Today I went to Eger, a city of rich religious history and a wine tasting.
The city was in the northeast of Hungary.
The train took about 2 hours to get there, so I studied Chinese/slept on the train
while everyone else was sleeping. The Hungarian views are pretty nice.
Right now the cities are covered with snow. It reminds me of the time
I went to a high school in Connecticut called Kent (I went there for one year).
A lady from our language program was our tour guide and she knew a lot about
the Hungarian history and the place we went to.
She told us that Eger was a place most Hungarian children dream to visit.
On the map, it says Eger Bervaros. “Bel” means center, and “Varos” (pronounced like
“Varosh” in English) means city. So, it is a city center.
We first went to see Basilica church. It was beautiful from outside
, but unfortunately we did not get to see the inside.
Then we visited a university there. I couldn’t believe
it is a university. It looks more like a palace to me (see the pictures attached).
The university was built by an order of an archbishop.
The place got destroyed by the Calvins, the Turkish
in religious wars and other wars. I would really like to read more about
this before I would say anything about Hungarian history.
The underground was great too. In the past, the wines were kept there.
But due to moistures and other safety reasons (which I don’t know of),
they removed all the wines. So we only saw the bottles and
other artifacts.
During lunch at 2 pm, we had a wonderful 3-course Hungarian meal
at Ettérem.
The tables were long and the room looked somewhat like a king room.
The first was appetizer (fruit soup—yes, fruit soup, not fruit sauce).
The second was meat and pickles. And the third was dessert.
The waiters were asked to introduce themselves, and
they said they were interning there before going to a school of culinary.
It was a paid job of about $300 per month.
I opted to go to the modern art gallery instead of the castle due to the time limit.
The art gallery was amazing. This month the gallery is officially open yet, but we had some privilege to get in there. Artist Kepes was a Hungarian origin who was
invited to teach at UChicago and MIT. He used many interesting photo techniques,
one of which is to use magnet as an element in the picture in a dark room.
Many visual art techniques such as projecting lights on a bunch of sticks to illustrate aliasing effects (my flatmate Christ says so).
Finally, we went to a wine tasting place.
I usually don’t drink wine, but this time it was just a tasting.
We tried five different kinds of wines, starting with white wine.
They also had a competition where they poured wine into someone’s mouth
and he or she would try to continuously drink from that as long as possible.
Our Slovak friend got about 40 seconds (by counting, so it might not be accurate).
But someone beat him. The winners got some wines as prizes. I weren’t brave enough
to try this.
Then the trip back was pretty peaceful. Good day!
tummykung 