All day, every day.

I learned how to say that in Hungarian yesterday, mostly just so I could explain how often I was learning Hungarian. Each evening, I plan something that I want to do in the morning before class - GRE studying, a run in the park, cleaning the living room, what have you. Then, I drag myself out of bed the next morning and can't think of doing anything but staring in to my cup of coffee and then working through the list of forty or so new vocabulary words and verb forms that I am supposed to study for that day's class. Then, I get to the language school and somehow a full day of learning goes by during which I make plans for the evening, like studying for the GRE, going for a run, hanging out with friends, etc - and when I get home, I am completely exhausted and usually manage to accomplish about 1/3 of my plans before going to bed.

That being said, I think I'm learning something. And last night, I went and had dinner with a lovely Hungarian family - and the mother and father in that family know my mother and father. My dad and this dad met in 83, which we realized was thirty years ago as we sat down to dinner. Since their meeting, both these two and my mother and father have met up in various cities (Budapest, London, Washington, DC) and I met their son who is my age the other day for a beer in the city. It was a bit surreal and positively lovely to be so kindly received into this family (and I have heard stories about my dad's two Hungarian friends my whole life) last night.

After dinner, they even had a Tokaj tasting - for, the dad explained, as much his own benefit as mine. We wanted to see if our layman tongues could distinguish at all between some of these wines. The other amazing thing is that Tokaj (a very sweet dessert wine from a particular region ((called Tokaj)) in Hungary) is something I have only ever heard of in books - I associated it with a fictional and dramatic world - and I got to drink it. It is very, very sweet and I do prefer red wines in general, but this tiny glass of pure gold liquid looked so gorgeous in front of me and I had a moment when I tried a small piece of deliciously crumbly blue cheese and though normally I more 'appreciate' such cheese than 'like' it, when I followed it with a sip of the Tokaj that ended up being my favorite of the three, my mouth understood wine and cheese and I was rather transported for a second. :)

Okay. So, now I have to start that routine I spoke of. Breakfast and rushing through new vocab. Oy vey. In the mean time, the escalators in this city are ridiculously steep and long and I've got some pictures here to show it - as well as a picture of the beautiful synagogue which is right near the languages school downtown.

Weekend, in brief.

It's a bit past midnight and I'm planning to be up by around six tomorrow, so I don't have much time. This weekend was good - I recuperated in many ways from the week, became more stressed out in a few other ways, but also had some good and exciting ideas. The actual math part of this program is getting closer and closer, and I'm excited. I'm also getting to know other folks in the program here better, and that makes all the difference. I just returned from a fun potluck which had all the ingredients for a good time - good food, more people than chairs, some wine, and a temperamental fuse that righted itself just in time for both a stir fry to be made and cookies to be baked. On my way home, I walked through a movie set. It's cheaper to film things in Budapest than it lots of other places - this set looked quite old-timey, with a schnazzy old car and someone walking purposefully down a red carpet into a fancy hotel. Lots of cameras, lots of people, and I tapped someone on the arm briefly to ask if I could walk through and then used the brief pause in the action to scamper across. Kind of exciting!

Here are a few images of the weekend - starting with hiking in the Buda hills and looking down over the city, then a chairlift back down the mountain before an adventure to Memento Park, a rather desolate park area way south of the city on the Buda side where all the old Soviet statues that were in and around Budapest have been collected together and "made to stare at each other", as a friend's guidebook stated. A somber but rewarding visit.

Some pictures.

My front door - facing the courtyard of the apartment complex.

The first stop on the way up to the Citadel over in Buda, on August 20 - St. Istvan Day!

Looking back over to Pest.

That first stop below the citadel. A pair of girls were just sitting and playing cards between these huge columns, and I thought it was a neat contrast.

Pest.

And more Pest, across the Danube.

Pest to the right, Buda to the left. It's such a lovely river.

A fight between a man and a dragon (I believe the dragon represents facism) and above, the Liberation Monument - a woman holding an olive branch aloft in triumph, built in 1947.

The sky in front of the train station nearest my apartment on my way back home that day.

Fireworks above the Danube for St. Istavan!

And what Hungarian classes look like from my perspective.

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!

"And they all lived happily ever after...."

"...until they died."

This is how our Hungarian teacher told us the staying goes in Hungarian. Two days into the language crash course now, and man, it is a crash course. About six-eight hours each day, language language language - you barely have time to review in your head what exercises you were just working on before it's time for a new one, and as someone who has learned foreign languages to the point of near-fluency, I can just how far I am even from understanding people on the street.

That being said, it's kind of fun. It's a new language! And it is so very different from anything I know or have heard before that even counting to ten is impressive to myself, and (Thank goodness!!) being able to read street signs and signs in grocery stores makes worlds of a difference.

And other than that, things are pretty good. I had a few new acquaintances/potential friends from the program over last night for wine and talking, where it turns out most of us had similar fears - how on earth do you compare math programs from different universities. Technically, we should all be one similar levels given what courses we've had, but if some schools are much harder, etc, or worse - what if there are some geniuses here? Ugh, that would be awful! But it seems like the kind of program some of those people would come to... Bottom line, none of us think that we will seem good in comparison to others. But I know that train of thought. That's what all the students at Carleton had before we started there as well. And there it turned out that we all had strengths and weaknesses in various areas and it basically balanced out, and the main reason we got into that program was that we were good at learning, so we could engage there easily. And, well, there was one genius. I guess you can't always avoid them. And I beat her at pool anyway, so there. :)

Okay. I'm going to finish my breakfast and head to my Friday classes. I am really excited for the weekend - I have some GRE studying to do as well as some pictures to upload here. In the mean time, I hope you find a hot beverage of your choice and enjoy this Friday.

Central Market - High prices, but lots of fun window-shopping. Paprika, veggies, MEAT, pickled things. And tourist trinkets upstairs.

So many pickled things.

Good ol' Danube. I like bridges.

After two days.

The last few days have been walking, walking, walking. Yesterday I met a bunch of the other BSM students (14-ish) and today I met the same amount, but with hardly any overlap, and there are still many to come. I think we number about 70 in total, which is quite large compared to some other math things I've done. But honestly, right now, I can hardly think about math. I keep forgetting that's what I came here to do.

The last few days have been for wandering, meeting people, and perhaps more than a little bit of introspection, which happens in foreign places, I believe. A lot of feeling separate from my own timeline, if that makes sense. Especially when you don't speak the language.

My knowledge is growing - I said 'thank you' convincingly enough at the supermarket today to get that response in return, in Hungarian instead of just a raised eyebrow. So far, my vocabulary consists of 'Yes', 'No', 'Thank You', 'Street', '(East) Train Station' [I'm most proud of this one for how fantastic is sounds - keleti pályaudvar], Where Is ___, and 'Paprika'. Which is just paprika. I kid you not. This stuff is hard. I know a lot more words by sight, but I don't know how to pronounce them yet. 'S' is pronounced like a 'sh', unless a 'z' follows it, in which case it is just an 's', an accent like this ´ does nothing but extend the length of the vowel, unless it is over an 'a', in which case it changes the sound entirely.... in addition to these phonetic rules and several others, if I am not wildly mistaken, there's a tonal aspect to this language as well. Not as complex as Thai or Chinese, but certain words are certainly always intoned the same way -- intoned? Is that a word? I'm a bit tired.

As I mentioned briefly in my first post, my landlady has been very, very welcoming. She made "lesco" (pronounced "le" as in 'let', "cho" - high tone on the 'le', low on the 'cho') for me - which is a dish with peppers, onions, sausage, and tomatoes, cooked kind of as a stew and served with special bread that is in stores now only because the day after tomorrow is St. Steven's Day (Szent István ünnepe). She showed me where the nearest grocery store was, walked me to the place where the math courses are held, and took me to the language school as well - on the way there by one mode of transit and on the way back by another, so I would be familiar with both. She walked me to the mall to find an adapter for my computer (all this traveling and I forgot mine this time. Ach, ja..) and in general just helped me a lot. And, I also got to hear her say a lot of words - mostly ones that there wasn't an English equivalent for (such as lecho and keleti pályaudvar, which is a metro stop name she wanted me to remember) and that's when I got the inkling about the tones.

So, the past two full days have just been composed of walking. Yesterday, the exploration with other students took about six hours all told, from Rottenbiller street (where many of us live, near the math school) to the river, and the area in between. Today, we explored a different side of the same area in the afternoon, another five-hour shindig, but in the morning - I got lost. Like, good and proper. I went on a run in the city park a few blocks away from my flat and, as this is an old city and not laid out quite in a grid, but rather with curvy, wibbly streets that turn different ways when they feel like it (and change names after intersections, and most streets are named after people, so everywhere you look there's an István or sometimes an István Street and an István Boulevard lead very different places) - so, all of a sudden, I didn't know where I was. But I navigated back easily enough, discovered that I did know some landmarks, and listened to quite a lot of my audiobook in the process. We may or may not have also gotten a bit lost in the afternoon, but I was in such a good mood, it didn't matter. Getting lost is a fabulous way to get to know a city if you are in good company, even if that company is just yourself.

The language school begins on Wednesday. 80 hours of Hungarian boot camp, and then I won't feel as much of an outsider. Many of the students here have never been abroad before. A few have - and one other student has already graduated, and thank goodness. I was feeling quite old yesterday. But actually, in a good way.

Here are a few pictures from my immediate vicinity:

The approximate location of my flat.

My breakfast, after the run-that-would-never-end. Or rather, walk-that-would-never-end by the second half of it.

Learning vocab with the help of vegetables. So, beet (cékla) and ginger (gyömbér). My kitchen is almost complete. I just need some kind of hot sauce and honey to feel totally at home.

I realize that I am not posting any pictures of landmarks or even of myself, or myself in front of landmarks. That's not quite the kind of pictures I tend to take, though I realize that might be what some people want to see.  Hopefully, there will be more people-pictures soon. I don't know these folks well enough yet. We'll figure it out.

Okay. After all the hours of walking and wandering today, it is time for me to rest.