Journal of a Sabbatical

February 19, 2001

bound for budapest

Today's Reading: Budapest: The City of the Magyars by F. Berkeley Smith

I'm off to Budapest this evening. I get to spend the night on the plane and suddenly it's morning in Paris and I get to dash to the gate for my connecting flight.

"All the wildness and splendor of a barbaric civilization at the edge of the Orient!" broke out the Enthusiast again. "Picturesque old castles, jutting from solemn mountain slopes and rocky crags, the lookout points of robber bands, silhouetted against the moon; over all the spell of that wild music. What romance it recalls! How clearly it brings to mind the days of the warlike, proud, and savage races of the middle ages! The blue Danube gliding along its tortuous course down to the ..."

"Here! here! hold on," interrupted the Pessimist; "the Danube isn't blue - it's yellow, yellow ochre, dirty yellow."

"It's blue in the waltz. I guess Strauss wasn't color blind when he wrote it," replied the Enthusiast, undeterred.

"All right," answered the Pessimist; "go ahead; you'll find it yellow just the same - dirty yellow and as tortuous as a New Jersey creek."

Actually the last time I saw the Danube it was green. Now it's probably frozen.

And so off to the airport not a moment too soon.