Sometimes, you just have to admire who you are in this particular moment.

Today was a particularly long day at the language school. Friday, the first Friday this semester, feeling completely done and ready to rest my brain yet knowing that it wasn't even math that we were doing yet, and it was also only a three day week - and it was hot, I was tired, etc. It was a long day. And after that, I came home and went for a run and then made myself some dinner.


As I ate dinner, I wasn't thinking about anything else - I was absorbed in the moment and all of a sudden (about thirty seconds ago) I realized I was sitting, still sweaty from my run, cross-legged on a tiny kitchen stool at my tiny kitchen table in my tiny apartment in freaking Budapest, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on my laptop and gesturing wildly with a peanut butter jar in one hand and a spoon in the other and giggling at Picard trying to flirt with someone on the show. And mid giggle, I froze - every now and then, you just have moments where you are out of yourself, looking down on what it is you are doing and they can happen quite suddenly, as this one did to me. But it made me smile.

I also wanted to take this chance to give you a taste of Hungarian, because it has some very interesting aspects, different from almost all other languages. Take for example the word "táska", or bag, pronounced "tash-ka", with 's' pronounced as 'sh', the first 'á' sounding like the 'a' in 'apple', the second like the 'a' in 'ball' (now you know what the accent is for!). Hungarian, our teacher told us on the first day, is a language without prepositions. I didn't believe him. Frequently, subjects aren't used in sentences either, since the subject is obvious given the verb form, but that's a different story. Back to the good ol' táska.

So, if you want to say that something is "in a bag", you add a 'ban' to the end of the word. (Actually, whether you add 'ben' or 'ban' to a word to indicate 'in' depends on something called vowel harmony, but I won't go in to that here). And, well, we have to change the second 'a' to an 'á' but don't worry - so, in a bag is: táskában. What about in MY bag? Well, we insert an 'm' just after the original word for bag, resulting in: táskámban. Pretty groovy, no?

You do this with most prepositions. For example, if I'm talking with my sister Rachel, I'm talking 'Rachelval' ("Én beszélek Rachelval"), 'val' being 'with'.  Living in ('on', technically) Budapest is 'Budapesten' ("én Budapesten élek"), whereas a book about Budapest is a book 'Budapeströl' - ("egy könyv Budapeströl"). :) Pretty neat stuff. Of course, in a crash course, you never coast, never feel like you are on top of things, because the next lesson has started already. Still, it's fun to look back three days ago on when I knew none of this. That makes it seem like a lot of progress!