Sightseeing in the Mindfields
Current Events 20: A Concert in Osijek
June 06, 2019
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One of our destinations in Osijek was an elementary school, where the students regaled us with a concert. The tour company's owners fund a charitable foundation that gave the school a grant, and the tykes were going to sing, and play, for their supper. We guests filed into a low concrete building decorated with metal panels in primary colors. There...
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Current Events 19: Osijek, Croatia
May 30, 2019
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We docked in Batina, a tiny river port in eastern Croatia. Eastern Croatia is the section that does not include the Dalmatian Coast on the Adriatic Sea. We were far inland, in a flat, agricultural area. After breakfast on the ship, we were taken by bus to Osijek (OH-see-yek), a city on the Drava River. As The Drava was too small a river to accommod...
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Current Events 18: Pajama Party on The Danube
May 23, 2019
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I wished that we could spend another week in Budapest, but we had to return to the ship on our second night there to begin sailing south on The Danube. The crew imparted, reluctantly, that we would have to rise from bed whenever the ship reached the Hungarian border at Mohacs. There, Hungarian border control agents would board the ship, and check o...
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Current Events 17: The Alexandra Bookstore
May 16, 2019
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I have to thank our guide from the boat, Radi, for suggesting that we repair to the Alexandra Bookstore after the Opera House. We had to ask for directions a few times, but succeeded in finding the tri-level bookstore. It was a well-stocked, modern emporium, with books in English as well as Hungarian, on the two lowest floors. On the third, however...
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Current Events 16: The Hungarian State Opera House
May 09, 2019
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While the guide explained the history and design of the three-tiered Opera House, he had us sit in the plush chairs in the orchestra section. The theater's acoustics are considered to be among the best in the world. There was a crew on the stage, busily changing the set and providing a serendipitous visual accompaniment to the guide's speech. After...
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Current Events 15: A Walk on Andrassy Avenue
May 02, 2019
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We consulted a map before setting out for the Opera House, a landmark that we had glimpsed during the previous day's city bus tour. We strolled on Andrassy Avenue, a wide, tree-shaded thoroughfare modeled on the Avenue des Champs-Elysees in Paris, past elegant shops, neo-Renaissance mansions, and sidewalk cafes. Youths on skateboards slipped past c...
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Current Events 14: Mystery Lunch in the Jewish Quarter
April 25, 2019
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We ate in a ramshackle falafel joint where we could not tell what we had ordered, owing to the girl cashier's limited English and our nearly nonexistent Hungarian. We unfurled our bills of hundreds and thousands of forints, and matched them to the prices that we read from a chalkboard. The cashier pantomimed that we had paid for more food than we h...
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Current Events 13: The Synagogue on Kazinczy Street
April 18, 2019
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Near the Great Synagogue on Dohany was a much smaller, Orthodox one on Kazinczy Street. It was about a century old. The exterior's Art Nouveau ornamentation evoked The Levant. It occurred to me that the native Magyars' antipathy towards the Jews might have been exacerbated by the Jewish taste for architecture in a style similar to that of the Turks...
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Current Events 12: The Tree's Testimony
April 11, 2019
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In the synagogue courtyard stands a monument to the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. It acknowledges Wallenberg's courageous efforts to enable Jews to survive the Nazi occupation while he was the Swedish consul in Hungary. The courtyard is named Wallenberg Memorial Park. In it there are tributes to other heroic non-Jews, designated Righteous Amon...
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Current Events 11: Cries from the Stones
April 04, 2019
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The most unusual feature of the Dohany was not the pipe organ nor the cathedral-like construction, but its graveyard. Synagogues, unlike churches, do not have cemeteries adjacent to them. Nor are the illustrious dead buried under the floor, as in a cathedral. The explanation for the Dohany's cemetery begins with a doleful roll of statistics. The Na...
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