Good luck with it.

Impressed that you can read a map upside-down in a mirror. I can’t even read one the right way up most of the time…

Did you not intimate an interest in learning Hungarian? Was it someone else with the beard? Did you not try and persuade young Conrad to stick to his guns?

I admit only to realise that I enter a language environment in which I will never swim. “In the beginning was the word….” mmm…. you see I am a visual type… mildly dyslexic… and probably see things quite differently. I can read a map upside down in a mirror and still miss the other cars in the car park. I can now communicate with others with a spell checker! No-no, no chip, but where did I get a picture of you with a beard learning Hungarian? Damned if I can find it now. But you did comment on Mr. Conrad’s blog.

Hope this adds a little lighter note and some light on it all. I had spotted your visit to my web site, thank you. I shall visit here again if I may, but I will keep my head down on the map!

Robert, my apologies. There were indications within your comment that suggested to me that it was a computer-generated response to my post but, after having looked at your webpage on artikuk.com (and after having spoken with another online friend of mine), I have come to the conclusion that it was not.

Hungarian is, indeed, a curious language. As to whether it is a challenging language to learn, I suppose that depends upon which language(s) you are coming from! One of the reasons that it is a curious language in its own right is because, unlike most other languages, it inhabits a language family all of its own. The broader language family, Ugaric, includes languages like Estonian and Finnish as well, but the various branches that connect Hungarian to this category are populated by Hungarian alone. Did your daughter pick the language up in the year that she was there?

Afraid that I cannot help you regarding scultpors in Australia. I enjoyed browsing through your contributions on artituk.com, but am not familiar with the work of anyone local to myself. Good luck with finding what you are looking for!

As for the (fading) romanticism of Israeli street names, I think that people may have just come to realise that you cannot recreate ancient Israel – and probably wouldn’t want to even if you could. Even so it is not necessarily unlikely that, in two thousand years from now, religious people will be ritualistically eating falafel, fasting on Yom Kippur for the “October War”, and rocking piously to Infected Mushroom; they will name their streets after Menachem Begin and their buildings after Dana International, and everyone will pray for a return of the old days when there was a Knesset in Jerusalem.

That’s kind of romantic too, no?

Your comments on self doubt caught me.

My daughter spent her “gap year” in Hungary, challenging language to learn!

Forgive me for asking but it is difficult to find references to Australian sculptors and sample pictures of their works. My e-friend Chris Miller has little to show for “Down Under” on his website find here. A pity I think.

http://www.ilovefiguresculpture.com/masters/masters20.html