Vaci Utca, Subways and Vajdahunyad Castle

Well the latter half of the week held no grand excitements, but it's nice to settle into a bit of a routine here. I finally bought a transit pass, so I have been riding the subways a lot, and just getting off wherever to wander about. The yellow line ends down near the river at Vörösmarty tér, and I have gone down there twice in the past couple of days. Vaci Utca (street) is down there, and the whole neighborhood consists mainly of carless streets filled with shops. One of these is called Fashion Street, and is filled with high end designer clothes stores, with cheap American ones mixed in. There are an excessive amount of shoe stores around the city, and the same holds down there, with two Reebok stores.
Friday, Sam and I went to Városliget (City Park), and visited Vajdahunyad Castle, which was pretty cool. It is an odd mixture of styles, with a moat around it, and a drawbridge with a giant iron gate. There was a big flea market happening, so there were stalls peddling all sorts of things around the bridge and inside the castle. That night, we went out for palacsintas, which are pancake/crepe like things. We had chicken curry ones, chili con carne, Milky Way, chocolate pudding, mushroom, apple and peach ones. All were very good.
This morning we went to see my landlady. She lives over in the Buda Hills, and walking up to her place was gorgeous. Her street is a beautiful tree-lined street with an amazing view of the city. It's like an older San Francisco, Jon said, and I think I would be inclined to agree with him, though I have never been to San Francisco.
This afternoon I didn't feel so well, so I read. And read. And read. I ended up reading over 3/4 of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It's amazing. It is about Prague during the Soviet era, and it's fun to see the comparisons to here. Plus he mentions Budapest a couple times, and Imre Nagy too. So if you read this Tom, thanks for the recommendation, though I think you are biased towards it because it is about a doctor named Tomas. This book is especially satisfying because the last two books were disappointments. I have read Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima and Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov already while here, and both are authors I have read before, and these didn't hold up to their best stuff. I have also been reading William Blake's poetry, which is quite good. Up next I have One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, Paradise Lost by John Milton and The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner. So if anyone has any recommendations, let me know and I will seek them out. Tomorrow I am (hopefully) going to a pigsticking in the countryside. It is basically the slaughtering of a pig, and a giant celebration. It is an ancient Hungarian tradition (and apparently partly the cause of the downfall of the Soviet Union in Hungary), but it will be outlawed once Hungary is officially in the EU. It should be quite interesting, and it will be nice to see another part of Hungary. A good article on the subject can be found here: http://www.hungarianquarterly.com/no173/9.htm.
Thats all for now.