Getting crafty with jazz

My favourite thing is to stumble upon things quite by chance: serendipity is a wondrous thing. I left work happy to have got through the week, and looking forward to a well-earned weekend. Walking out with two of the girls in my team, we headed off talking about weekend plans. At the crucial point I had to decide which way to get home, and decided to go with Dia towards the metro. Changing at Deak Ferenc I managed to walk to the wrong line, decided to take it and use an alternative route, but ended up going in the wrong direction. Oh well I thought, why not take a look at the Danube in the dusk light.

I climbed the steps out of the station, and was pleasantly surprised to find I'd accidentally arrived at a little Spring festival. It was just like the commericalised, standardised 'fair', with little wooden huts, and 'crafts', that you find all over Europe now, but extremely pleasant nonetheless. There was a stage with folk music, and the traditional dancing, where the men slap their thighs. Oddly Hungarian folk dancing is almost entirely about the male dancers, who just twirl the girl under their arm, before going back for a good thigh slap. The stalls were very cute, but I didn't buy anything, because it was all quite expensive. I meandered towards the river, and gently strolled back to where I could get a bus, past the very pretty, and grand Belvarosi Plebania church.

Sally and I headed to a little jazz cafe off Blaha Lujza in the evening, called Jelen. There wasn't anything live music that night, but we got in some cheap wine, and enjoyed some very edible grub. Again I marvelled at the tremendous amount of space in Budapest bars, a far cry from the tight, crowded ones you find everywhere in London. Tim and Lovisa joined us, and I decided to show them my flat, which has hardly had any guests so far. Sally serenaded us on my piano, which is even more out of tune than I'd realised. Hopefully she's going to find someone to tune it, on the proviso I allow her to practice here. It's a pretty fair deal. How often can you get a concert pianist to play in your flat for free?