I am in Budapest visiting the IAS of a university. it is funny how many books and shows that I am/was reading/watching have recently and unexpectedly referenced the history of Budapest during the holocaust.. or just the city as today. Russian Doll; Boris on youTube; Sheila Heti's 'Motherhood'; and what I picked up to read on my phone's Kindle today (hubby's account), a book about Kurt Godel.. in fact the last one hit home even more intimately ... I had just received (as I woke up this morning) a rejection for a short paper close to my heart from yet another journal, and the book started with reproducing Godel's psychiatrist's notes about him: "Belief that he hasn't achieved goals that he set out for himself - hence a "failure" - therefore other people, particularly the Institute (Princeton IAS), will also regard him as a failure and try to get rid of him. ... Took on big subjects, may not have been talented enough. - Usually works on his own, in way and fields that are opposed to current stream. ... Listed the various distractions that have interfered w/his progress w/his philosophical work. ..." I was sitting in the office of the National DG of Aliens Policing then and unprepared for a long wait, this was all I had. by the way, the office felt so like the DMVs of the USA, but less crowded and much more European if you know what that means. incidentally, Doha airport felt very American on my recent layover; efficient, clean, with a lot of the ground force of African origin. In the Buda office of Aliens policing I then spent some time looking at maps and reading Wikipedia about the Habsburg empire and the names of the major cities and what they are called now; for eg. Lemberg seems now to be Lviv in Ukraine. Sheila Heti on the other hand moved me by writing about her mother's and father's parents' history in Budapest, and of her mother later in Canada: "When I was five years old, my father and I went to visit her in the apartment where she was living for several months, so she could focus on studying for her exams. There seemed to be nothing so glamorous or romantic in the world as a mother who lived alone in an apartment with her colored pends and books. I wanted to grow up and be like her. I wanted to live in an apartment, too, with no one around to bother me.", and of course the reason why I bought her book in the first place: her questioning, similar but much deeper than mine, of the reasons to become a mother, of the need to do so or not... incidentally also, I am staying in an Airbnb apartment in Pest, in one of those old buildings all stuck together with courtyards in between that house many people with space used very efficiently ("most Hungarians homes are small" a man said to a small boy walking with him a couple days ago behind me on some street here, as he explained to him possibly the difference between Hungary and whichever European country the boy, possibly his nephew, was visiting from) - mine has a loft bed right above my living space - with no one to bother me and so I can work on a new proposal and on old rejected papers, undistracted by anyone, thanks to this visiting grant. also I have always been struck by what Virginia Woolf said and wrote about women and their need of "A room of one's own" which they often didn't have and without which it was difficult if not impossible to tap into their talents... the day I came in, the cleaners were still cleaning out this place, there were no bed linen or towels and the ones used by the previous renters were running in the washer in the bath, my phone and computer plugs wouldn't go into the electric outlets in the walls (European plugs look like Indian ones but have thinner metal pins and smaller plugs and the last times I visited Europe was from the USA where the plugs are different... I got fooled into thinking I didn't need converters this time), there was no shampoo and bath products, ... such that I spent hours hunting around the mall near this place looking for various things and feeling utterly lost. luckily I was carrying my old computer which has an american plug and I realized the small jugaad converter I carried for it works for all my plugs, but this only after I stopped a random desi-looking guy outside the mall to ask him for where I could get an India-Eu converter and he lit a bulb in my mind by saying "there are these Chinese shops..."!!! now after finally having also bought a stove lighter (the apartment has an old stove w/o an auto-lighter that seems like no one has used in a while cos there was no lighter around), which was hard to find as the shops around only seem to carry the portable gas-lighters for the numerous smokers in this city, this apartment is finally feeling like a room of my own. the trams are similar to Jerusalem, you buy tickets and punch them inside the train, but even if you didn't no one is checking, and most locals seem to be traveling with something either more permanent that doesn't need to be brought out at all or without it.. another university I ran into yday, in search of a large park where I could run, felt similar to my university where I got my PhD from, simply in the combination of vast space modern architecture and young people rambling around the campus... (the university where I am visiting is in contrast, a smaller campus, more in the center of town, where you don't see hoards of students milling around). on my way running back, a bus-driver waved to me (or so I thought) and I waved back (felt very American), and then after about 5 minutes of driving along with me or a little faster than me, he stopped at a bus stop and clapped looking at me supposedly to say I made it (catch the bus); I felt like I had misled him but just smiled and ran past; not many people running around (a few near the Danube in the mornings and more inside the modern university campus), but they do seem to walk a lot, and faster than me, which is not usual in most places.