything social that day). Tomorrow is the 4th, and I'll go to Fulton's Folly and/or RSI's camp ( Read more... )

I haven't been much in touch on goings-on in Boston. And it has actually been pretty awesome! Last week I was helping out with the Research Science Institute, where I think I did more good than harm. I was talking to high school students about arithmetic combinatorics and it was really a great deal of fun: it was hard to reach the right level for ( Read more... )

Hello, wacky friend-type peoples, some of whom are in Boston ( Read more... )

I need to write a detailed life-update at some point, but right now I'm just in request-for-comments territory on one thing ( Read more... )