Budapest
Hm. I'm in the computer room in the basement of College International.
Budapest is cold. That's the first thing.
Our apartment is stunningly beautiful. I'm totally impressed. I was expecting to be sharing a bedroom and have a tiny kitchen, nonexistent bathroom, a few mismatched plates, and so on. Instead, I have a room that is huge even by American standards. With a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. (Looking out onto the crumbling building just across the way, but quand meme.) It's been tastefully decorated with chairs, a table, a rug, floozy transparent curtains, all in a nice coordinated color scheme. The kitchen is, well, huge. And it has a real oven. I think that's our trump card. Many of the other student apartments seem to have similar amazing details: the girls who have a whirlpool bathtub, the guys with cable, the girls with DSL.
I took some gooey pictures, but I'm on a random computer in a random computer lab, so I won't post them just yet.
On the computer lab: it's in the basement of College International, which is where the math classes will be. But not where the Hungarian classes are. No, those are at a language school that seems to primarily teach English, about a 20 minute walk away. We live halfway between them, which is kind of nice. Means we've been too lazy to get our metro passes yet, though. The sun setting so early (4:30) makes me groggy at night.
Oh, right, the computer lab. Diane's been carting around two guys from her Hungarian section all day, having promised them dinner. We decided internet came before dinner (it has been three days) and walked to the College International, but nobody was really around. We found someone who directed us to the computer labs downstairs, but then was informed by one of the Hungarian students here that one had to have an account. Well, suck. We were already turned away from an internet cafe on the way that was totally full. Totally cheap, though, at 100 forints ($.50) for half an hour. Then Diane notices a page listing accounts and what looks like default passwords. We all sit down and start plugging them into the windows logon screens, to the (probable) alarm and consternation of the poor Hungarian students around us. The 5th one down or so works. Moral of this story: change your default password.
Everything is in Hungarian here. This should be obvious, but, er, Hungarian looks nothing at all like English, French, or German. It's a bit disorienting. Luckily, if people do speak a foreign language it's either English or German. I'm amazed, though, at people's willingness to chat at me in Hungarian when I don't understand. We went to the market today on our mid-class downtown tour, and it is huge and fabulous. I bought things. A woman near one of the entrances tried to sell me some unfamiliar berries, and I think she was telling me through sign language that it was good for hair and chests. Another woman came up to me and (I think) told me that my hair is beautiful, but I really have no idea other than that it was friendly. So I smiled a lot. I manged to buy quite a lot of food using 1. English 2. German (funf? ein hundert forint) and 3. broken Hungarian. At least we've learned numbers in class.
Other than that, no huge adventures, because nearly all our time is taken up by class. The first night we walked down the street, and saw many shops. We looked at the menu of a restaurant that had absolutely no vegetarian options whatsoever. Most of the dishes were things like stomach goulash. Yum.
I have no idea where to buy yeast or baking powder/soda. It seems not to exist in Match, the supermarket closest to our house. If anybody who knows anything about Hungary has any idea where I might find these things, I would be grateful.
Time to go home and eat, perhaps. You should all come and visit me. Until next time...