nawl

Again posting from the computer lab on a "borrowed" account. Today it seems College International is full of Germans.

Hungarian class is going much as many other language class goes. We have a third teacher now. I mean seriously, we must be an experimental section or something. The new teacher is very young and shy and clearly afraid of us. She's not comfortable enough in English to understand us when we speak normally (in American), or understand us when we try to speak in Hungarian with our still-horrid accents, or be able to pronounce "definite" and "indefinite" in a way that we can differentiate.

On Friday I watched Garden State in someone's apartment with a big pile of other kids from the program. It feels like a very 20-something movie, full of little quotes and jokes aimed straight at my situation. I mean, I appreciated the observation about not having a home anymore, and then appreciated the meta-situation of watching the movie aimed at my stereotype. I was disappointed in the ending, though.

There you go, movie reviews from me.

On Saturday we all failed at going ice skating, then had dinner at the "pancake restaurant" in Buda that everyone's been raving about, then failed at going clubbing. The ice skating place closed before we got there. The "pancake restaurant" turned out to be a crepe place, and I wasn't all that impressed. If I could just find some gruyere here, I'd be set. For clubbing, we first went to ChaChaCha, a bar in the metro station at Kalvin Ter that is apparently world-famous, but again not that impressive at midnight. At least, it was kind of smoky and full of people halfheartedly dancing to ok music. Then we tried a second club listed in someone's guidebook, but it turned out to be bad rock music night, and we didn't see any women there, so we decided to try a third club that had apparently fallen off the face of the earth.

The night wasn't a total waste, though, since we had some exciting rounds of Pick Two with semi-drunken nerds before going out, and I discovered that a fellow CS major here is a very good ballroom dancer, so we danced in his living room.

I'm slowly learning important food words, though I haven't had enough time to let things settle in, so I tend to promptly forget whatever I was trying to say in the first place. Lots of people here speak English, and so my current restaurant experience consists mainly of the counter-person just looking at us with irritation when we order in broken Hungarian, then printing out a receipt for the price of whatever we bought without even bothering to try to say it. People who don't speak English at all seem to be awfully chatty in our direction, though.

As far as food goes, I was able to find baking powder (sutopor, with accents that I can't find), and yeast, and there's an "asian" market in the basement of the big market that has a wall of every kind of spice, most of the other standard asian things I could possibly want, and even a shelf with salsa and 800-forint packages of tortillas.

Hungarian is weird. There are two words for red. They are not interchangeable. I've finally managed to remember most of the numbers. 600 is pronounced very much like "hot sauce". Diane has decided that 5 (o"t, where that's supposed to be an umlaut over the o) should mean cold, so we walk around saying things like 55! (o"tveno"t) or 555! (o"tszazo"tveno"t) to the confusion and consternation of the real Hungarian people around us.

People's names are given as last first, like Chinese. The word for sex is szex, which greatly amuses all of us. (There are quite a lot of szex bolts around here.) The word for joke (and the root for many words having to do with "funny") is vics, which is pronounced vits, and is, er, obviously German. Nagyon jo means "very good", and is my current favorite collection of sounds, because the way the teacher pronounces it it sounds more like najyoyo. Plurals are formed by adding -ok or -ek or -"ok to the ends of words, so that you end up with magazine article headers like "szexy starok!". Actually, the huge number of words ending in k has convinced me that this is an awesome language.

Time to jaunt off to watch a Romanian men's choir. Next time I hope to bring my laptop so as to put up pictures.