Day 84/85/86/87/88: Food, Fun, Friends, and a Sprinkle of Work In Between

Last Thursday, I decided to escape the apartment and seek somewhere quiet to do work. So I went to my favorite place in Budapest. I took more pictures for you all to see how beautiful it is there! These still don't do it justice, but I hope that you can understand why I love this park so much.

There was a gently curving row of picnic tables, and I chose one to settle down at. This was the view I had every time I looked up from my work:

It was wonderful. Oh, and look! Representation theory!

It got dark within an hour, though, and I had to seek another location to do work. I remembered that I ran by a cute-looking cafe several weeks back and decided to check it out. I'm definitely glad I did. It was this place called "Antique Cafe" and is located almost directly across from Hero's Square, which means that the view is absolutely stunning. I settled myself at a small table surrounded by mini armchairs and chose the seat that gave me a perfect view of the window and the beautiful frame of Budapest beyond it. I had tea and worked and every time I looked up, the light outside had changed, and the sky changed from dim blue to a dark periwinkle, and Hero's Square went from moonlit to being completely illuminated by the lights in the monument. I didn't get a picture of it, but this one that I found off a simple Google Image search seems to capture the sight I saw:

[Credit: http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/5th_enlargement/picture_gallery/hungary_en.htm]

I was there for several hours, and after I finished my fruit tea...

... and also the delicious black forest cherry cake I ordered (which was not overly sweet like most American renditions, and was that perfect balance between fluffiness and moistness and melt-in-your-mouth-ness)...

... I had done exactly one problem, which is pretty exciting for me, particularly when it comes to solving problems in Isaacs' character theory book. I am definitely going to go there in the future to do work. I didn't take any pictures of the interior, but let me describe it for you: It's a prim-and-proper sort of place, and the decor is in a sort of fancy-retro style. The walls have these huge vertical stripes of brown and off-white and the ceiling is fantastically high. The man sitting across from me was dressed in a v-neck gray sweater underneath which was a collared white shirt with a tie pulled tight around his neck. He got up, and his pants were slim and tapered down each leg and his shoes were those fancy semi-high-heel types. I watched people come and go for the few hours I was there, and in general, they all appeared to be wealthy, stylish city-goers. But anyway. I really like this place. It's clean and pretty and I love the view. Also, the cake is delicious.

Friday night was an epic night of cooking, cooking, and more cooking. We had some friends over and decided to have a humongous dinner. On the menu: bacon-chicken cream something, vegetables, vegetable soup, rice. I guess that sounds a lot less impressive than I had expected, but it really did feel pretty epic. For instance, this was taken during the food preparation:

We used every pot in the house, so I made rice in a frying pan, and it was an absolutely phenomenally mountainous amount of rice. Literally.

Anyway, eventually, after three peoples' combined efforts to put together a meal for 7 (or 8?), it was dinner time. Here are some people excited to dig into dinner:

Eva made this dish with bell peppers, chicken, bacon, and cream, and it was fantastic.

Here's a glimpse of some of the food.

Later that night, a couple of our friends decided that tonight was the night to make truffles. I had fallen asleep (I didn't get much sleep the night before and it was already 10:30, which is nearing my bedtime), and when I woke up, I was offered these delicious chocolates! They were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.

That night, because of my two-hour nap from 10:30 pm to 12:30 am, the (albeit small amount of) caffeine in the four truffles I ate, my refusal to go to sleep until I had studied a sufficient amount of representation theory, and my two-hour (failed) battle to slaughter a mosquito that had bitten me several times, I ended up staying up all the way through the night. And then the sun rose. And it was absolutely gorgeous. I had just enough energy to take one photo (that doesn't capture the beauty of sunrise at all) and then collapse into bed.

It was 7 am when I went to bed, and when I woke up at 11 am, unable to sleep any longer, I realized that it was an absolutely terrible idea. My Saturday was thoroughly unproductive. And then my Sunday was too. And I couldn't even use my usual free Monday to get my work done because I had two make-up classes. I was in a terrible mood for most of the weekend, and I attribute it to my lack of productivity. Is it bad if I measure my self-worth based on how much work I get done?

So yesterday, I tried to get a lot done, and today, I've been trying to get a lot done, and I think for the rest of this week, I'm going to have to become a complete hermit and do work and nothing else. So no usual cooking parties with friends. No socializing. Just studying. Study, study, study.

Oh! I made fried rice today. We had a lot of rice leftover from Friday night (the night I made that mountain of rice), so I tried to use as much of it as possible. I only managed to use half of it to make fried rice that fed four people though, which sort of gives you an idea of how much rice we had sitting in our fridge. So anyway. I made chicken fried rice and a chicken-celery-and-pine-nut dish. Here's a terrible picture of them both:

Now back to studying! Goal for these next few days: algebraic number theory, representation theory, functional analysis. I probably won't get everything I want to get done, but a good friend of mine told me recently that what I should do it not say, "I want to get this and this and this done," because then I'll be terribly disappointed when I don't. Instead, I should say something along the lines of, "Today, I will try to learn as much as possible," and then call it a day. I think that's good advice. He's a smart cookie, that one. And as a last note, here's my progress in NaNoWriMo thus far: 4006. Pathetic? Yes. And will I finish? Probably not. But oh well. I'll try. If it doesn't work out, then I'll be sad the day everyone celebrates their 50,000-word victory, and then I'll remember that I'm not superhuman, that I only have 24 hours a day, that I need to sleep, and that probably, in the time I could have spent (frantically) churning out stories, I was happily learning math. Well, that's all for now! Toodles!