SUNDAY, 8.11.13
The opera ended up being a complete success! Everyone in Sarospatak showed up for the event. I do mean everyone, it’s not a very large town (there’s even been a population drop from 1980-2011, check out this map. inh/km^2 means body per square kilometer): http://www.citypopulation.de/php/hungary-borsodabaujzemplen.php?cityid=27474
I couldn’t take pictures or video during the performance, but it was a beautiful 58 degrees Fahrenheit that night. Our heat wave broke!
On Monday morning (8.12.13) at 4am, I hopped a train from Sarospatak to Budapest. “Hopped” might be the wrong word for it- I got on a train and sat there for 5 + hours. As Mr. Crosse aptly describes in Round About the Carpathians, “in Hungary it is frequently more a question of roads than of actual distance.”
I have more to post on Budapest, including an interesting encounter with both St. Stephen’s Basilica and a sloth at the Budapest Zoo, respectively. At this moment, I would just like to thank a few people for their unwavering support.
My thanks to both the “W&M Mapping our World” Internationalization Grant and the Reeves Center for their generous grants, without which I would not have been able to go on this trip. To everyone I worked with (Hungarian, Italian, American, Finnish, Romanian, Russian, and many more) thank you for making me feel welcome. My sincere thanks to Silvia Nagy for her translation, and Teresa Moyer for being a very inviting director.
Courtesy of The Crescendo Summer Institute Facebook page
Last, but certainly not least, my deepest thanks to Matthew Allar. It was an absolute pleasure to work with Matt, and I learned so much about what it means to be a designer and scenographer. I also appreciate his dedication to making sure I did not get lost at the Keleti train station on Day 1, along with a million other things.
I still have a few more blog posts in me, but for now I hope you enjoy catching up on my adventures in Hungary!