We started Tuesday with a light schedule, going to the Fine Arts Museum, where we saw a great exhibit of Toulouse Lautrec prints, of which this museum has a huge collection (~400 original prints).  These are mostly lithographs, and I was really impressed at the quality of his drawings and the fact that he could suggest people's character with just a few "just so" lines.  In a way, it suggests Picasso's skill later in the last century -- Lautrec died in 1901.  We also toured the 17th century Italian masters, part of their excellent collection of similar era Dutch painters, and then walked around the area of the "Square of Heroes", where I saw a rather modern memorial to the events of 1956, and an "eternal" clock built in 2000 to celebrate Hungary's joining the EU, which is a giant hourglass embedded in a huge circular stone, with bearings under it to allow it to be turned (manually) once a year.  It's huge, so the sand takes a year to flow through.  Alas, it is already broken; so much for eternity.

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The next day we took a trip to Szombathely, near the Austrian border, to check out Mom's intuition about the likely presence of a Roman town half-way between Gorsium, a set of Roman ruins I had visited on an earlier trip with Jani, and Szombathely, which in Roman times was called Savaria. She had designed such a town as part of a MOOC she was taking on Roman architecture, and thought that location would be ideal for it.  Well, her intuition is very good, because one of the first things I saw in Szombathely was a map placing the Roman town of Mogentiana just where she expected it, though in those times it was on a road connecting Savaria with Aquincum (Buda), not Gorsium.  There is still some controversy about exactly where the town was, but the map agrees with her.  We also visited the town of Kőszeg, just on the Austrian border, which is beautiful and well preserved/reconstructed.

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Thursday we began by visiting a friend of Jani in Szentendre, with whom it turns out Jani participates in demonstrations against the current government's anti-Semitism and (as they perceive it) their general corruption.  Then we went on to Skanzen, an outdoor cultural history museum, where they have collected buildings from various regions of Hungary and have a small number of people like the ones we remember at Sturbridge or Mystic, enacting life in those times and places.  They showed a lot of agriculture, a shoemaker's shop (interesting to both Jani and me because of our shoemaking heritage – my Uncle Imre, Jani’s father, was a shoemaker, as were my dad and both my grandfathers), a dry goods store run by a Jewish entrepreneur, a windmill for grinding grain, a cloth dyer's shop, etc.  It's remarkable how much of a variety we saw among styles in different parts of a very small country. In the afternoon, Jani was busy taking Panni to a doctor's appointment, and I spent the afternoon wandering around the banks of the Duna (Danube).  In the evening, Jani and I went to a Beethoven concert (the Egmont Overture, his Violin Concerto, and the 4th Symphony) in the courtyard of the Hajduhunyadi Castle, that pretend construction in the Liget that brings together castle styles from all different eras in a single extended building.  Except for the threat of rain, it was very pleasant, and a good orchestra and soloist.  The soloist kept glancing at the sky, hoping not to get his precious violin wet; we only got a few drops.

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Friday afternoon, we went to the Industrial Museum, and saw a fascinating set of advertising prints from the 1930's, showing how Art Deco style matured and came to the service of advertising.  There was also a great exhibit of ceramics, some from the Paris exhibition of 1900, some Tiffany pieces, and some from the Zsolnay pottery factory in Hungary. They specialize in faience, as opposed to the fine porcelain of Herend.  In the evening, we went with Panni to dinner at Tomi's (Jani's son), where I played with their 10 year old son, who handily beat me at a card matching game, and their three year old son, who is a hellion, physically driven little kid.  Tomi and Ancsa look like they are doing well financially, though always worried about teetering on the edge of economic collapse as a result of geopolitics, the economic policies of the government, and Tomi's fear of losing his well-paid job.  They wonder whether they would have been smarter to leave Hungary, as some of their friends have, but they note that Hungarian savings don't go far in the more developed parts of Europe, and many who do leave wind up getting only temporary work abroad and come back.

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Saturday afternoon we spent in the University district in Budapest, visited a couple or Baroque churches, and then had dinner in a restaurant built in the ruined courtyard of a building in the old Jewish Quarter, left decrepit since then.  It's now a chic place, with many such funky restaurants, bars and cafés.

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Sunday was a nostalgia trip I had requested, to visit Polgár, my birthplace, Derecske, Apu's, and Debrecen, which is the big city in the neighborhood, where Aunt Bella and her family lived.  I managed to find our old house in Polgár, but it had been torn down, started being rebuilt, but the construction was halted half-way.  The Russian WWII memorial across the street had also been razed after the fall of Communism, but recently restored, thought less prominently sited.  In Derecske, I found the WWI memorial on which my grandfather's name appears as one of the war dead, and we wandered the neighborhood where Apu was born and lived for the first 10 years of life, though I could not remember exactly where his house had been (Mom and I were there in 1983), and most of those old houses had been torn down and rebuilt to modern standards. I spoke with an elderly lady who tried to help, but didn't know much about where our family's house might have been.  I had heard from Vera's family that the house was gone some time ago, but I would still have liked to see the site.  Debrecen is a nicely fixed up city, at least in the main squares; it's in poorer shape in the side streets. According to Jani, most investments to fix things up (including the wonderful new highways everywhere) are from the EU, because Hungary just doesn't have much money.

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Monday Jani and I set off for Eger, the town of my mother's birth, which is also where Jani was born and lived as a small child.  On the way, we drove through the Mátra mountains, which are very pretty. I had a lunch of wild boar with potatoes and wild mushrooms, we climbed up to an old castle that held out against the Turkish invasion of the 1500's for a long time, and today offers a wonderful panoramic view of the valley and small town below it.  Eger is pretty, also built around an old fort that was similarly a scene of battle against the invading Turks.  Eger eventually surrendered, but the Turkish army went no further north, having been exhausted in the battle. One of the pictures is Jani standing in front of an antique store, which is actually the location of the house where Uncle Imre, Aunt Panni and Jani lived after WWII.  I only realized the next day, talking to Panni, that this was in fact where my grandparents had lived and where my mother spent her girlhood years.  However, the house is not the original one.  It was torn down about a decade ago, but rebuilt in a very similar style, though this time with better plumbing and electric wiring in the walls.  As on many of our trips, we saw beautiful clouds in the sky as we returned to Budapest, and got a nice car-wash from an intense but brief rainstorm.

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On Tuesday morning, we wandered around Veresegyház, where Jani lives.  It's an old village, one time an agricultural place, but now a commuter suburb of Budapest, though there are still fields around town, and Jani's neighbors do keep chickens, pigs and a sheep. Jani only has a friendly old dog and a bunch of cats.  Later we visited the Roman ruins at Aquincum, which is in the "old Buda" part of Budapest, where the road to Vienna started both in Roman and modern times.  Like at most Roman ruins, the buildings were mostly demolished to re-use their stones, so only the low walls remain to show the layout of the town.  But you can see the temples, baths, and villas that probably made for a comfortable lifestyle 2000 years ago.  The museum has also rebuilt one building on its ancient foundation, though it looks fake. They have an interesting collection of broken statuary and funereal markers, and a big museum building with mosaics and everyday items recovered from the site.  We then drove out to Győr, on the road to Vienna, which is another nicely spiffed-up town, with a pedestrian district full of cafes and restaurants in the historic part of the city.  My only childhood recollection of Győr is that it is one of the places through which we tried to escape after the Hungarian revolution in 1956, but our intended guide had been detained by the security police, so we had no way to get from there to the border.  We thus spent the day as the tourists we were pretending to be, and returned to Budapest, to try again later.  The town then was a grimy industrial city, so its tourism has improved greatly.  There is still a big Audi factory there, but the belching steel mills have shut down, like they did in Pittsburgh, as Chinese labor is still cheaper than Hungarian.

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On Wednesday, we visited a Cistercian monastery in Zirc, where we were guided around by a young monk who seemed very witty and modern.  The place dates back to the middle ages, though it lay fallow during the Turkish occupation, when Christian institutions were not much in favor.  The monks who re-established it after the Turks were driven out decided that their old-fashioned church and dwellings were no long appropriate, so they used the stones to build a grand Baroque structure.  We then headed to the northern shore of Lake Balaton, the great Hungarian resort spot, where we had a nice lunch, walked around Tihany's church and another old monastery on a peninsula sticking out into the lake, with great views, and got another sudden, intense but brief storm while we were trying to sit outside at a cafe in a classy little resort town, Balatonfüred, where the jet setters of the 1920's relaxed.

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Thursday was my flight home, from which I didn't take any interesting pictures.  Overall, I had a wonderful time, except for a tragedy that happened the morning of my arrival, when the boyfriend of Jani's step-daughter Timi died suddenly, at age 32, of a cardiac arrhythmia. He had no earlier symptoms.  She was, of course, devastated, but perhaps my presence provided a bit of a welcome distraction.