We arrive yesterday morning, amid the sleep deprivation that goes with a mildly bumpy trans-Atlantic crossing, and made through customs and immigration with remarkable ease. No forms, a glance at my passport, nothing to declare at customs and noone interested in asking me to declare anything. I guess former Communist bureaucracies minimize paperwork on the other side.
The tour guide is Austrian, so I guess she will be with us for a while. She recognized that we would
be hungry (in Hungarian) and took us to a nice restaurant where I have a beer and a bowl of hen soup with peas that was quite good. Sat with a bunch of Worcester people- names remain problematic for me. Joe (tenor and nurse at UMass ER), Kathy from Texas who lives in RI to be near her grandkid, Jean (I think) who is a speech pathologist from Northbridge who works at Balmer School. We spoke of old Northbridge gossip. Mrs. Rossetti is still the principle there and is as she ever was. Lunch went on for a while, but eventually we walked back to the bus and headed for the hotel. On the way, we got a little briefing about the city, culture and surroundings. I also heard about pickpockets, and how it was the 
Gypsies who were responsible- amazing how quickly racism crops up in hard times. Why did they have to add a “cause” to a complex problem with many causes? Slippery slope from there to the camps….Apparently Budapest still has a thriving Jewish community. Will have to figure out how that happened, if I can get on the internet.
All 120 of us arrived at the hotel at the same time, making for a bit of a congestion problem. The hotal is a large round cylinder in a
“suburban” district of the city; my room (I splurged on a single) is typical Eastern European hotel room, with double beds and the blanket stuffed in a sheet thing that they loved so well. I’m on the first floor, which is convenient- I can walk up and down the stairs. Unpacked and showered felt better. I went to rehearsal.We crammed into a room, all 120 of us. Andy was sorting us out according to Dr. Page’s seating chart. We sang Part’s 1 and III, with Dr. Page refining us using many of the same techniques that he had used in Worcester. He focused on timbre, inflection and tone quality, and seemed very pleased that he didn’t need to work on notes. Towards the end, we were beginning to sound like a choir. I was sitting next to a guy from San Francisco who works at the Berkeley National Laboratory as an administrator and sings with the San Francsico Symphony. Met others from Lincoln
Nebraska and Knoxville TN. Quite a group, the Robert Page Festival Singers. It is really a privilege to work with them.After rehearsal, I tried to go for a walk with some of my fellow singers. Their idea of a walk, however, was much shorter than mine, so I lit off on my own, walking through the park adjacent to the hotel. We are on the Buda (hilly) side of the city, about 3 klicks from the river, but even with the hills, the terrain was not strenuous. Temperature was in the 30s (read 90s), at 6 PM, and the park was hopping with cyclists, basketball players, soccer games in walled urban rinks and wanderers. Passed a crowded ice cream store, a number of restaurants, and a few shops. Mixture of elegance and decay, but this section of town did not exude the charm of Prague; felt more like the faded decadence of Vienna. But who am I to complain? I am wandering around Budapest, for God’s sake. I found a bicycle shop, that doesn’t rent bike. They directed me to a shop down by the river that does. I’ll head over there later.
Dinner was buffet at the hotel- good, not special. I sat with Randy and Clair, and a couple from Lincoln Nebraska, and, at 8:30, headed to bed, exhausted enough to sleep for 8 hours before getting up to write this. Not sure if I will write so much each day. The hotel internet wouldn’t let me in earlier, so this may be posted from an internet café I spotted in my travels. Sun is up. I should be up and doing.
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