Wine Cellar No. 2 in the Valley of Nice Women
February 28, 2007
Jó napot!
Classes are going well so far. They are hard classes, but having lots of free time (and no extra-curriculars) and study groups makes classes manageable. I didn’t realize there would be such an emphasis on problem-solving in the courses. For example, in my Number Theory class one day a week is pure lecture and the other day is pure problem-solving where our professor walks around and watches us solve problems and gives us hints. The problem sets in Combinatorics are pretty hard because I haven’t ever really thought in that way before. But the Hungarians do, apparently. The director of the program teaches the other Combinatorics class and his daughter had one of the problems from our last problem set in her seventh grade math class! The problem was to arrange N basketball players who have distinct heights such that a shorter player is never between two taller players. It’s fairly easy to see the pattern, but constructing a combinatorial argument involving sets and subsets is much harder. I’ll put the answer at the very end in case you want to try it yourself.
In my Hungarian Culture class, we read The Paul Street Boys, which is a book that every Hungarian child reads. It teaches kids what it means to be a Hungarian, so it was interesting to read that. But that was the topic of my last email.
Geometry continues to go well. It’s probably my hardest class, but I have a good study buddy, Christian, who is about at the same level as I. He usually has frisbee on weekends (he plays for a Budapest club team and has tournaments all over Europe). This was one of his free weekends, so we decided to go to the town of Eger, which is in Eastern Hungary. I also had the option of going to Vienna and Prague, but those are so close too that I’ll be able to go to those places anytime.
Eger lies in the vineyard country of Hungary and is most famous for one of its many wines—Bull’s Blood (Egri Bikavér). Apparently soldiers sustained themselves on this wine during the siege on Eger Castle by the Turks, so the enemies thought this is where they got their strength. I tried some, but I didn’t feel any stronger. On the train to Eger we started talking to someone on the train and it turned out he was a math teacher, so we talked to him for awhile. Once we got there, we walked around for awhile. It’s a very nice-sized town, and we didn’t even need a map, because the directions to landmarks are clearly marked in Hungarian, German and English, and everything is within walking distance. 
Even the Valley of Nice Women… But first we went to the Basilica, which has some stunning frescoes. The outside is a very intense yellow color. In fact a lot of the houses also have vibrant colors in Hungary, which is very nice to see. The houses in the US will look extremely depressing after I come back. At least in Northfield there are a few individuals daring enough to have vibrant colors. One such vibrant place was a little bistro near the basilica. They had some of the best bread I’ve had so far. Then we went to the ruins of the castle, which has a lot of passageways, guard towers and different terrain; it would be a great place to play cops and robbers or a fun level for Halo. The locals probably wouldn’t like that though. While we were there, we went to the wine cellar at the Castle. I thought it would have barrels of wine, but apparently the wine cellars have become very commercial, so there are sampling cellars and then the wine is actually stored in another cellar, though sometimes they are combined. In the castle wine cellar, one half was a wine bar and the other half was a small archery range, which seems like a deadly combination. After going to that wine cellar, we decided to go to the real cellars, which are just outside of town between the vineyards and the town in the Valley of Nice Women. I keep mentioning this because every direction sign had an arrow pointing to “the Valley of Nice Women”. From our guidebook we knew this was where the cellars are, but we wondered what other tourists think when they see that sign. So we walked in the Valley of Nice Women; however, we didn’t find any “nice” women anywhere in the valley, which is probably a good thing, because they would probably lure us to some expensive cellar and make us buy them expensive wine. We arrived to the cellars, which look like military bunkers (in wartimes, at least the wine will be safe). We went to the first cellar we saw—charming Wine Cellar No. 2 in the Valley of Nice Women.
When we entered, there was an older woman working in the Wine Cellar No. 2. I greeted her by saying “szia,” which is very informal especially when addressing someone older. It was probably the equivalent of saying, “s’up, grandma.” Then she said, “oh you Americans…you Americans always say ‘szia.’” So I quickly redeemed myself by saying, “jó napot kívánok”, which is very formal, and she was impressed by that; she wasn’t expecting an American to know that. Though later on that night when we went to dinner I walked into the restaurant and said “kösönöm,” which means “thank you”…I had no way of redeeming myself from that one. We talked to the woman in Wine Cellar No. 2 for at least 40 minutes about Eger and Hungary. She is a retired English and German teacher but enjoys selling wine in her freetime. She grew up in South Africa, lived many places throughout Europe and now lives in little Eger. We talked to her about languages for awhile (she’s fluent in six), and she talked about how Hungarian students undervalue other languages or at least speaking other languages. Especially if you speak Hungarian, it’s necessary to learn other languages to communicate with the world. Unfortunately, she had to leave, so our conversation was cut short. Even though the wine that we tried wasn’t the best, we definitely want to come back to Wine Cellar No. 2 to find that nice woman again.
After Wine Cellar No. 2, we tried No. 5, No. 13, No. 31, No. 32 and a few others. We spent less than $10 each on quite a few glasses of wine and two bottles. Our favorite wine was from Wine Cellar No. 5, which was Egri Otton Muskotály—a sweet white wine. The wine was fresh from a big aluminum “silo” (as they call it) and they filled it into 1,5 liter water bottle. Classy.
I definitely want to go back to little Eger again.
On Sunday night I went to see Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (the fighting ninth for you Stephen Colbert fans) at the new Palace of the Arts in Budapest. We had standing room tickets, which were a budget-breaking $1 each. I was expecting the concert to be very formal and to follow strict concert guidelines; however, the conductor of the symphony was very dynamic and liked to play with the audience. He was the soloist for one of Mozart’s Flute Concertos before the fighting ninth. We asked for an encore (which I will talk about later), and he came out and played a little ditty on his flute and then walked off the stage. It was really fun to see. The fighting ninth was really well done. One of my favorite parts was the end. No, not “Ode to Joy”; rather, everyone clapping. We clapped in traditional chaotic claps for about two minutes and then the slow clap started. I’ve never seen this done before. Pretty soon everyone was clapping in unison, which is a very moving experience with about 1500 people and after a great concert. The slow clap would gradually speed up and then after it was getting too fast, the slow clap would start again, and everyone followed. Apparently this is very common in Europe. I think it’s a really cool tradition. I believe it’s done to ask for an encore, and after about ten cycles of slow claps, we got one; they played Ode to Joy again followed by more slow claps. I was surprised that not one person gave a standing ovation (well, except for us in the standing room section). But, the slow clap was a great substitute.
I hope the Hymn Sing at St. Olaf went well this weekend. I really wish I could have been there for it!
I’ll put up more pictures of Budapest at night and Eger in a few days.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/webmoof/
Szia!
Daniel
P.S. Answer: 2^(N-1).