Goulash, Scientists and Home

Wow, two weeks has already past. Sorry for missing a week, but I was busy living the high-life in Budapest, Hungary. Time is really flying by; autumn is already in the air and I absolutely love the feel of it. It seems that all places feel the same during the fall. It's getting dark early now and leaves are everywhere. So to sum up the first few undocumented days: I'm pretty sure I contracted the Swine Flu and stayed home from work for two agonising days, which I don't really remember as I was lying in bed and praying for death, but it passed quickly. We went out for curry the next night and I stocked up on some Lamb Tikka Madras which satisfactorily cleared the sinuses and perked me back up, just in time to go to Budapest.

Now the bit that really matters and why you're probably reading this. On Friday morning, I met up with a few friends and one of their girlfriends drove us to the airport. I partook in my first tradition of the Glaswegian traveller, a pint before the flight. No matter what time. Including 10:30 am. For the first time (and definitely not the last) I had a pint of lager with eggs and black pudding and bacon. Oh Scotland. Little did I know this was only the beginning of my exciting discovery of how Glaswegian physicists travel. The flight was pretty simple: the regular commuter flight from Glasgow to London then a quick layover in Heathrow's Terminal 5 (which, if you've ever been, is basically an airport attached to a mall) before heading off to Budapest on British Airways. On the way, I listened to a file that I put on my iPod of Hungarian and how to say hello and thank you (those were the only ones I had any chance of remembering). Don't worry, I didn't listen to "hello" and "thank you" repeatedly on a 2 1/2 hour flight; I interspersed it with some music. We landed in Budapest in the early evening and all crammed into a taxi to the Ramada. It was an interesting drive as it felt more like the United States than anything. It was a wide motorway, we drove on the right side of the road and passed a giant strip-mall with a Tesco (sort of like Safeway). Once we got to the Ramada, we ran into some other physicists in the lobby.

Before I keep going, I should probably explain what I was attending. This was a regular meeting for the international collaboration with whom I work. Though we communicate regularly about our progress via email and weekly telephone conferences, we have meetings four (soon to be three) times a year in person to accomplish the things that are difficult to do over the phone, like discuss particularly complicated issues that require lots of input. The weekend consists of meeting in our smaller groups (I work in continuous waves, so my speciality is pulsar analysis) in conference rooms. It's two 8+ hour days of basically an extended telecon. The rest of the week feels more like a proper science conference where people give scheduled presentations. The difference lies in the fact that we know all these people and it's all within a specific field. These meetings run from Monday through Thursday and is mostly a chance to exercise our skills in multi-tasking and catching up on emails and various side-projects.

Okay, back to the Ramada. Because everyone knows each other in these meetings, we run into each other everywhere. After checking in and myself discovering that I had somehow landed a giant, king-sized suite, we met up with people in the lobby. I almost cried with happiness at my bed, but not before walking into my room with all the lights off and not turning on and the television on a blue screen that said "Wilkommen Frau Macdonald". Totally creepy; I thought I had walked into some sort of Eastern European horror film. Finally, I noticed the small box next to the door that I somehow figured needed my room card to activate. Granted, it was about 2 minutes of wandering around a semi-dark room but I eventually got there. Score so far: Erin 1 Budapest 0...haven't been defeated yet. Though the language is completely inscrutable, so I guess Budapest more has a score of 10000 but who's counting?

We got directions from the front desk to go visit Ráday utca, where there are tons and tons of restaurants, all with a good portion of tables outdoors and as you walk down the street, you actually walk in between the restaurant and the tables. It was beautiful, warm weather, far into the night. We split up and about 8 of us got a table together at a restaurant called Jaffa. Later, after we ate, some people from our group at Milwaukee came in and settled down. There was some mixing up and down the street, but I just settled with a bunch of new people at Jaffa and had some beer and chat. They were a really fun group of people and we ended up staying there until about 2am. Again, this was just the beginning of my week of socialising and partying. Everyone was welcoming and happy and pleasant company.

The next day, Saturday, was the first day of the face-to-face meeting. We met up in the lobby and wandered over to the university that was hosting the meeting. This "wandering" included crossing the Danube River which was thrilling and exciting. Though, contrary to Strauss' opinion, the Danube is much less blue as it is a browny-grey. Still lovely though and makes the Clyde River look like a creek. The meeting started at 9am and took place in a conference room with about 20 people. Everyone had their laptops out and got straight to work. Lunch was provided for us every day and was a great exploration in the culinary delights of Hungarian catering. Without going into details, I'll leave you with the following: Brilliant at meats and sauces, not so brilliant with dessert. One particular one was a chestnut puree that I still maintain tasted like cloves and pot blended with flour and water and pressed through a play-dough spagetti-maker. Another one was a dry couscous with raisins and mango chutney-like topping. I don't recommend either though it did make for some great stories.

On Saturday at lunch, we looked out the window and saw this weird spiky glass building. We decided to go for an adventure and discover what it was. Totally worth it. The regular crowd from Glasgow, the former and the present group all rallied outside for our grand hour-long adventure. Turned out it was totally worth it; turned out to look like a half-overgrown bunker, half-modern avant garde building surrounded with barbed wire. Absolutely bizarre and hilarious. The best bit was that there was a running track that led into the barbed-wire area and promptly died. Excellent discovery and led to much speculation.

Oh man, I'm only up to Saturday afternoon and I already have carpal tunnel syndrome. Okay, I'll have to speed things up a bit. Well, that night we took the Budapest trams (a totally great mode of transportation) to the city centre, called the Oktogon. We found a great restaurant just off of the square and about twelve of us sat down for dinner. Many pints and some great goulash later, we went wandering around trying to find some excitement. We found some street performers singing Evita and Monty Python songs, so, needless to say, we wandered on. We found this brilliant bar area that was all outdoors and gradually went underground. The underground area had a cracking band playing that we could just wander in and out of. After having some beers outdoors, we decided to check out the band and it turned out to be this crazy, tribal, trippy group that had 3 drummers and a singer who chanted what sounded like old Aborigine songs. It was absolutely fantastic and we all left sweaty and hoarse and sore. We don't sleep until we're dead, though, we made our way back to Ráday utca. Funny anecdote: before we decided to get more drinks, we had all intensions of going to bed. Two guys saw a rickshaw and decided to take that home. While they arranged the trip, we walked on ahead. They caught up to us and the guy asked where they were going. When they said, he said it was too far. So they got off and paid him to catch up with us in a rickshaw. Got a great picture out of it though. So we went to Ráday utca and found a bar that was still open so we went for some cocktails. They eventually got us to leave by mixing the third round poorly and putting on some really awful 80's Norwegian pop music. So we left and actually, finally went home. At 3:30am. It is a good thing most of these chaps are no longer at Glasgow or I'd never finish my PhD. Brilliant company though.

The next day was the second day of our face-to-face meetings. Rather uneventful (thankfully). We wandered to the Danube during lunch and enjoyed the sun. They had a joint meeting at 5 that ran pretty late, so we met up again on Ráday utca for dinner. We hung out at the restaurant until 11pm and went home for an "early" night. This ended up with me chatting online to a bloke who was frantically trying to finish his talk for the next morning so I stayed up as his cheerleading squad. Went to sleep at 3:30am again. Dang it.

The next day was the first with the proper meetings taking place. This was with all 180ish people there and was in a large hall filled with tables and extension cords for the generally accepted lack-of-interest in non-relavent discussions and subsequent news/email checking. Again, everyone glued to their laptops. This night was our conference dinner at the Marriott looking over the Danube in a ballroom. Amazing setting. As the Glaswegians do, we went out for a pint in the 20 free minutes we had before dinner started. The dinner was fantastic though they limited us to one bottle of red and one bottle of white wine for a table of ten Scots. We discovered that the hotel bar downstairs sold wine for half the price they were going to charge us for more bottles. So we (and by we, I mean the delegated group of large, intimidating boys who were less likely to be questioned) went downstairs and bought some drinks. We then went to the balcony and looked over the night lights of Budapest. Tired of spending too much for drinks at the fancy hotel we decided to take a large group of people to the underground/outdoors bar we had found two nights before. There ended up being about 30+ people there and this old Irish guy bought rounds and rounds of Polinka, a strong, vaporous Hungarian liquor. We left for the hotel around 3am again. Dang it.

The next day we went off in the afternoon to go see the House of Terror. It wasn't a horror house, thankfully, but rather a museum on Nazi and Communist occupation of Budapest in the headquarters that were actually used. It was super depressing but really informative. It started at the top floor and worked down. We all got rushed into a life at about 5:30, figuring we were being ushered out (again, language barrier) but the doors closed and the lights went out. Going through my (and by the faces on the others, also their) mind: this is it. do people ever come out of this museum? am I going to die? is this the "Terror" bit of this house? Then a video came on and this Hungarian guy started talking (subbed in English) about how he was forced to kill prisoners and to what extent. The lift started slowly moving down while this played. It worked well because we were all sufficiently feeling a bit uneasy when the doors opened into the basement prisons and gallows to end the tour. We did not die. We then went to the pub next to our hotel that had pints of beer for just over a pound. This successfully helped us forget the horrors we had just heard about 20th century Hungary. Again, dinner at Ráday utca for some brilliant German food. One of the blokes got a "Transylvanian Wooden Meat Platter" which was literally a pile of different meats on a slab of wood with some pickled veg on the side. Classic. We then went back to the pub by our hotel and had some "proper" Polinka (i.e. not served in bulk out of plastic shot glasses) that was quite fantastic. 2:30am this time. Doing better.

The next day, the meetings ended at 12:30 so a few of us decided to go to "Memento Park" that one person's friends told us about. We found instructions on a map to get there. It's a famous park that has old Communist statues. This park didn't really seem to be on the map, but there were the instructions. We had to take a tram to the end then catch a bus to the outskirts of Budapest. After finally deciphering the Hungarian bus stop, we realised that our stop is the 28th from where we were. So we were WAY out there. Thankfully the only people that ride that bus who don't know where they're going (and subsequently stand out) are only ever going to Memento Park so this old Hungarian counted down stops for us. We finally made it and it was absolutely amazing. It stood on the top of this hill at the literal end of Budapest. We knew this because there was a sign on one side of the road that said "Budapest" and one on the other side that said "Budapest" with an X through it. The sun was setting and illuminated all of these old, giant statues left over from communism. It's very hard to describe, but it was basically a field on top of a hill that was just littered with about 15 statues. Absolutely phenomenal. We made it back just fine. This was the last night that all of them were there before they left for Munich for Oktoberfest (something my fiscally responsible, read: poor, self had to opt out of). So we did our usual routine: pub near hotel, dinner on Ráday utca then hit the Irish Pub next to one of the hotels. Fantastic, cracking time.

The last day of the meeting was a half-day so I had a full afternoon with no delinquent Glaswegians with whom to have fun, so I was able to explore the city a bit more. Since my camera died, I finally summoned the courage to find batteries with lots of pointing. Success. I was able to walk around the Danube until my feet were bleeding taking lots of great photos. I got some take-home felafel (amazing) and went to bed at a respectable hour.

The next day was the flight home. Easy enough and uneventful. Flying into Glasgow was a revelation though, because as we came through the clouds I got that fantastic feeling that you get when you've been gone for a long time and you finally see your home. It's like the city is giving you a hug, welcoming you home. You recognise streets and buildings and a wonderful feeling of comfort comes over you. This is how I felt, which means Glasgow is my home now. Deep in my conscious I'm home. I got back to my flat, went to the research club to meet up with the Friday night drinkers, got some deep-fried black pudding and chips on the way home. Living the true Glasgow life.