time is relative, anyway

my husband and i have been on time for church TWICE this week. by "on time" i mean "the readings hadn't started yet." this is due to our geographical setting: the church is outside our bedroom window and it rings the bells 15 minutes before a service starts.

for those of you who don't know us very well, fifteen minutes is almost exactly the amount of time we need to, for example, walk next door. the bells start ringing as i'm sitting on the edge of the bed, wondering if my favorite socks are clean (the eggplant-colored ones from mama t-tine), thinking about which earrings i should wear today, pondering whether or not i should bring my big camera when we walk from mexico to canada, frowning over my split ends, asking my husband if he wants to go ride bikes, and wondering why france is so far away. then the clanging of the church bells remind me that it's sunday, and i'm going to mass, and mass is in 15 minutes. i think we'll always have to live next to a church.

we didn't do so well last night, however, when going to an 8 pm concert (we were supposed to collect our tickets at 7:30) that was a 45-minute walk from here. we left at 7:20, picked up some gyros on the way, stopped at an ATM, backtracked 1 1/2 blocks to see if we could figure out the metro, discovered that the metro is closed on friday and saturday nights for reconstruction, then walked the 45 minutes. by the way, we found the ultimate indigestion recipe: eat a large gyro with extra pickled cabbage, then power walk for 45 minutes. mmm, can't beat it.

needless to say, both 7:30 and 8pm were long gone by the time we huffed and puffed our way up to matthias templon, at the top of the hills of buda. it is a truly gorgeous church, with a spectacular view of the danube and all of pest. we had long ago resigned ourselves to missing the concert, but the woman at the door surprisingly said we could still buy tickets... for nearly half the original cost! so we heard [most of] a beautiful performance of mozart's requiem, in the wildly and colorfully painted szent matthias templon (the original frescoes were whitewashed by invading turks), for less than $25!

afterwards, we munched on some dirty baklava (purchased earlier at the gyro stand, then dropped on the cobblestones--hey, 5 second rule!) and wandered around the church grounds, taking pictures. there is a large statue of king/saint istvan (stephen), who apparently bequeathed the country to the virgin mary, for lack of another heir. the statue of mary behind the altar has a real crown... we wondered if it was really the king's crown. the remains of another king, king bela, and his wife are contained in the church, although when their bodies were discovered in the 17th century their jewelry was stripped and taken to the hungarian national museum. there are various other altars around the church, dedicated to the many royal hungarian saints.

our walk home was just as hurried, due to the frigid weather! we stopped halfway for some much-needed hot chocolate (forro csokolade) and mulled wine (forralt bor), and watched some 25 spanish (?) tourists in the street try to cram into 4 taxis (they succeeded, somehow), and admired the smoke-rings the other patrons were blowing. then we were back out into the cold, to pick our way around endless dog-droppings (what is UP with that??) to our warm zen-loft.