Discourse in the Breakfast Room at the Hotel

Dear 4 Ladies in the Breakfast Room,

I just wanted to thank you for letting me overhear and record your conversation here in the breakfast room at the hotel. I couldn't have been more entertained. Hope you have a good trip home. Perhaps you should rent The Princess Bride. Action, romance, and the folks who die are only mostly dead.

This man I know bought a pet cemetery. He buried a horse one time. It's not like you can say, lead that horse. Walk over here, die over here. We've got one in the yard. The kid's playground is over there and the garden.

Oh, we had to do that one time. My poor daddy. I had a pick axe. He walked over to the big sugar maple. He said. 'We're not burying him there."

Our family pet died, the one we had from the time I was eight or nine. He was the sweetest thing. He died when I graduated from high school. My mama and daddy, they had gotten up and he had died. It was like a death. My daddy got up and dug a grave.

Brenda is way past her prime. We fix her omelets. She hates it when she has to go to the kennel. Um.m.m It's too much, I'm sure.

We've got to leave before it's too late. We can't drive late into the night. We'll each be driving thirty minutes and say, "OK, it's your turn."

Well, we can just sing. That'll keep you awake.

Let's get a movie. We can listen to that.

OK, but we have to get an action movie, one with lots of mysterious music, "Da, da, Duh."

Yes, nothing that's quiet. Not the Notebook. That will make me cry. I couldn't even watch that, my children watch it, but I can't watch that. How about Martian Child?

Oh, no. Not about a child. Anything about a child is real.

I can't watch movies like the Horse Whisperer, "I cry!" That horse died. It reminds me of when I was trying to get my mare pregnant. We had a beautiful stud palomino! She finally got pregnant and had the cutest little colt. He would just follow me. I'd go out and call him and he'd leave his mama and come to me. Then in 2000, that tornado come through. They come and say, that little horse won't lead. I go out and he's paralyzed.

The next day the vet comes and puts him down. I just couldn't stand there and watch that.

We could stay here another night!

I'm not thinking about that yet. When we get home I have to give away 4 kittens.

Have a great trip.

BRD

Franz Liszt Accompanies Tour of Budapest

Dear Franz,

Thank you for providing background music for our tour. Though we didn't go to any Liszt concerts while in your fair city, this soundtrack more than makes up for it. Thanks. Gee, we didn't even get to go to the Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum, which I hear is a recreation of your last Budapest flat. Well, next time.



I'm posting this semi-repetition of my last slide collection because I have overcome some of the innate technological problems of the last. Plus, and this is big, your music as well as some title slides to tell where we are.

Write!

Betsy

Budapest: Betsy and Steve's Great Adventure

Dear Alan and Malinda,

I cannot express what a pleasure it was to be with you and to explore the wonders of the beautiful city of Budapest, Hungary. The slideshow below is somewhat chronological as you will realize. It cannot capture, but only reflect the beauty and old world vitality of the city.



Of course my remembrances of this great adventure will always be colored by the warmth of your hospitality and flavored by the zest of your spirits.

Thank you.

Always,

Betsy and Steve

Survey: What Should I Do in Budapest?

*Note: Results of My Tour Posted Here!!!

Dear Experienced Traveler,

I am finally doing it. I'm going with my husband to Budapest. My husband has been to Budapest and it's environs (i.e. little places in Central Europe) many times. Every time he has said, "Please come with me." I have never said, "Wow, yes!"


"What is wrong with you?" you say. And that is the question I put to myself. What is wrong with me? Why haven't I started packing my bags at the very opportunity, throwing financial responsibilities and well tended calendars to the winds, and climbed aboard the appropriate jumbo jet headed for Budapest Ferihegy International. I finally admitted the dirty truth. I'm a scared traveler. I don't want to go anywhere. I don't want to pack my bags and decide in advance what I will be wearing on Day 6. I don't want to get lost in a major metropolitan airport where no one speaks English as their heart language (although I have been to Memphis).

I don't want to think about comfortable walking shoes or what if I get a deep cut in the bathroom while shaving in a foreign city, I don't want to decide who to ask to feed the animals while I'm gone or how to change dollars into fandangos or whatever money they use over there. These are scary things for me.

However, it is wrong for me to be this scared little self. I know it is wrong and I loved it when my husband forced me onto the plane to go to London and Paris. So perhaps I will love it when I go to Budapest.

When I was pregnant with my first baby, I was scared like this. I didn't want to have a human subset grow inside me. My only hope in that situation was advanced knowledge, so I got a book by Lennart Nilsson, called A Child is Born and read. The description might scare those of you who do not have children and do not want to. . . as well as the accompanying high resolution photographs. A blurb like, "Nilsson zooms in on sperm racing towards the egg, the brand-new zygote, the embryo clinging to the lining of the uterus, a tadpole-like fetus and the remarkably developed ear of a 18-week old fetus, among other moments in the process of human reproduction," is not necessarily comforting to someone whose breath has been knocked out of them by the news that they are impregnated. However, for me, knowledge is always curative, and by the time I'd reach the last picture in A Child is Born, I was ready to pant-pant-breathe.

So I'm hoping that is what will happen here. If I just learn enough about Buda + Pesh, maybe I'll be able to appreciate the glow of the sun on the Danube. I mean, that castle is pretty cool!

When I went to Paris, I studied. I read at least six travel books, studied pictures and maps. I had a list of 100 places to see in Paris (in 5 days.) I divided the city up into sectors and started each morning at the farthest point, coming back toward the hotel through tourist spots like the grave of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the Louvre, the Big Thumb Statue by the Grande Arche, and so forth.

I can do this!

So, survey is. . . what are the best sites to see in Budapest? I need your help. We leave in February and I'm just on my first travel guide!

Betsy