Budapest. Third day in the city. The city is actually wonderful.

I come out from the indoor market in Ráckóczi ter, where customers wait their turn in patient lines, vegetables in their hands personally picked from the large crates piled in the market. The clouds seem to be giving room for disbanded sun rays filtering through (it rained all morning). Near the large brownish river the wind comes along cooler and wet, shaking the top end of the small trees. People climb up and down the yellow trams that go across the river. I enter the folk music shop, where the manager gives me to listen a quarter of hour of amazing CDs I'll end up buying. The violin virtuoso, the traditional folk band, the recent folk band, the pop-folk-experimental ensemble of the seventies, the traditional gypsy music & dance ensemble. That sort of things. Folk music must be that kind of thing on which nobody can teach Hungarians a lesson.

( On the other hand, I went to the Buda castle musem yesterday, and it consisted in a gigantic boredom of Hungarian painters of all ages, imitating European schools all the way. There I fell asleep on a soft armchair on the top floor, where the contemporary Hungarian artists are. I closed my eyes, the buzzing of the museum faded away, and I dreamed I did find a word to define the feeling of impotence and shame that takes me when I don't do things, worried to fail. Like approaching the stunning girl I kept seeing around in the museum, for instance, instead of just looking at her like an idiot. Why there isn't a definition for such a precise feeling? )

Outside. I know I said I was not interested in architecture but the streets of Budapest, or at least the old bits of it, are quite superior to anything you can see, say in Prague or in Salzburg or cities like that. The reason is that not everything is renewed here, nor too much rich and well-kept, but it is used, so the streets, despite all the cars and the shops, seem to have a soul, I mean a character. Or at least a age. Renewal of old urban architectures may be good to make money, but it is also quite depressing.

The people here seem to be proud, reserved and yet easygoing. They seem to be smart but also understanding, as if they knew all the weight of the world. I probably am not understanding anything of it all.
I love to make eye contacts with Hungarian women, although the chatting hasn't brought me anywhere so far. I talked for a while with a woman at the folk fair (buying a long silk skirt and shirt with her help. You know, the fucking presents), and for few seconds with a very young girl at the Buda castle, at night, among all the kissing of lovers. That's about all the talking I had here, it was nice and nothing remains of it.

There are actually women for any taste around, the short, the fat, the giraffe, the Diane Keaton type, the Meryl Streep type, the supermodel, the spiritual, the impossible. I don't seem to be able to think at much apart of sex these days.