Sun, strudels, and ... snouts?

Today began with an irregular sight: blue skies!!! From then on we knew it would be a good day because sunny, clear weather is hard to come by in Budapest. We started our day with language class in the morning. We learned navigation vocabulary and tested our skill by guiding other students around the classroom. Now we can ask for directions when we get lost, which does happen (we know from experience). We always manage to find our way by stumbling through conversations in less than perfect Hungarian. In those conversations we use a lot of hand gestures, which helps to make our Hungarian understandable. But now we have new knowledge that will help us use less hand gestures and more speech, hurray!
After language class, we made our way to the Strudel House. Lucky for us a lot of Hiungarian culture focuses on food (really good food if you skip the brains and liver). Get ready to be hungary (pun definitely intended)! The menu was a strudel-filled three-course meal, surprisingly not just desert strudel. First there was delicious chicken filled strudel with a paprika sauce followed by strudel filled with mashed potatoes served with duck. To top it all off, we had two dessert strudels; one had cottage cheese and lemon, and the other was filled with apple and cinnomon. Finom!
In typical European fashion the meal had a slow pace (cutting down on our Number Theory time, sad). In between courses, we saw a somewhat cheesy, but all the more entertaining, film about the history of Hungarian strudel. Something we should all know about strudel is that "strudel is a conquerer like Alexander the Great, and it has reigned longer." The film explained the secret behind the dough: the all important gluten. The dough must be stretched to cover a table top about 1 meter by 1.5 meters (we are in Europe so you must suffer the metric system too); the high gluten content in the flour makes the dough stretchy. Stretching the dough is one thing, but it must be stretched AND thin (thin enough to read a piece of paper underneath). This takes practice and is harder than it looks, as we soon found out.


One of the chefs demonstrated stretching the dough. He magically flipped the dough in the air and pulled it over the whole table without a single tiny hole. We then had our chance to try. Our first attempt became more of a donut shape, so we had a second try. Professor Garrett found her second calling (or a new summer job) as she demonstrated her skills at flipping the dough. Our second try ended in success, with only a few tiny holes.











From the Strudel House, our guide Carolyn (who set up the Strudel House adventure, Thank you!) took us to the market. The market is a three story building filled with vendors of souvenirs, prepared food, fruit, meats, and almost anything you could think of. Carolyn gave us a guided tour of the market, explaining some Hungarian specialty foods, common ingredients, and some oddities of the food culture. We found pig snouts, duck livers, barrels of sauerkraut, and tons of paprika. The market is unlike anything we have seen in the US.










We ended the day with a little Number Theory and the typical homework and supper. Overall the day was exciting and filled with new experiences. Of course any day with 4 different kinds of strudel is a good day!