X's and O's

There wasn't much planned for today. We wanted to tour the parliament building, go tour the art galleries and of course make sure we ingested at least 1 lb of lard as recommended by the Hungarian food guide.

The parliament was beautiful:
Jess and I found the tour (all 45 minutes of it....that's a long time for us...we can knock off a museum like the Louvre in 45 minutes... Holla Emily!) a wee bit taxing. The guide really lacked the stage presence and spark that we need to keep interested. As the guide was describing the history of each of the figures on the wall I turned around to find that Jess had settled into one of the antique chairs in the room and looked like this:
At the end of the tour the guide thanked us for coming and said "Sorry if I seemed a little nervous, this is my fourth week doing this tour and my job is to do the Hungarian and Russian language tours." Pretty amazing. How many of us can even speak a second language, never mind be called upon to speak in front of a group for 45 minutes in our 3rd language at the spur of the moment. We forgave her for her lack of stage presence.

After parliament we toured the artists district and found a couple of pieces we liked at a gallery called Stereo/Gallery by an artist Pinter Gabor. The girl at the gallery told us we should visit their studio across town to see more of his work and negotiate the price.

We made our way across town and found the building of the studio. Now, when she said "studio" I visualized a "gallery". Nope. This was a working artist studio ala crack den. Having said that, it was a totally amazing space and made the experience of buying the painting that much more special. The inner courtyard of the building looked like this and the owner explained that the holes in the wall were from bullets shot from planed during the war:
We climbed up two flights of stairs to enter a large apartment type space that smelled of cigarette smoke and paint to find 3 artists working in different rooms. The artist we were interested in was off in Paris (at least that is what we were told, sounded like an artist thing to do!) We were sat on a lovely(?) sofa as the gallery owner brought out painting for us to view.
We decided on the painting directly above. We love it and think it will go great in our hallway across from the paintings we bought in Argentina at Christmas.

For lunch I had a paprika chicken dish which only had about a third of a pound of lard in it and since I had an egg white frittata in the hotel at breakfast, my heart is starting to beat properly again and I'm not quite feeling right. We are going back to Cafe Kor tonight for the fried goat cheese "salad" to get our lard quota up and to ensure that our bags aren't overweight (cough, cough), we have to plow through that bottle of champagne the hotel sent us before dinner.
We have to be up early tomorrow to catch a 9:30 am flight to Warsaw and then arrive in Krakow around noon. We are flying economy on LOT-Polish Airlines and we here they are amazing! It might be a bit of a lapse between now and our next post but we'll be sure to log on as soon as we can once we get to Poland.