Budapest, August 11-16.

And then we went to Budapest for a memorial service for my deceased father-in-law Arpad.

Budapest has two halves, divided by the Danube: the more residential and hilly Buda, and the downtown Pest. They have about seven bridges; the most famous is called the Chain Bridge. This picture is looking towards Buda, which has some old walls and buildings on top, collectively known as the “Var” or Castle. Like Kafka’s castle, a bit.

We spent a lot of time with my wife’s aunt Emmi, a lively old lady who lives on the fourth floor of a walk-up apartment building in Buda — she’s lived there for about fifty years. She made this special cake by rolling up chocolate and ground chestnuts. “Hab” means “Whipped Cream.”

Emmi told us a story about World War II. When the Russians took over Budapest, they were raping all the women. Emmi and my wife’s mother made their way from one basement to what they deemed a safer basement, pushing along five children in two baby-carriages (including my wife and her brother).

They went through big Calvin Square in Pest, and the buildings on each of the square’s four corners were on fire. Dead soldiers and horses lay everywhere. It was winter. Emmi said that later they would go out every day to cut meat from the dead horses; it stayed fresh enough, as the weather was so cold. “Have you had horse meat?” Emmi asks us then. “It’s good.”

My wife has dozens of relatives in Budapest, here’s two especially cute ones: Andrea and Zsuzsa.

We came upon the Frank Zappa Caffe which happens to be next to my wife’s birth place house in Budapest, the very house where Emmi was headed that fateful night. What a treat to find Zappa here, my favorite musician. The waiter played the whole Hot Rats album for us.

Zappa performed at this cafe once or twice, which is why they named themselves after him. Big paintings of him on the wall. So synchronistic to find good old Frank here.

A tunnel cuts through the Var Hill, from Emmi’s Buda neighborhood to the Chain Bridge across the Danube to Pest. Looking at the egglike tunnel shape, I thought of Hungarian mathematicians solving differential equations.

In the Hungarian National Gallery up on the Var Hill I saw some paintings by József Rippl-Ronai (1861 – 1927), a terrific post-impressionist.

Rippl-Ronai was friends with Gaugin, and is sometimes called a Nabi.

On the Var Hill is a statue of the Magyar totem animal: the Turul, a mythical and very bad-ass relative of the eagle.

Walking around town, the signs began looking more and more like optometrist eye-charts to me, evenly spaced random symbols. This says something like “Retired Actors Rest Home.”

Maybe this graffitto represents a person walking on water?

We had dinner with my wife’s cousin Rita and her son Gyorgy Szentgáli. He plays guitar and has some music syntheis software; he’s been making songs and posting them. My favorite is “Tengerparti Pára,” which sounds like a surf song. Oddly enough, Gyorgy had heard of the concept of surf music!

But wait — surf’s up in the Hotel Gellert pool! Budapest is famed for its hot springs, and one of the best public spas is connected with the old Hotel Gellert. That was about the most fun of all that I had in Budapest. I went to the Gellert thermal baths and swimming pools two days in a row. Not many photos here, I’ll just have to describe it and copy a couple of postcards and two new CA images.

I went in nine forms of water:

(1) Heated outdoor soaking pool. It feels a bit like Esalen, warm-soaking in the sun, but these aren’t of sulfur water, I smell chlorine.

(2) Large outdoor ocean-wave pool. I dive down to confirm that the water is alternately sucked into, and powered out of, large vents in the wall at the deep end. I love bobbing up and down in the deep end. Chest-high breakers form in the shallows, I even catch some short rides, but mainly stand there grinning, letting the waves splash out from my bod, big-chesting myself against the crests, spraying sparkling drops far and wide.

(3 & 4) 38° C indoor thermal bath for men, and 36° C ditto. Many of the men are nude, some wear little dick-hiding aprons, I have a bathing-suit. This is the real heart of the place, the water is naturally sulfured, non-chlorinated, continually refreshed. I stretch and do yoga to my heart’s content — I take my suit off for awhile, then put it back on. Men in pairs and groups are talking Hungarian, the voices echoing off the old-timey tiled barrel-vault ceiling. New, hot sulfur water pours into the pools from gargoyle mouths, I get right under a stream, enjoying the heat on my tension-pained back. The railings into the pool have heavy brass balls on the ends, I crouch and rub my back against one of these, massaging it. I went back to the Gellert the next day and did a steambath, a thermal soak, and paid for a real massage. The masseur was casual as a barber, like a Hungarian Seymour Moskowitz — a sarcastic college pal of mine. Wonderful. He kneaded me like dough, and sent me off with a friendly “go git ‘em, big gaah,” slap on the ass.

(5) A steambath so hot (50° C = 110° F) that moving around in it comes alarmingly close to scalding my skin: the motion causes me to contact more superheated droplets per second. It’s hard even to breathe in here, I can barely see through the fog, it’s perfect. But I don’t stay all that long.

(6) The heavy intense stream of the shower off the thermal bath is like being peed on by a divine, life-giving elephant.

(7 & 8) The indoor cool-water pool is an Art Nouveau temple, with a sliding roof open to the blue sky; a hot Sunday sun lays a square of gold on the blue water. At one end is a coed heated soaking pool, separate from the long cool-water pool. These pools smell nasty, like chlorine and sweat, not like the outdoor pools or like the healing thermal baths. I don’t stay here long.

(9) I go back outside and reenter the wave pool when it’s turned on again — seemingly it’s only on for like the first ten minutes of every half hour. Again I end up grinning in the shallows, loving the paracomputation of the waves, a happy California boy. And then, for my ninth form of water, I take an outdoor shower.

Debrecen, August 9-11, 2005.

Kids at an outdoor restaurant play “Kö, papir, ollo,” meaning “Stone, paper, scissors.”

This far-east region of Hungary is like the Wild West of the US in that they used to have horsemen tending large herds of longhorn gray cows.

Their free range is called “puszta.”

Big beautiful 1910 oil-paintings of horses and cowboys adorn the marble staircase of our grand hotel, Aranyi Bika (Gold Bull). It’s kind of like being in Billings, Montana, with the huge, open sky. We’re excited to be in Debrecen at the far east end of Hungary, almost in Romania or the Ukraine.

I like this gnarly fountain, with a railing that looks like the time-frozen water. I’m writing this in the big (triangular) Calvin Square of Debrecen at a table in the Gara Cukraszda, a cake and ice-cream shop. “Cukrasz” means “sugar.”

The enormous yellow two-toned Calvinist church of Debrecen is at the end of the square. Most of the Hungarian churches are painted yellow, they love coloring their buildings, as I mentioned before: yellow, pink and green.

The Deri museum. Very bossy guards, guilt-provoking entreaties that I visit every room, these women are like aunts nagging you to take another helping of dessert. Dull metal artifacts, age-browned three-tined wooden pitchforks. The jewel of the museum is three large canvases by Munkácsy: Christ and Pilate, Ecce Home, and Golgotha.

I’m getting more of a sense of how Hungarian my wife is. In Debrecen we went to a handicrafts center, and two women her age were making cut-out felt appliqué items. She started talking Hungarian with them and they were so interested in her. They kept gently plying her with further questions, as fascinated with my California-Hungarian as if she were an exotic bright-feathered macaw flown in through an open window to perch on the back of a chair.

I sit in a courtyard in Debrecen, the Reformed theology college, dancing pine branches all around me.

I compare the old library here to the nanomachines dreams of the extropians. The lovely quiet books, half a millennium old. Idiocy to turn trees into paper, and even greater idiocy to turn paper into nanomachines.

That picture's of storks on a power pole in the puszta. Think of the storks as humans, pecking at the sparrow nanonmachines.

What are the thoughts of the nanomachine clouds? Like cellular automata, BZ scrolls and gliders. Walker: intelligence = memory. The fluttering leaf is always saying the same things, or so it seems to me from the outside. But the tree is growing new leaves, twigs and branches as time goes on, fed by the light-eating leaves.

Lots of Hungarian women dye their hair red, it’s like the upiquitous blonde dye of California. Reds: cherry, strawberry, purple, violet, raspberry, every imaginable shade.

Thanks to the international SF connection, I met up with Donald and Csilla Morse, who teach in Debrecen, Donald being involved with the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts.

Always amazing to roll into a burg at the ass-end of nowhere and find it full of people doing their thing. The locals are into their soccer team today, Team Debrecen is playing a big-ass game against Manchester, it’s being televised on a giant screen set up in Calvin Square on the steps of that big yellow Reformed church tonight. We can see it out the window in the hotel above the Cukraszda. We have an haut-relief of a puszta longhorn on the bedroom wall.

At Donald's urging, we go see the amazing train-station-like Debrecen University. And then, walking around town we enter yet another church. A fat man is just inside the door, inert, like a fish in the shadow of a rock, hanging there. And a hunchbacked little old man is staring at the Virgin and Jesus in a glass case. Perhaps he’s praying for a miracle.

I had puszta-style gulyasch (goulash) for supper, with caraway seeds, meet from those longhorned grass-fed gray cattle, potatoes and dumplings, it was unspeakably delicious. Traditionally, gulyasch is made in an iron kettle hanging from a three-bar metal tripod over a fire. It told the waiter, “Holnap meg gulyasch,” meaning, “Tomorrow more goulash.”

August 6 – 9, 2005. Southern Hungary: Pécs and Kecskemét.

So we flew to Budapest, rented a car, and set off into the boonies of Hungary, starting with Pécs down south.

We’ve been eating goose liver nearly every day. The best is soft as butter and pink inside. A good lunch today as well, those handmade little dumplings and a creamy meat stew. The meals are cheap here in the Hungarian boonies. All we two can eat at a top restaurant is under $30. Back in California I’m a pescatarian, but when in Rome… We saw a fascinating museum devoted to the work of Pécs native Csontvary. Like Ensor, also a bit fauve.

Csontvary was a self-taught artist, pharmacist by trade. Amazing work, some of it, with great scumbling, that is, lines of contrasting color lightly brushed over other colors. The guy was nuts, they say. I’m sorry to leave his pictures. A new mind to twink.

The buildings are great, like crumbling cakes, coated with 19th C ornamentation and painted yellow, pink, and pistachio.

Saw a museum of Zsolnay porcelain, amazing art nouveau, deco, ersatz bronze-age pieces too, all these artists came into the Zsolnay company over the years.

The Hungarian signs, it’s such an onslaught of bizarre words. I have very little pattern-recognition, everything has to be sounded out, and even then there’s no cognates. This sign means Women’s Bathroom, “nö” being “woman,” with “nöi” the possessive. I love that word nö. “ö,” by the way, is a gender-indefinite pronoun meaning “he, she, or it”.

The next day’s itinerary: Pécs, Mohács, Nagybaracsk, Baja, Kalocsa, Kecskemét. Nagybaracsk = big peach = Sylvia, singing, happy to be in her native land. This picture is of Baja, which is not to say Cabo Wabo. Dig the sky.

We got into the road trip rhythm. Took a ferry across the Danube at Mohács, 12 km north of Croatia. I rode a ferry across the Ohio River when I was four or five, I was awed and a little frightened. This ferry on the Danube was cool, too, though the ride not long enough. I was proud that I could buy the tickets. I have better luck speaking German than English in the boonies. And I know a few dozen words of Hungarian.

The streets had little shade trees, unusually long-branched leafy trees, maybe elms. A bearded squeegee guy haunted the parking lot, looking like a peddler from a fairy tale.

Country roads, green trees, fields of hay, corn, wheat and paprikas — the hay tidy in rolls. The skies have been pale watery blue with sweet cloud-puffs. Skies like this always remind me of when I was a young man (32-34) on a grant in Heidelberg, learning to write science fiction novels(White Light and Software).

We saw fields of finger-like Hungarian peppers destined to be ground into paprika; we even visited a paprika museum in Kalocsa. They only started using paprika in Hungary in the 1700s. The pepper came here from … Mexico!

So paprika peppers are cousins of our friend the jalapeño and serrano peppers. What did the Hungarian use for spice before paprika, I wonder.

Lots of peeling stucco. This patch looks more or less like the map of Hungary. They have, I believe, seven neighboring countries. Listed clockwise, starting at the west side: Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. I think many Hungarians consider all of their neighbor countries somewhat shady, always with the exception of Austria.

Genetically, the Hungarians a kind of pond of Magyar genes overlaid upon the indidgenous Slavonic and Germanic tribes; the Magyars showed up in, like, the tenth century, settling and interbreeding, horesemen riding in from the Carpathian basin north of the Black Sea. In Budapest there's a statue of the nine “heroes,” representing the leaders of the nine nomadic tribes who settled Hungary. They have great names: Arpad, Tetény, Ond, Kond, Elöd, Huba, and Tas. They have beards, mustaches, long hair; they look like Hells’ Angels. Arpad was the leader; that's him on the first horse. As it happens, my father-in-law's name was Arpad.

We ended up in Kecskemét, means “Goat Walk.” So many European churches paint God as a triangle, often with an eye inside like on the dollar bill, but sometimes with God’s head. I’m thinking about a godlike dark-matter being shaped like a triangular pyramid (tetrahedron) containing an eye, and ö’s name is Aum. Aum will free Sol system of the filthy nanomachines.

I have known Hungarians to say things on the order of, “Hearing my child’s sweet voice singing that lullaby was like a knife in my heart,” meaning that the experience was exquisitely touching and almost unbearably wonderful, tinged as it was by the awareness of looming mortality. “Do you love me?” “Seeing your face is like a knife in my heart.” This is known as Hungarian Drama; I'm prone to myself by now.

This is a really gnarly snack I bought at a market, the woman claimed it was marzipan (almond paste), but I dunno. It was flavored with cherry, wrapped in dried apple and rolled in poppy seeds. Like a fork in my stomach.

We went into an amazing Hungarian Art Nouveau building with, like, Peter Max tiles on it, big Zhabotinsky scrolls. Though I didn’t get any pictures, there are really a lot of Hungarian Art Nouveau buildings in a somewhat heavier kind of style than French or Belgian Art Nouveau.

August 1 – 6, 2005. Geneva.

I’m using an analog notebook, spiral-bound, it cost 33¢ for a 70-pager at Walgreen’s, a real deal. And a pen, my favorite kind for the last few years, a Pilot P-700 fine gel pen, with a nib that looks like a hypodermic. I get these for about 40¢ each at Office Max. That’s my word processing system now: pen and notebook: no batteries, random access, water-resistant, crash-proof, low theft risk, easy to turn off and on.

In the plane, as we wait for takeoff, the video screens soothe us with images of gnarly computation: sped-up clouds, waterfalls, reflective ripples, flocks of birds. (Not fire, though, not in a plane cabin.) Gnarly continuous-valued CAs would be okay, too, I think. Paradoxically, once we’re in the air and in a position to look at gnarly soothing nature on our own, the steward requests that everyone close their window shades so as to bring into greater prominence the video screens, which begin showing CBS reruns. We’re to look at evil, farty consensus-reality consumerist propaganda instead of the gorgeous clouds right outside our winged tin-can. Ain’t it awful.

It was raining when we got to Geneva.

I took a walk by this great old house like a castle.

Peter Bruegel passed by the Lake of Geneva as a young man, coming back from his visit to Italy. He used this scene as the setting for his paiting, “The Harvesters,” which hangs in the Met in NY.

A sawed-down tree blocking a road: like a Tarot card for “barrier.”

I like walking in the Perle du Lac park by Lake Geneva.

The town is beautiful as well. I’ve been to Geneva nearly every year for the last forty years, as my wife's family lived here.

I always remember coming here with my parents for my wedding in 1967. Excited and proud. Pop had a drink of whiskey right before we landed, the whiskey was in a glass test-tube with a clip bracket like a pen, he had it in his inside coat pocket, one of his parishioners had given it to him, as a joke, I’d thought, but here he was drinking it, nervous I guess, my mother remonstrating, “Really, Ruck.” I thought nothing of it, at the time, I thought it was cute.

This may be the last visit for quite some time, as my wife’s parents have both passed on now. We’re here to tie up loose ends.

It’s raining linden blossoms on me in a cafe in the park-like campus of the University of Geneva across a traffic circle from the opera house and the Musee Rath. A lovely mild blue-sky day, people of all ages here at 10:30 AM, drinking tea, coffee, beer. I just ate a croissant that was Art Deco in its dough-folds.

My favorite Swiss artist is a dead guy called Ferdinand Hodler. Here's a virtual tour of his show at Musee Rath last year.

One night we went to see fireworks by the lake. These are moths swarming around a spotlight. The dottedness of the lines is due to the electical grid's 60 Hz flicker.

One day I spent a long time in a shoestore.

The net-withdrawal continues to intensify. I can’t get the computer at my step-mother-in-law’s house to do webmail. Must I settle for internet cafes? I’m totally jonesing for email. I feel like a man who’s lost his glasses. My laptop and email help me confirm to myself that I do have an identity.

But I’m finding that writing in this notebook soothes the same itch. In the background, I have in mind to type up these scribbles for my electronic journals, and for excerpting in my blog. But what if I didn’t ever type them up? Even so the act of writing would remain pleasurable. Writing is an end in itself, not only a means to an end. I am a graphomaniac.

This woman was doing mime-begging on the street, and then I saw her walking away. Another Tarot card: the mysterious gypsy. I see this as a starter scene for Frek 2.

Variation on the Pig Chef theme: a turtle hawking tortoise-shell eyeglass frames.

My back is unbelievably sore in the upper right quadrant and I’m doing yoga on the lawn as I write these notes, lying on a towel in red Palau T-shirt and black bathing trunks. Also reading and writing notes into Stross’s great Accelerando.