Collision Course

(I’ve been so bad at updating this blog recently, but now that things have calmed down for a bit, I should have time to update it a bit more frequently.)

I’m in Budapest this week. My dad works here, and usually spends a couple of days here each month. When his visits overlap with my breaks from school, I tend to head out with him. Being here gives me the opportunity to study somewhere different, and the cafés in Budapest are certainly unlike anything we have in Ireland:

That’s one of the first things that strikes me about being in Budapest: there are so many gorgeous buildings on the street here. They’re the kind that, were they in Ireland, we’d make them into museums or art galleries and plaster signs pointing to them up everywhere, encouraging tourists. Here, such gorgeous ornate buildings are so common that they’re cafés, bookstores, or shopping centers.

When I arrived, I was pleased to see that there was still snow in Budapest. There was practically none in Ireland this winter, so I enjoyed going for walks along the Danube, taking in the scenery:

Recently Read:. Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. I read it about five years ago, but I wanted to re-read it since I have a better understanding of dystopia, security and cryptography this time. I quite liked the book; Doctorow’s style of writing is plain and unassuming, and his brand of dystopia is utterly believable. I read The Hunger Games last year and sort of liked it. Dystopian fantasy is a wonderful genre for writers, in terms of the freedoms it affords and the fun you can have creating the worlds, but I found Collins’s characters both boring and unlikable. Doctorow’s characters are far from perfect, but I much preferred them. If you liked The Hunger Games, I’d be fairly certain you’d like Little Brother.