Fulbright Friday #4

This Fulbright Friday actually started for me on Thursday. Annamaria invited Brittany and I to see Tchaikovsky's Onegin at the Budapest Opera House. This was the first ballet I can remember going to and I have to say that any other ballets in my future will have a hard time measuring up! I have seen the Opera House from the outside and have been inside the main lobby, but this was my first time into the stage area and it was incredibly beautiful. The ballet itself was also beautiful; the dancers were fantastic and the sets were wonderful. All in all, it was a really great experience!

 Ceiling of Budapest Opera House

 The Opera House is a stunning building

 Curtain call of the ballet

On the actual Fulbright Friday, we went to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. The Academy of Sciences is actually a big library that has a great collection of old and rare books. During the tour, we got to see some of their very special collection. The first special collection we got to see was the Oriental collection which had books from ancient Asia and Tibet. Most of the books were handwritten because they were made before engraving and printing were options. The drawings in these books were incredible. We couldn't handle these books because they were too fragile, but being able to be around them was pretty special.

 

After the Oriental Collection, we went to another room where more one of a kind books were on display. In this room we got to see a text from the 2nd century Rome that was written on an actual piece of wood. It was some sort of trade agreement between merchants, but not enough of the original wood fragment remained to tell exactly what it was about.

Another text that was really special was a page of the Gutenberg Bible. The person who owned this copy of the Bible bought it for $50,000 and then took it apart page by page and sold each of them for $50. The Academy only had 1 page, but we could handle it and touch it which was pretty amazing.

 
 In the midst of all these ancient and very special texts, the newest one we saw really caught my attention. It was a post card from the mid-1900's, written on birch bark. This text was so impactful to me because it was written by someone in the Soviet Gulag to his family. The inmates in the Gulag had no paper so they had to use what they could to communicate home. The text is also in Russian because the inmates were forced to write in Russian so the guards could read their letters to ensure they weren't sending secrets home.

After we had the tour of the Academy we got to eat lunch in the restaurant, The Academy Club. This restaurant is ultra-exclusive. You have to be a member of the Academy to eat there. Lunch was amazing: a 4-course meal, different wines with every course, exceptional service. It was definitely the nicest restaurant I have ever been to. The inside of the restaurant itself was also gorgeous and there were big windows looking out over the Danube, the Chain Bridge, and Buda Castle so the view was great.