It was a very foggy six am this morning, so thick, in fact, that we couldn’t even see across the river to Buda.  Even as I sit here now  at nearly 9am at my desk facing the river and the water tower on Margit Island, I can’t see the steady-moving river.  Probably by eleven, the sun will burn most of it away.

Despite the humidity, it was such a peaceful run today.  It had that quality of dream-running, which every runner knows by sensation rather than the visual details.  The heart is pounding, legs moving, lungs expanding and contracting, and yet somehow the view is blurred by the pale sheet of dreaming.  Like mist.  Or, like this morning’s fog.

And because it is Friday we decided to take a different route home, in order to swing by the bakery to get a few fresh kiflis (simple crescent bread with salt on top).  And I don’t know if it was the the different route through old 13th district, or whether is was because of the fog, but I saw so many new things I had never seen before.

Street signs, old cafes just turning on their lights and preparing their pastries, vegetable stands where owners with their 4am hair lightly water and sweep the stoops.  And on Visegrádi utca this strange little inlaid statue of a saint pouring water onto a burning building.  It looks like it says Saint Flora, but she is the patron saint of the abandoned, converts, single laywomen and victims of betrayal.  So maybe they cut the name short or smashed it into the bottom, just out of sight.  Saint Florian, who is the patron saint of chimney sweeps and fire fighters.  The date:  1935.  And the building was built up again, perhaps damaged again during the war and other occupations, and still stands today.  It’s amazing what you notice in the fog.  Probably because your eyes are just waiting for a cleaning and then you really take in what is available to be seen.  And I know that there is an undisciplined tendency to use words like “perfect” on Fridays, but it was a good morning.

This weekend is the cheap movie weekend here–film days–film napok.  Almost all movies throughout the city are 500 forints per ticket ($2.75) regardless of the time so I think that we’re going to go.  And if the weather holds, we’re going to try to explore the pest side of the river closer to Elisabeth Bridge.  And if the weather doesn’t hold, I won’t mind it.  I’ve really enjoyed the rain in the last two days and what has been lingering in the air after it falls.