So, I haven't written a blog post in forever. And for that I apologize. I've been busy and, more than that, I've been lazy. That's how it goes I suppose. Classes are difficult and my time has filled up.
It's been almost two months since I last posted. Things not covered include: Debrecen, Bratislava, Prague, my family in Budapest, Vienna (the second time), spring break (featuring Brussels, Madrid, and Barcelona), the meteor shower from Gellért Hill, and Belgrade. I don't have enough time now and will have never have enough, I'm afraid, because I allowed myself to fall behind. So, in brief:

Debrecen
Nice city in Hungary, one of the largest, but not that exciting for a tourist. There's a university there and they're famous for their sausages and are close to the Tokaj wine region, but overall, there are more exciting places to go.

Bratislava
Capital of Slovakia, a really cool city. Very small, very walkable, with the entire downtown/old city being composed of pedestrian streets, and beautiful. Not as happening as some other cities, but there are nice, interesting bars and clubs, if that's your bag, and plenty of delicious food and stuff to see during the day. Also, fair amount of random statues scattered around the streets, which was nice.

Prague
Honestly, I was a little let down by Prague. I had heard so much about it, but it was incredibly touristy. Multiple tourist shops every block in the old town and I heard more English, German and French than Czech. That said, the city is gorgeous, with so many old, interesting buildings, that it's incredible. Nice cobble stoned streets, lots of pedestrian streets, and great squares. Not as walkable as Bratislava, but still doable. If I return, there's supposedly cool stuff to do outside of the old town and castle district that I'd like to see.

Brussels
Great beer, interesting city, awesome fries. Lots of statues of children or animals peeing, as well as an incredible amount of high-quality street art on buildings. Unfortunately expensive and not the greatest weather, but a nice city. As far as beer goes: the beer culture's awesome, there's good beer everywhere, and the beer itself is delicious. But it's definitely more expensive, and compared to American craft beer, not as diverse. America does good beer in every style, where it seems (and I'm sure I would find counter-examples if I had more time) that Belgian beers fall into a couple styles, in which they excel.

Bruges
Small town in Belgium, we went there for a day trip, I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. Beautiful, touristy in the center, but perfectly sized for walking around in a day, and less crowded in the outer parts.

Madrid
Much less expensive than I thought, we spent all our time in city center, very easy to walk around. Beautiful and tasty, with lots of interesting museums and parks. We stumbled across a procession of some kind for Holy Week Wednesday evening after watching a Real Madrid match in a bar, which was really surprising, interesting, and fun to watch.

Barcelona
More expensive than Madrid, but we ate better there, partly because we made more of an effort. Had some fantastic seafood. Smaller than Madrid, but we stayed farther away, so it felt larger. Walking around the old town is easy, but it's packed and very touristy. There's a beach as well, which was nice and relaxing, as it came at the end of our week of non-stop traveling. We rented bikes and went up to Park Guell, the only place in Barcelona to see Gaudi architecture for free, and got some great views of the city, though it was difficult ride uphill to reach it. Also saw the Sagrada Familia, a Gaudi-designed cathedral, which was quite interesting. I quite enjoyed Barcelona, and I'd definitely like to explore it more.

Belgrade
Former capital of Yugoslavia, present capital of Serbia, an awesome little city. Strange mix of Communist-era stereotypical (to my mind) Eastern European architecture and interesting 19th-century (perhaps? It looked similar to Budapest and Bratislava) architecture that's very easy to walk around. Also the first country I've gone to that has a primarily Orthodox population, so the style of the churches was very different, including the Cathedral of Sveti Sava, largest Orthodox church in the world. Many many parks and fountains and many more young children than other cities, or so it seemed. Also, best breakfast in Europe: Turkish coffee (small sized, strong and bitter), yogurt (liquidy, plain and a little sour) and burek (a pastry made from phyllo dough stuffed with cheese, spinach and cheese or meat, similar to spanakopita), very nice and filling.


That's an overview of the major destinations I've made.
And I will note that hostels in Western Europe (or at least Spain, as that's my only point of reference, as we stayed in an apartment in Belgium) seem to be more expensive and of lower quality than the ones in Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe, you can get good locations and sometimes breakfast included for under 20 bucks, while in Western Europe not only is that not possible, but you may have to rent towels and lockers with locks aren't always a guarantee. This is anecdotal evidence, 'tis true, but in general it seems that Eastern European hostels are better.
And I of course have a metric butt ton of photos, but it's not practical to upload all of them, so for that I apologize.

Okay. Really long time no post. I have a lot to catch up on, so there will be much summarizing. I suppose I'll try and tackle Vienna now, as that will involve probably the most information, and it has been giving me a mental block on this blogging thing.
So when we last left our heroes, we had arrived in Vienna. We followed the directions we had gotten from the hostel and found our way through the Viennese metro, or the U-bahn (which has 6 lines compared to Budapest's paltry 3) to the hostel. The hostel we stayed at was called wombat's (that's supposed to be not capitalized), and was pretty great. We checked in, got ourselves into the rooms, which contained four beds, and headed off for a late dinner. Because our group had 11 people, there were two rooms of girls where they took every bed, but there was a guy we didn't know in the room with the three guys. He ended up being a French Canadian who partied quite hard (somewhere else, fortunately), who seemed like a good guy. He slept all day Saturday, so I assume he had had some fun the night before. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Some classmates of ours had recommended the hostel and a place to eat nearby, so we got directions from the hostel front desk and headed out to try and find it. We found it, but it was as much a bar as a restaurant, and was completely full of smoking Austrians with no seat in sight. We headed across the street to a different gasthaus, the Austrian term for restaurant (not sure if it's a specific type of restaurant or not). The kitchen turned out to be closing as we walked in, but they were still able to serve us food, though from a very limited selection: either blood sausage or pork chops. I got the blood sausage, which turned out to be fried, served with sauerkraut and potatoes and it appeared to floating in butter.

The sausage was good, not too rich, and it was all tasty, especially since I accompanied it with an Ottakringer beer, which was quite nice. Everyone had something similar and the meal, while tasty, was significantly more expensive than Budapest, which was rather unfortunate.
We then went back to our hostel and got our free drink at the hostel bar, the womBar. It was tiny and completely packed with various hostel-residents getting their free drink and enjoying the place. We spent the rest of the night drinking and relaxing in the hostel, as we were going to get up reasonably earlier the next day to go exploring Vienna.

Saturday we started off at around 9 (that's pretty early for me) and went to the Naschmarkt right across the street. I got breakfast, a stein and hot chocolate, in that order. It was a nice open air market, though very large and relatively expensive, so we didn't stay for too long, wanting to get into the center of Vienna. We took the metro downtown and saw St. Stephen's Cathedral, a large basilica that someone said has been under continual construction since about the 13th century. Not sure if that's true, but as we walked out of the cathedral, we saw a big scaffold running along its side, so maybe.

From there we walked down a rather scenic street to the Habsburg Palace Complex, which featured palaces and museums.

It was a nice pedestrian street, flanked with modern buildings with all kinds of modern businesses.
The palace itself was really cool looking.

That bottom picture is the entrance to the museum we went into, the National Library State Hall, which was basically a large, old library that had several small exhibits but was more of just a neat hall.

The coolest single thing in the hall, in my opinion, was an old first-page from a Bible:

That's the lion of Judea, with the outline (and everything else on the page) made from Hebrew letters. I thought it was really cool-looking, so I snuck a picture of it even though technically we weren't allowed to take pictures of the exhibits.
From the National Library we walked to lunch, which was tasty but not super exciting.

It was a beef soup with potatoes on the side. Those sauces are a sour-cream type deal and applesauce mixed with horseradish, which was really tasty. Unfortunately, they wouldn't give us tap water here, so we had to buy a bottle. I've been pretty lucky so far, and have managed to escape doing that at too many places.
After lunch, we headed off to another museum, the Esperanto Museum, which was focused on planned languages, the proper term for languages created by someone purposefully, and with a special focus on Esperanto, the most well-known of them. I'm not sure why exactly this museum was in Vienna, but it was really cool. It actually really made me want to learn Esperanto, since it can be mastered in about 6 months for an English speaker and has a random distribution of speakers around the world. Most importantly, there exists a passport program, where you can stay with another speaker of Esperanto somewhere in the world for free. They're mostly in Europe, but there's also a fair amount in South America and Asia, with less in Africa and the Middle East. So, if you like to travel for cheap and like learning languages...I would suggest Esperanto.
Then we just decided to walk around one of the ring roads in Vienna, which turned out to be a great idea. We walked through a park and saw many gorgeous buildings:












However, even better, we then stumbled across this:

Let's zoom in:

We managed to stumble across a large outdoor Viennese festival, where, outside of whatever this building is (it looks important), they have a giant pond for ice skating. And then a trail thing leading away from it. It was really cool, though we didn't end up skating because well, two of us (one of them me) can't skate, and we had no idea how the whole thing was organized. We had our stuff with us and couldn't see lockers to put them in, none of us spoke German, etc. So we just stood around, drank our respective alcoholic punches (I had caramel, it was delicious) and enjoyed watching people for a while.

After we left we just continued walking around the ring road until we found a cafe, where we took a short break, played some cards and drank some coffee. After that respite, we returned to the hostel and did homework, like the cool math majors we are, until dinner.
We went out to Franz, the place that had been recommended to us that we tried to go to the night before. To make sure we got in we went early. It was delicious and the cheapest meal we ate in Vienna, but still rather expensive by Budapest standards. I know I've said that several times, but...I've been spoiled by Budapest. Traveling almost anywhere else in Europe will be expensive...
So for dinner I had a cheese plate and then a pie stuffed with blood sausage with a side of sauerkraut and mustard and fresh grated horseradish.

It was really good, though looking back I feel kind of silly eating blood sausage both days. But it was tasty!
Anyways, after that we all retired to the hostel to recharge, taking naps and reading for a couple hours.
After this relaxing respite, we reconvened to head out to the Bermuda Triangle. The Bermuda Triangle is a neat cobblestoned part of Vienna with lots of different bars. After some wandering through various full or expensive bars, we found one that had space for us and wasn't too much money, so we sat down and ordered ourselves some of these:

That's a liter of winter beer. For reference, the mug is about the size of your head. We spent our time nursing these beers and enjoying the bar before calling it a night and returning to the hostel.

On Sunday, 9 was the hour we woke again. After a quick breakfast at the hostel, we headed off to some museums. Went to the Haus der Musik, which was a pretty cool museum about music, detailing the physical phenomenon and some Austrian or Austria-inspired composers. It was interesting, but no the coolest museum I've gone to.
After that, we went over to the museum quarter, grabbed a small lunch and hit up the Leopold Museum, which featured various contemporary art. It was not too large, so I made it through the whole thing. While contemporary European art isn't my bag, it was still interesting to see, since it was definitely different than most of the art museums I've been to.
I'm sorry I don't have more detail on the museums...that's one of the effects of having gone so long ago I suppose. To make up for it, here are some pictures of the Museum quarter, which is really cool.

That blockish building in the bottom pictures is another museum, modern art, that's supposed to be pretty cool, but we had no time.
After we left the museum, we returned to the hostel to pick up our stuff and then caught a late afternoon train in order to get back to Budapest by dinner.

And that's my Viennese saga. This probably would've been more interesting, with more details, if I had written it sooner after my return. I'll try and catch up now, since there's not nearly as large a block at once as this.

So this is not a post detailing what I've done, but what I'll do.
This Thursday is Gluttony Thursday (I'm unsure if it has any relation to Lent and Fat Tuesday or if it's something completely separate), which is a Budapest even where many restaurants in the city present everything on their menu at half-off. Needless to say, I will be heading out to dinner at a nice restaurant with some friends. I'm very excited.
And then this Saturday I'll be heading over to Debrecen, the second largest city in Hungary, with some friends via train. Not sure exactly what there is to do in Debrecen, but it should be fun. The only down side is that the train ticket cost about as much as the one to Vienna. Ah well, still not too bad.

Alright. Long time no post. I was going to start with Vienna last weekend, where I left off, but then I decided that there would be a good deal of information to pack into that post. So I'm going to instead go through this week, which was much less exciting.
We returned from Vienna around 7pm on Sunday and then some of us returned to my apartment where we made dinner with what I had lying around from last week, which ended up being pasta with bacon, onions, garlic, tomatoes and a fried egg on top. We then, instead of doing homework, played cards. Hearts was played, with rules being explained as we went. 'Tis a good game, Hearts.
Monday I decided to take advantage of having a late class and slept in, simply reading until my class at 2, which was classical algebra, the non-credit class designed to catch us up on everything. I was a little lost on Monday, as the class goes fast, assuming you've seen everything before. As I'm not sure I've seen all of this before, it can be a little much sometimes. I'm glad there won't be any grade for the class, though it is definitely entertaining and useful. After class, I just returned to my apartment and did homework, so it was not a very exciting day. I don't even remember what I had for dinner, though I assume I threw something together.
Tuesday was pretty similar, though I had class from 8 to 12 in the morning, followed by another class at 2. In the middle, however, I went and got lunch at a nearby langos stand. I believe I've mentioned langos before, but I'm not sure. It's pretty great. It's basically fried dough topped with things. The stand near the university fries the dough up fresh in front of you and it costs (at most) 2 dollars. I had mine topped with bacon, cheese, sour cream, garlic and purple onion. It was delicious, though not quite filling, so I stopped on the way back to pick up some fruit at a little fruit/vegetable store on the way. After my last class, I simply returned to my apartment and did homework. I made myself a nice dinner of leeks, tofu and noodles, which was very tasty. I also roasted some peanuts, tossed them with a small amount of oil and pepper, which was very good. Unfortunately, it's rather greasy. I was using the oil as a way to get the dry pepper to stick, but I'm not sure if it's necessary or if there's a better way. The oil itself was delicious though, as it was chili oil and sesame oil, so I rather like the flavor. Besides homework and dinner, I celebrated Valentine's Day by talking to my girlfriend, Anna, via phone. This was really nice, but unfortunately expensive; it ate up all my minutes. I have yet to refill my phone, which I should probably do soon.
Wednesday things start to get a little more exciting. I meant to wake up early and do homework before my first class, at 2, but I ended up just sleeping in. I got a bit of work done, making a grammar reference sheet for Hungarian, but it was not nearly as much as I would've liked. I then had Hungarian, which was great. It's a very enjoyable class, and will only get to be more so after it splits into two sections, but I kind of wish it met more often, and I don't think I'll have as much time to put into it as I'd like...the language is really cool. I've said it before and I'm sure it'll keep coming up, but Hungarian's a neat language. It doesn't seem particularly difficult, despite its reputation, but it's just very different from anything else, which would make it difficult, I suppose. Anyways, after class, several of my classmates came back with me to my apartment, where we made grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner, accompanied by roast peanuts (prepared as the day before) and tomato soup. This was delicious, and followed by homework for a little bit, before devolving into cards. Hearts was played for a bit, but we also played a game I had never played before, 13, which was an interesting game. It was good, but needs to be played with exactly four players and involves getting rid of all your cards, in a manner similar, but not identical, to the game Presidents. After 13, a full game of Spades was played that lasted for an unexpectedly long time and so was the last event of the evening.

Class is as class is, and was still good. Thursday afternoon, I, along with many other BSM students, watched a documentary on Paul Erdős, a very strange Hungarian mathematician, who was one of the founders of the program. He was also the most prolific mathematician ever, publishing over 1500 different papers with around 500 different collaborators. Once he became an adult, he never had a home, simply traveling from conference to conference, staying at the homes of colleagues along the way, and he continued doing math up until he died in his early 80s. All of his belongings could fit into two half-empty suitcases, and he was eccentric to say the least. I'd recommend reading up on him, because he's an amusing fellow. He's also an incredibly important mathematician, not only for his work, but also for fostering work in others: he would call people up whenever he had a problem he thought they were specifically suited for and provided a link between Communist Hungary and the West during the Cold War. So the movie was definitely interesting, to say the least.
Afterwards, I went with a large number of people to go get dinner and make cookies. Dinner was from the hummus bar (we did take out), which is a wonderful place, even though it took a very long time for the one guy working there to prepare all of our orders. I ordered the falafel plate again, accompanied with a simple salad of cabbage and cucumber and some mint tea (while we waited). As the hummus bar is right next to the good beer store, I also headed across the street and picked up some interesting-looking brews. After we picked up our food, we all went to somebody's apartment and ate. It was delicious, as expected. Afterwards, I baked cookies. That was the whole reason for this adventure. As my oven doesn't work, I asked one of my friends if I could use hers. She said yes, and then proceeded to invite many many people to come watch me bake, essentially, so this entire event came out of that. It was great.
Their oven doesn't have a degree markings, so we kind of picked a pot on the dial where the flames (it was an actual gas oven) looked good and put the cookies in, deciding to check up on them regularly. The cookies came out a little too done for my taste, as I like them to stay a little raw, but they were still good. Different from at home though, because we couldn't find baking soda or brown sugar. Or chocolate chips for that matter. For the chips, we just chopped up some chocolate and threw it in, but for the baking soda we used something that translates as "volatile salt." It worked well, and according to the internet volatile salt was a precursor to baking soda, so that's probably what I will keep using to bake. For brown sugar, we used aranybarna cukor, or golden-brown sugar, which wasn't actually brown sugar but looked more like raw sugar. It had much less moisture and much larger, most distinct crystals than brown sugar. This changed the taste somewhat, but they still turned out well. After the cookies came out, we all just kind of hung around and talked for a while before leaving and making it back at a decent hour.

And that's all the blogging I think I'll do for now. I made a dent, but there's still much more catching up to do.

So now I shall summarize the events of the end of last week, leading up to my first departure from Budapest since I arrived here about a month ago.
My only class on Thursday was at 8, which was quite nice. I used the rest of the morning to work and bought my train ticket for Vienna. It was a very easy process, as the people working there spoke English and I only needed to specify the day I was leaving, since the return could be anytime in the 3 days after the departure. Anyways, after working and ticket-buying, I went with some people down to the Four Tigers Market for lunch. Our classmate who speaks Vietnamese didn't go with us, as he had class, but we were still able to order some delicious food. I had knuckle soup, which I believe was pork, and was quite good (and rich, as was expected), though I think I prefer the pho. Again, the soup was made much better by the addition of the homemade chili-garlic sauce (I believe, it was very similar to sriracha) and pickled peppers/garlic, which were fantastic. Next time I go with the student who speaks Vietnamese I'm going to try and get him to ask the shop owners if I can buy some of the peppers, because they're great. I tried to buy a bahn mi (a Vietnamese sandwich on a baguette) from the stall to split with one of the guys, but they were out. Again. I sense a conspiracy.
After lunch, tofu and fun-looking mushrooms were bought. I don't know what type they were, but they were very good. I then wandered the street opposite the market with people in order to try and find the Chinese groceries and restaurants that I thought were there. After much wandering through markets and office buildings, with signs, in Chinese, that I couldn't read most of, I eventually found a grocery store. It was more of a normal Chinese grocery store than the markets across the way (though they had fewer vegetables it seems), and I picked up some chili oil, Sichuan pepper, and peanut butter. This is the first time I've seen peanut butter in a store, so I promptly bought some. It's a brand I've never heard of, from I have no idea what country. It was only 1000 forints, or between 4 and 5 dollars which, considering the scarcity of peanut butter, is something I'm willing to pay. Pretty good peanut butter too.
After the grocery (which I was more excited about than anyone else), we walked a little further down the street, poking our head inside other places, and found a kinai gyorsbüfé, or Chinese fast food restaurant, which is what most of the (bad) Chinese places here are called. However, we saw Chinese people coming out and, knowing the location, I wanted to give it a try. We had already eaten lunch at this point, remember, so I was just looking for some dumplings. And it was definitely different than any other kinai gyorsbüfé. I don't quite remember what was in it, but it definitely wasn't your usual affair. We did buy some dumplings, at 50 forints or about 25 cents a pop, and they were delicious. I also got a chance to speak some Chinese with the man working there (as I can speak Chinese much better than Hungarian). I had some trouble understanding him as he was Southern and had a lisp, but I was successful.
I then called my trip a success and returned to my apartment, where I spent the rest of the day and night doing homework, with a brief intermission to make dinner (throwing together what we had lying around) and watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail with some friends.

Friday, it seemed, had broken his dreams.
I had classes all day on Friday, which was interesting. 4 classes, back-to-back, in the university building for around 8 hours. It was more classes I've had sequentially since I finished high school, though there were breaks spread throughout it to make it more do-able.
This was the first time I had three of my classes: Statistics, Bioinformatics, and Dynamical Systems and Bifurcations. Statistics is about what I expected, but should be reasonably interesting, as it will probably be a little more math-y than if I had taken it at Oberlin. There's 3 of us in that class. Bioinformatics seems cool; the first class was an overview of the (very limited) biology we'll need to know and a very simple model of genome rearrangement, which will be the topic of the first half of the class. There's 4 of us in that class. Taken in total, 3 of the 6 classes I'm currently in (those two plus intro to abstract algebra) have 4 or fewer people in them, which is interesting.
Dynamical Systems and Bifurcations looks like it will involve systems of differential equations and how you can use them in models, which will be very fun. Though scheduled as a reading class, it has more than 7 people in it, I'd say, making it rather large.
Lunch was a hurried sandwich that I made at home eaten in the 15 minutes between class at noon. I need to find artichoke hearts here, which I know exist, because they'd be great on the sandwiches I've been making.
After class, which ended at 4, I ran back to my apartment to pack and head over to the train station. Fortunately it was the one right next to my house, because the train left at 5:10 and we were meeting up at around 4:45 to make sure we would get there in time. As we were only going to be gone until Sunday,  I didn't need more than a backpack worth of stuff, which was very good. Anyways, we all made it on to the train with no problem, though the latest member of our party made it on about 3 minutes before the door closed, and we got there too late to have seats next to each other, so we were spread out across two cars. This was perhaps not too surprising, though, as there were 11 of us.
The train ride was without incident. We didn't even have to show our passports when we crossed the border, just our tickets again. It took about 3 hours total and was a very easy ride.
Then we arrived in Vienna and that will have to wait until later to be told.

Wednesday morning I had no class (again). But I didn't get to sleep in. I went to the immigration office bright and early, waking up before 7 in order to get there around the time it opened, 8:30. There were several of us who had issues with our forms and so needed to go back, but only one other person had her form signed by Wednesday. We made it to the immigration office and, as it was the day set aside for students and we weren't in a group of 30+ this time, were able to get out by around 9:30.
After a brief run to the nearby Tesco (a giant grocery store) in a failed attempt to find peanut butter (I had been told that peanut butter could be found in the international foods section of the store, but I was unable to find this section), we left the area. I returned to my apartment for a glorious 2-hour nap before I had class in afternoon.
My only class on Wednesday was Hungarian language, which was shortly afterwards split into two sections, one for beginners and one for intermediate. The intermediate class is composed of people who took the intensive language class, either this semester or last, and the beginner is designed for people who haven't had any Hungarian, but there are a fair amount of people who were in the intensive class who want to take it as well, as they don't think they're ready for the intermediate class. It will be very slow and uninteresting for them, then, because they start with the alphabet and pronunciation, but ah well.
The intermediate section started with a very brief review of pronunciation and numbers before moving onto animals and adjectives and various other words. It's a very cool language, I must say (as I've said many times). But the whole throwing on of syllables to change/add meanings...it's neat. Hard to wrap my head around, as an English speaker, but very cool. Class met for about 2.5 hours, with a brief break in the middle. It was long, but not too bad.
After the first couple weeks, we might split the intermediate class, into one that goes fast and one that goes slow. The fast one sounds like a lot of fun, with reading actual Hungarian (she said last semester they spent the entire time reading and going over a relatively long speech) and going into more detail about the grammar, as opposed to the slow one which will just read children's books and the like. Both would be valuable, but I feel like the faster one would be more interesting to me.
Afterwards, I met up with some other guys who were in the class to go play some Race for the Galaxy. It's enjoyable, and doesn't take quite as long as other, comparable games. It reminds me a little of Puerto Rico, though it's a science fiction card game instead of a historical board game.
After we played several games, we all went out for a late dinner at the Hummus Bar. I had the best (of the various ones I've tried) Middle Eastern food I've had here. It was a falafel plate, composed of falafel, hummus and pita. And it was very tasty, and reasonably filling. Also, ridiculously cheap. 1000 forints, or between 4 and 5 dollars, for a delicious meal. Probably the cheapest dinner I've gotten at a restaurant, which is a reasonably impressive feat.
Anyways, I then returned to my apartment and being lazy, didn't blog.
This was, it turns out, a mistake, as I now have much catching up to do, and suddenly...homework! I will try, though.

Today I had many more classes to make up for my lack yesterday. I had to get to the university by 8 for my first class and spent most of the day there.
Introduction to abstract algebra, which currently has 4 people in it and needs 6 by the end of the registration period or it will be dropped, was first. It seems like a good class, and should be fun. It transfers as group theory, a required class for the math major at Oberlin, which is very convenient and the reason I'd rather have it not be dropped.
Then came combinatorics, which is so large that it's split into two sections, both of which are large. It's a popular course, as combinatorics is a branch of math that Hungary is particularly renowned for (or so the program tells us). It also seems to be a good class, and, like all the classes I've been in so far here, it moves along at a good clip.
Then more classical algebra, which consisted of solving problems about complex numbers. It was a good time, with interesting problems and the teacher running around being very excitable, which was rather amusing.
Classes were interesting, though it is still taking some getting used to the accents and getting back into the fast pace of the classes. Hungarian was much slower than this, and much more notes need to be taken now than before. I'm still unsure how much work I'll have because homework hasn't started yet. This will be the important factor in my semester. I could end up having way too much work; we shall see.
After classes, I met up with a bunch of people and we all cooked dinner consisting of pasta with a variety of veggies: eggplant, broccoli, sun-dried tomatoes, onions, garlic, mushrooms, and possibly others that I can't remember as I'm tired.
I apologize for this kind of fragmented, short post. I'm tired and I also don't feel like recounting the details of all my classes, as much as I know everyone reading this/the entire internet was looking forward to hearing the secret details of Hungarian math classes. But I was sworn to secrecy, so what can one do?
But in other exciting news, I recently found out I got into the summer program I applied to, so I will be spending this summer in Beijing. Which means there might be a sequel blog to this, with a similarly clever name.
I'm also going to be going along with a group of people to Vienna. Which will be very exciting, especially as someone else is planning most of it.