8:30 AM, St. Olaf: Students can be found fast asleep in their dorms.
9:30 AM, St. Olaf: Some students begin to rise and get ready for a relaxing day on the hill.
11:30 AM, St. Olaf: Most students are up and about. Many can be found walking through the sidewalk slush to Buntrock for food.
1:30 PM, St. Olaf: Students are enjoying a nice break from classes and can unwind for the day.
In Hungary things are a bit different.
8:30 AM, Professor's House: Students are up getting ready for the day.
9:45 AM, Professor's House: Students pile into the breakfast room for class.
11:30 AM, Professor's House: Students finish up with group work and make their way back to their rooms to get ready for a trip to Szentendre.
1:30 PM, Szentendre: Students climb off the train at the Szentendre station to go site seeing.
After a morning of class, we were all excited to take the train out to the picturesque Szentendre. Szentendre is a quaint town between ten and fifteen miles north of Budapest, along the Danube. It's a popular tourist destination due partly to its museums, shops, and reputation as an artists' colony, but also largely as a result of its winding cobblestone streets and general visual appeal. After a quick bite to eat, we all went to the Margit Kovacs Museum to check out the work of Hungary's best-known ceramic artist. Her work ranged from painted bowls and tiny scenes to figures that were maybe a meter tall and murals painted on tiles. She worked consistently for about fifty years, through both World Wars, and her signature, KM (Hungarian surnames come before given names), was apparent on each piece, although it was often creatively woven into the design. After the museum, we walked around the town, checking out the shops and museums along the way. The marzipan museum seemed to be a hit with many; Princess Diana, dinosaurs, and Disney characters were some of the few marzipan creations in the museum that caught our eyes. Many of these works of art took at least 20 hours to create, while the larger life-size creations took a few days and weighed a large amount.
We've been making the most of our late afternoons and evenings, but tomorrow afternoon is our first extended free block of time in daylight, so you can look forward to hearing about our adventures soon!
The Margit Kovacs pottery sounds amazing. What a lovely gift to bring back to the states with you. Such history! Sounds as though the Marzipan creations were fun and whimsical as well.
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