Back in Pest

Not a bad place to work for an afternoon - a café above the Alexandria Bookstore on Andrassy, near the Oktogon in Pest.

So, I'm back from Germany. I can't even quite explain how good it was to be back there. Familiar town, familiar people, familiar language. I know which busses to take to get where, I could get to the university from my old apartment with my eyes closed (probably), and it was amazing how connected I felt to my surroundings when I could understand the people. I didn't realize how much I was missing that here. My Hungarian is certainly more than it was when I got here, but that's hardly remarkable. In fact, it would be a shame if anything but that were the case!  It was neat to realize (as I did a few times this weekend) how my vocabulary has been growing without my knowing it, but still - it's nothing to actually speaking the language of the country one is in.

And now, I'm sitting in this beautiful cafe, working on a presentation for tomorrow about Stochastic Calculus, Portfolio Theory, and the crazy models that my research partner/friend and I have been working on for the past -- two months? Is it that much already? Miklos mentioned this morning in Spectral Theory that we're more than halfway through the semester. I don't quite know how that happened.