Yesterday the current inhabitants of my flat (me, Zaubi, and ) were having a discussion on chickens and what color eggs they lay. Do brown chickens lay brown eggs, and white chickens white eggs? What about black chickens then? 

So this morning I wake up and mrtee has sent me a couple links on chicken egg production. here’s a gem from http://www.ces.purdue.edu/extmedia/AS/AS-518.pdf. 

 So I took almost a month off from the blasted terry cat, I was so depressed after the initial embroidery disaster.

But then I picked all the horrible embroidery out of the back of his head, and after much pondering and trembling, basted a rough nose/mouth/eyes onto the FRONT of his head: just basted with a few threads so that I could study the general effect.

After redoing it a couple times I got some basting I was generally happy with, and then tried to embroider over the basting, with the thick embroidery thread. 

DAMN what an effort. It still kinda sucks, but it approximately 2000% better than the original attempt. I still do not know how to embroider, how to use thread to fill in all the space (e.g. on his nose). But the mouth and eyes are okay even if the nose is sucking, and there is NO WAY I am picking the dratted thing out again. 

Now the final problem I have is to stitch the head to the body. The instructions say to close the hole in the head, and close the hole in the body, and then stitch the head to the body, but how am I supposed to do that?? There is not enough fabric, and if both holes are closed, how do I stitch it? it won’t be overlapping or anything. This cat is going to have no neck. Besides, I don’t know how to sew in a circle like that.

Gah. What possessed me to try to do this??

Budapest was interesting. I didn’t like it, actually. The architecture was beautiful, but it seemed to me like a city living a bit of a lie. Just how all the tourist places were so done up and made to look all nice, but as soon as you went a little ways out, it became a barren dirty crumbled graffitie’d wasteland.

Zaubi and I really make terrible tourists. We don’t do museums, don’t really like sightseeing, don’t like all the normal stuff that is recommended for tourists — instead, somehow, incomprehensibly, we always end up in the middle of nowhere walking for miles and miles and miles to the middle of nowhere else. When I go to a new place, I like to explore it as if I were going to be living there, and judge it thus. What do the non tourist people eat and how much does it cost? Where are the parks and the walking places? How is the public transit? I’m really not interested in going to the most attractive buildings/churches/museums/shops/etc and staring at 10000 other people taking pictures. 

So I guess you’d say Budapest failed me in my city-assessment. It was just too much of a skew, between the tourist places and the normal places. The sun was unpleasant too: and this is even compared to the sun in Brisbane, which is extremely strong and damaging. But somehow the sun there had this peculiar kind of glaring brassy harshness that never seemed to get more comfortable no matter what time of day it was. It was always at exactly the wrong angle. 

Still, it was a very enjoyable trip, our hotel was really excellent — the Charles Hotel on the Buda side — and the folks were extremely hospitable. We did go to one of the baths — the Gellert — and that was very neat. I was really eager to do that just because it seems like it would be at least a faint shadow of how bathhouses were back in the days of the Romans. And I find the Romans so fascinating.

I sadly did not go in any of the saunas or steam rooms (don’t want to addle the kid’s brains with overheating!) but there were plenty of cool and warm pools to jump into. The main outdoor swimming pool was a wave pool, and that was neat! Wave pools = awesome! And the main indoor pool had funny bubbles of water in it– what did they call it – effervescent. There was a thermal pool for mixed gender but that one was too full of people & chlorinated. The other pools, that were segregated by sex, were much nicer and very relaxing. And besides I didn’t feel as weird walking around with my bizarre pregnant stomach sticking out, in the women’s area.

We also went to a day spa thing and got a massage. That is, I signed up for a expectant mother massage, and Zaubi got a back massage — his first ever professional massage — so he wouldn’t be bored simultaneously! it was actually very nice. Included in the price was the use of their little tea house thing which was a quiet, pleasant place of low lighting and plushy sofas surrounded by gauzy curtains, and you could lounge around in your fluffy bathrobe and drink herbal tea and eat fruit and cookies for as long as you wanted before and after the massage. And they had one of those neat light-therapy saunas, and I admit I did go into that one for a little while.  

I saw a Segway tour there. I never saw one before, anywhere. SO RIDICULOUS LOOKING. I was embarrassed for them, honestly!

We did go see the Memento Park outdoor museum thing to look at Stalin’s boots and be amused by the pseudo-Communist paraphernalia. And took the cute little funicular up to Buda Castle — didn’t spend long there, though, as that was our last morning and I for one was totally exhausted. And to think I used to be so good at walking! There were other things I would have liked to do but there simply wasn’t time…

Anyway, it was altogether an enjoyable experience, though I was saddened by the skew, as I said, between tourist Budapest and other Budapest. Obviously, all cities make their tourist areas as swanky-pretty as possible, but I really felt the difference more than usual here. I know it is still a city recovering from the era of Communism — and I am at this point spoiled by the (some would say excessive) cleanliness of Zürich — ah well!