Day 14 (20 June): Giant Communist Statues

Today we tried to get into a lot of sites in Budapest to no avail: the parliament was mysteriously closed, the Enthnography Museum was closed because it was a Monday, etc. We did manage to get into the Budapest Grand Market, which was interesting, but not that different than any other large indoor market hall anywhere. We also saw a church built into a cave. Later in the day we hoped on a bus to head out to the suburbs to see `Statue Park´ which was a park full of old communist statues from countries all over the East Block. Some of which were erected as late as 1989 and were enourmus in size. While it was cool it probably wasn´t worth the several bus/tram transfers it took to get out to it. What was kindof interesting though is that at the park we ran into a group of kids who had just graduated from MIT: one of them rowed their freshman year and two of them were moving to LA in the fall to start PhDs.

Economic/cultural observations of the day:
1) I saw my first non-white person in over a week today. For some reason there doesn´t seem to be much immigration of people into the countries that I´ve been in.
2) Snoop Dogg was here. I think the Hungarians should sue him for copyright infringement on their language since a number of words on their signs take the randomly placed ´z´s that he adds to words and do the same. Fo´ shizzle.

Weird sighting of the day:
One of the Headlines in the English langugage ´Budapest Business Journal´ read ´Tough Times Ahead for Richter.´ Quite ominous. Apparently ´Richter´ is also the name of Hungary´s biggest biotech company.