Journal of a Sabbatical

February 21, 2001

jet lag is so weird

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

Hotel Platanus - Budapest - February 21, 2001

The weather is gray and damp but not really raining at the moment. It's quite humid. I'm cold and sweating at the same time. How weird.

The breakfast buffet in the hotel has basic Hungarian stuff like bread, cheese, salami, pickles, and cucumbers as well as eggs and fried potatoes, stewed fruit, yogurt and cereal. Something for everyone. No tomatoes though. Tomatoes are out of season. And they have sour cherry juice, my favorite from the last trip. I did not try the orange juice. It looked too orange to be real. Positively neon orange. Nothing in nature looks that orange. The coffee is good and strong with a hint of chocolate. So it's not served on Herend china with wild boars and bustards on it, it's a good breakfast.

My big project for today is to get sort of over the jet lag while István is off dealing with the printer. I walked to the ATM machine down the street to get myself some Hungarian forints in case I need to buy anything like coffee or lunch or postage stamps. When István checked in to see if I'd gotten any Hungarian money yet and I told him about the ATM he was surprised. He didn't know there was an ATM there. It's outside a convenience store (which doesn't open until 10:00 AM, how convenient is that?) next to the soccer stadium. I can see why he didn't know it was there. He would have no reason to cross that street, which you really have to cross by going down into the metro station and coming up on the other side unless you want to be run over.

I walked around the block where the botanical department is and took a few photos of the crumbling facade. I thought maybe I'd take some pictures of the historic 1956 bullet holes but in this gray drizzly light they don't really make all that interesting a photo. There's scaffolding around the front door where they're putting up a little portico typed thing because pieces of the facade are falling off the front of the building right over the main entrance. I guess the idea is to keep the falling pieces from hitting anyone.

After my walk, I installed a bunch of software on the new G4 and got the Zip drive hooked up so we'll be ready when Zoltán comes down from Eger in the afternoon with the rest of the software. The only thing I didn't get working was the email because I didn't understand the note that the computer guy left me with the POP and SMTP info. The rest of the network stuff is fine and I successfully replaced the preinstalled IE default browser with Netscape (which is what István requested since he's using Netscape on his PC), the default e-mailer with Eudora, and got rid of the desktop picture and replaced it with a plain color (blue).

Zoltán and Marilee arrived in the afternoon with Photoshop etc. in a wicker basket. While Zoltán took over the G4, Marilee showed me pictures of the mastiff puppy I saw at their place last visit. It now weighs 17 kilos and they call it "Mammoth". It is huge!

We (me, István, and Marti) went out to dinner at a Hungarian restaurant called Kalosca with Judit (a friend of István's). Quite a change from "soy cheese domestic. I would have loved to sit and talk over coffee after dinner but I am wiped out. I'm trying to use BiB's jet lag coping strategy, which is to ignore it and carry on, but it's just so persistent. Jet lag is soooo weird. I feel dizzy, tired, hungry at all the wrong times ... despite my resolve to ignore it.