JUNE 21 This is when I was supposed to post this, and I am only beginning it today, which is my last day in Hungary, as I have a morning flight to New York via Milan. So what has happened since I last wrote..... Hmmm... Well, suppose I work backwards from today.
This past Saturday we threw a dinner party at a restaurant in Hodmezovasarhely. We had been guests at the home of these friends--ex-classmates of Anna, but neither Anna nor I have an apartment large enough to comfortably invite guests, so when we invite someone to dinner, we are inviting them Manhattan-style, which is to say that we are taking them to a restaurant. They set us up in a very nice private dining-room that was air-conditioned, which was very important, given that the temperature has been in the low 90s for as long as we can remember and in fact is supposed to hit 97 today. We dine there frequently, so they know us very well and take good care of us. Everyone was very pleased, so naturally we were as well. I had driven back from Debrecen that morning. Normally I take the train, as I do not have to pay, it is only an hour or so slower than driving there, and I can read and listen to music on the way. But although I arrived to the train station a half hour early, I missed the train. How could that happen? Well, I had decided to take a later train, and a train pulled into the station and just sat there. Then at 7.15 the front half detached---it was a two-coach train---and set off for Mako. I assumed---big mistake; NEVER assume anything in Hungary---that the train I wanted would pull in and I would get on, but the next thing I knew, the front half (now the back-half) pulled off and headed for Szentes, which meant it was my train. Now I could have sped to Szentes and beaten it there; but while I have been to the railroad station in Szentes numerous times, I do not remember the appearance of the area around the station, and since I planned to leave my car overnight, I felt some misgivings about the idea without knowing (or remembering) what the neighborhood was like. So I decided against outracing the train to Szentes and instead drove to Debrecen, which is why I had to drive back Saturday morning to be in time for the dinner-party.
I am going to do something and post this and just keep adding to it while in USA.
June 29 I am in USA now, arriving under the most pleasant circumstances imaginable. My plane landed at 1.30 PM, and by 2.00 I had (a) clearned immigration; (b) collected my baggage---it was the seciond one out the chute!; (c) cleared customs; and (d) gotten on the bus to Grand Central. It was the hottest day of the year in NYC thusfar. I am now in Middletown at the College, having just visited Cassilda at her office and stopped by the College on my way to see Ken Newman, intending to stop off and see Rich Eldridge on the way. Now, re-tracing my steps back in Hungary. We went to Kalocsa to attend a performance of Haydn's The Creation, performed by the Szeged Philharmonic and Vaszy Viktor Chorus. I had last been to Kalocsa in 1983, and Anna had not been there since the late 60s. We had a fine room in a hotel right across the square from the Cathedral. But the bells rang at 5.00 AM. They even rang during the performance of Haydn, causing the conductor to pause at an appropriate point. We also visited several museums, the Archbishop's Library and Treasury, and a peasant house outside the town. It was a most enjoyable experience.
