Spent most of the day exploring Budapest. The city is beautiful, with wide avenues and some striking architecture. It bestrides the Danube River and has an efficient and cheap public transportation system (I used a combination of subway trains and trams to get around). It feels a lot like Prague in some ways.
All winter long, the girls on my squash team tried to get me interested in watching this season's breakout hit TV show, Glee. I fended them off, but the last week or so I've slowly been digesting the first season of this series and it's one of those slightly addictive guilty pleasures. It's easy to work my way through a television series on the iPad while killing time in airports, on a flight or train ride, or in my hotel room before bedtime.
I finished a surprisingly good novel today: It's Superman. The book takes as its premise the hero's original appearances in the late 1930s as a champion of the oppressed without the expanded powers and complex mythology that grew around the figure in the decades that followed. The novel reworks the backstories of Lois Lane and Lex Luthor with a hefy dose of gritty realism. Tom De Haven clearly did his homework in capturing the feel of New York City and the midwest in the middle of the Great Depression. (Maybe he did a little too much research, as at times his frequent allusions to historical events and contemporary films and music as well as popular consumer products of the day was a little excessive. No need to show off so much!) An enjoyable read.
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