So it begins.

With a cup of coffee (with soy milk! I'm astounded.) on the food court terrace in Budapest Liszt Ferenc Airport. It always makes me giggle to see stores like Burger King and KFC so early in the morning -their bright colors and plastic signs seem so out of place at this time of day. The airport actually seems fairly empty - there's a fair scattering of people about, but they're quiet, subdued. I guess it still is rather early.

As predicted, the prospect of a day of travel made me all thoughtful. Somehow, everything got packed in my apartment. All the dishes got washed, the floor vacuumed, blankets folded and sheets cleaned. I seem to be leaving with almost exactly as much stuff as when I came - though a few books have traded places, new ones coming home with me and one or two staying behind.

I opted to take a taxi to the airport. The airport is about a half hour's drive from the city center where I live. Lived. By public transport (as I have done before), for me it's two stops on the bus that goes right by my front door, then about five stops on the tram on the main road to the metro station. Then, take the Metro (line 3) all the way to its end, then get on the 200E bus and take that to the end of the line at the airport. Takes about an hour, all told. Plus, with a backpack and a satchel in addition to my worn and weary pirate suitcase (to those of you who don't know, my big red suitcase has been with me on every big journey since I went to Thailand - almost seven years ago - and on its way back from one of the several trips to Germany, it lost one of its roll-y wheels. It was quite a cruel suitcase injury, it ripped it right out of the socket. It was like my suitcase had lost a tooth. And at that time, I only had about thirty-six hours at home in between trips and my mother, brilliant as ever, fashioned my suitcase a peg-leg so that it can still stand up on its own. So, it's a pirate. Thought you might need the backstory.), I decided a taxi was the way to go. In Budapest, even I am affluent enough for a taxi ride every now and then.

It was starting to snow. We zigzagged our way out of the city and to the highway as I thought about how little time I spent in cars in Hungary, or this semester at all. It's a thought that usually comes after some time in Europe - I spend plenty of time in busses, trams, trolleys and trains, but not cars. They seem like foreign little transport pods to me when I first use them again. (Speaking of foreign, my Hungarian got about as passable as one could hope for living in an extremely international city and not living with Hungarian people, nor needing to speak it on a daily basis, but it was good enough to read the little electronic sign on the cab driver's dash that said "Rottenbiller 27 to Airport, 7:30. Emily (foreigner)" That made me smile.) As we were drifting down the highway, I saw the 200E, the bus that I would normally have taken to the airport at the end of that public transport shuffle. I met the eyes of some of the people on the bus from my seat in the taxi, and decided, just for a second, to tilt my nose up just a bit and pretend to think I was better for being able to take a taxi. I saw a few eyes narrow. I wondered how many of them thought I was a pampered jerk, taking a taxi like that. And I wondered how many times that I've thought that of people in cabs was it actually just a game for the people on the other side of the glass.

I have a fair idea of what it will be like when I finally get home. It'll be 9:15 in the evening in Pennsylvania, where it's much snowier than here. And traditionally, it seems, someone in my family gets off the plane, there are hugs and smiles and questions about the flight, about the drive to the airport. Then, inevitably, the traveler will yawn and then one of the folks receiving the traveler will bunch up his/her eyebrows and calculate at which time in the destination timezone the traveler must have gotten up to make this journey. I'm always extremely giggly and talkative when I first get into the car to go home - and by the end of the drive (either 45 minutes or an hour and a half later, depend on which airport I've flown in to), I can barely keep my eyes open. Tradition is tradition.

As I was in line for this coffee here on the terrace, I heard somebody say my name - and I turned around to see one of my comrades from Algebraic Topology, one of the people who I got to know enough to call a friend this semester. His flight to Warsaw (getting to the states from here makes for an interesting journey) was just boarding and he dashed over to say a quick goodbye - it made me really glad to see him. I've said quite a few goodbyes, as you can imagine, over the last few days but he and I hadn't run into each other. The nice thing about the math community is, though, that once you get this far (and most of the people I've met here will go farther - grad school and beyond), the math community isn't all that large. I probably will see a lot of them again.

And, most importantly of all, I managed to get my snacks of choice through security today. I wasn't sure they'd let my carrot, cucumber, banana, and apple through - you never known with produce. I've seen a poor, confused German gentleman get very flustered in the Philadelphia airport for having an apple in his backpack (when an enormous dog and equally enormous security guard manhandle your backpack, you don't really expect it to be because of an apple, rather something more sinister) when he arrived in the states, but I think if you eat it before going through immigration, you're fine. So, I'll do that. I'm also interested in seeing the other passenger's faces when I do so. I miss fruits and vegetables while traveling - I always do, so I thought I ought to bring them this time. Still, I can't pretend that eating a cucumber as long as my forearm is a normal thing to do on a plane. Oh, well. I hope it makes some people smile.

And all of a sudden.

Leaving tomorrow. I'm sitting with a belly full of mulled wine and good, Hungarian salami, thinking about my flight tomorrow morning. This semester flew by.  I'm sure I'll write something tomorrow - traveling gives me some nice head-space to write. I'll check in then.

Just a tinge of pride.

I'm sitting in yet another lovely café in Budapest. The plethora of cafés with varying atmospheres is something that I will miss about living in a big city, especially a city with such a focus on café culture as Budapest. I am one damn proof away from finishing all my work for Spectral Theory, the course that has taken more of my time than any other in the history of my education. We met with Miklos one last time in this café this morning. I'm really happy to say that I got up the courage to ask him for a letter of recommendation for future endeavors- only one that is concrete in my mind right now, but you never know.  A strong letter of recommendation is invaluable, and I have a feeling he'll write a good one.

And I've learned so much in his course, in this semester here. It's almost as different from my math education at Mills as Germany was, though it's also different from Germany. Different areas of a spectrum. And though now I know what Hilbert Spaces are, can talk about tangent bundles, can think about the spectral radius of infinite graphs, the one thing I am most proud of: as I was typing my final writeup this morning (another amazing thing I've had to become proficient in this semester - using LaTex to type math) and going to check on the things I had typed yesterday, I found that one of my files hadn't saved. About an hour and a half's work of formatting enormous square roots (or 2n-th roots, rather) of vectors and matrix multiplication, limit suprema and infema, and all kinds of subscripts - GONE. And I looked through my files carefully to make sure that I hadn't just overlooked it, and after five minutes of fruitless searching, instead of pouting and griping and swearing, I just retyped it. This time, I remembered the formatting errors I had yesterday and it only took me about forty-five minutes. And it's all done now. I'm most proud of that reaction.

Alright. And now, we will continue what my close friends is calling the 'Spectral Theory Pub Crawl', though café crawl would be more accurate (yet most cafés in Budapest serve a host of alcohol as well, so really, it's pretty synonymous) - where we schlep ourselves and our laptops and notes to several cafés during the day, trying not to over-caffeinate and yet to stay engaged in the corrections, the typing, the formatting, the math - until we're all done!

Looking out of the window in Mainz.

Waiting for the bus in Budapest.

That tiny Christmas Market.

Hand-made crafts of all kinds for sale.

A fire outside to warm ourselves up.

And a dog with the perfect instincts for what to do in the cold winter.

Classic.

Thank you, xkcd.

I'm sitting right now in a very comfy chair in Mainz, trying to get my brain to focus on my second-to-last Spectral Theory assignment. Last Thursday, I finished everything (including the lectures) for Algebraic Topology. The research project is coming along, as is our paper summing up what we've done this semester (I still can't get over how exciting it is to write a math paper, and how giddy I get when I generate the nice PDF of our work - it looks like fancy math! Really, it's just typed math, which is not all that fancy, but still!)

And I've been absent here for a while. Yesterday, C and I went to a tiny Christmas market in a tiny town a very short train ride away from Mainz. We went with her neighbor and another friend to this village so small and cozy, it reminded me of Meadville, my home town, just a little bit. We got to see this amazing country house/farm that C's neighbor's parents own, to warm our cold toes next to a wood stove, have amazing soup with barley and pumpkin, and curl up next to the sweetest, oldest, most non-strangle looking Dachshund I've ever seen (I don't really like small dogs that much, but this one was positively lovely. At least thirteen years old, partly blind, and all sweetness- and with long, gray hair! That's right, not the strange, worm-like smooth-haired Dachshunds we're used to seeing yammering on corners.), pictured below:

Maxi couldn't really be bothered to get up from next to her favorite spot by the wall for a picture.

So, I went to her instead.

C's neighbor Miri has been known to take great pictures, and I hopefully will be getting some of the market from her. In the meantime, Erin, who came to stay with me last weekend in Budapest and enjoy some ex-pat Thanksgiving, wrote a lovely blog entry about her time here and her time in Edinburgh, where she is studying. Please do give it a read! Here it is.