The day is Monday.
More Hungarian class was had, with much more learning. The weekend break, with its accompanying lack of Hungarian practice, makes it really difficult to jump right back into the swing of things come Monday. We learned today about the definite and indefinite conjugations of Hungarian verbs. In most cases the verb is conjugated one way, but it's conjugated differently if it takes a direct object that uses a definite pronoun, a specific direct object. For example, "the homework," but not homework in general, or this cup or that cup, etc. It's very strange, and difficult to get used to. The conjugations themselves aren't too difficult, it's just realizing when to use them. Ah well.
For lunch, I made a quick run to a soup and sandwich place a little bit away. We grabbed, and then returned to the school to eat a sandwich and a soup. I had a thai coconut chicken soup that was very good. Made with coconut milk, it actually had some lemongrass in it and a bit of a bite. The sandwich was a chicken ordeal with cheese, leeks and a couple other things, and the whole sandwich was grilled. The sandwich was not as good as the soup, but still satisfying. It was pretty fast and cheap, so I might make return trips in the future.
After class, I traveled with a group of people to the tea shop that had been recommended to us by the tour guide yesterday. After a bit of traveling and wandering around possibly lost, we eventually found it.

It was a Tibetan teahouse, so it claimed. We had come with the intention of only buying some loose-leaf tea and then leaving, but we didn't realize that it was a full blown teahouse instead of just a little shop. So we sat down at a table and ordered three pots of tea to share. We were all really impressed by the women who worked there, as most of them spoke English with very good pronunciation, even if their vocabulary wasn't too large. We ordered a pot of masala chai (spiced black tea), a pot of oolong (Ti Kuan Yin), and a pot of Tibetan butter tea, which I've been wanting to try for along time. The oolong was okay, a little different than I expected but still tasty. The masala chai was very good, a good mixture of all the flavors that I find is generally hard to get right. And the butter tea was also very good, but definitely interesting. One of the guys I was with had had this tea in China, near Tibet (he was unable to actually get into the province) and said that this was not nearly as strong; he liked this one much better because of this fact. It definitely tasted buttery, not all that much like tea, and salt was added to it to make it even better. Not sure it's something I'll drink often, but it was pretty good.
Loose leaf teas were then bought, because I miss tea. I got myself some genmaicha, the Japanese green tea mixed with puffed rice that is delicious, and the stuff for masala chai. They sold the spice separate of the tea, and recommended grinding the spice very fine, then combining it with the tea and steeping it in a boiling mixture of 50% milk, 50% water. I bought some cheap assam, an Indian black tea that they used for their masala chai, for the tea part of it. I'm very excited. I'm actually drinking my green tea right now as I write this, and it's great. The entire teahouse was very neat, and they also sell some food. There's a back room you can rent out for like 3500 forints (total) and then you can put as many people as you can fit in there and get all you can and all you can drink, which will definitely be done soon. I will certainly be returning.
We then left to go find a Thai restaurant nearby. We eventually found it, but it seemed to be closed. (After I got back home I discovered that it has moved locations and was actually now two small blocks away from the tea shop, but we didn't know this at the time). We had passed another Thai restaurant however, and headed over there. It was pretty tasty, though I don't think it was very authentic. Not the dish I got at least.

My dish was chicken livers and gizzards sauteed with peppers and garlic and some green which I couldn't find the translation for. It was very tasty but, as I said, not particularly Thai.
It turned out to be a rather Thai day, accidentally, but it was one I was happy with.

Okay, with this post I'll finally be caught up. Man, this has been more difficult than I thought.
I made myself fried rice for lunch, taking advantage of my shopping trip yesterday. Tofu, eggs, and onion combined with rice and soy sauce, black vinegar, sriracha and a little bit of sesame oil. 'Twas delicious.
I then took the metro to the far north of Buda to meet up with a group of people to go on a tour of Óbuda, (Old Buda, originally an old town to the north of Buda, now part of Budapest) and the Buda caves. I managed to arrive just as the group was walking away from the metro stop and, as I was congratulating myself on my awesome timing, I stepped into a pothole in the street and twisted my ankle. I was able to walk on it, but it wasn't comfortable. Fortunately, the tour consisted of many sitting breaks, where we took a bus or a tram or sat in a cafe, so I was able to both exercise and rest my ankle. And luckier still, the tour of the cave was just a walking tour, on a paved path with stairs and ladders that were kept dry, so I didn't put too much strain on the ankle.

Óbuda is a nice, quiet part of the city, with cobbled streets that are barely wide enough for a car and the tram.

We didn't spend much time here, walking through on our way to the caves, which were up in the hills. Hungary's a pretty flat country, but Buda goes right up into hills, which contains the most expensive neighborhoods in the city.

The cliffs near the caves

We waited in a little cafe for the tour to start, sipping hot chocolate and petting the resident spoiled cat. I think it may be the first cat I've seen since I've been here. We then walked into the caves, where we spent a lot of time walking around these beautiful limestone structures, trying not to touch them (as that would interfere with their formation). Many stalagmites and stalactites were seen, and many pictures were taken. However, most of my pictures just look like various rock structures, which aren't very interesting, except to my geologist friends. After walking around the caves for a while, I realized that wet limestone looks kind of uncomfortably fleshy and membranous in places, like we were inside a very large, stationary beast.

That was my overall impression of the place. That and it looked vaguely like Moria, especially the entrance and exit. 

This resemblance wasn't helped by the Lord of the Rings music played about half way through the tour. The door to the entrance even has words written across the top, though I couldn't read them. I'm pretty sure that it didn't say "Speak friend and enter," but I can't be certain.

After we returned from the caves, we stopped at a bakery down in Óbuda. Apparently it was a fairly big name bakery, founded by Hungarians with Austrian background. According to our guide, Hungarians don't really like talking about the fact that they were part of the double monarchy, but the city's a pretty constant reminder...

The bakery was delicious. They had a selection of sweet and savory baked goods, from cakes to scones and cookies and kifli and all sorts of things. I bought a little sampler of savory goods, because I had no idea what most of these things were and they looked interesting. These are the scone things whose name I forget and are delicious. The two small ones are goat cheese (very lightly flavored), the two normal looking ones are plain (made with mashed potatoes apparently, they were hot and absolutely delicious, and tasted cheesy), the speckled one had pumpkin seeds in it (also good, not a very strong flavor), and the smaller brown one was made with animal fat somehow, possibly lard or cracklings or skin or something (the explanation was unclear, but the scone itself was delicious, slightly salty and crispy).

I also bought a little walnut cookie, but finished it before I took this picture. It was small, sticky, crunchy and not overly sweet. Very tasty. These were all fantastic and I would definitely return to this bakery if it wasn't so far away from me.

From our guide, me and one other guy managed to get recommendations on where we can buy loose leaf tea, which I'm missing quite a good deal. Tomorrow, we're heading over there and buying some. Because it's delicious. Not only will tea be made, but also tea vodka (stay tuned for the results of this venture...)

What followed was much indecision and wandering before a place was located for dinner. It was a small cafe in a relatively easy-to-get-to location that served delicious food for not too much. I had more of the fantastic garlic cream soup, and then some pork cellar stew, which was basically pork and potatoes in a pretty good sauce (I forget now exactly what the sauce tasted like, but it was interesting). The meal was accompanied by a wonderful glass of forralt bor, mulled wine. Forralt literally means boiled, which is a satisfying discovery for me because I was irritated with it being different from forró, or hot, which I had thought it was previously. I thought it was some very strange conjugation that I didn't understand, but it being a whole different word is a nice discovery. I couldn't finish my meal completely, it being very rich and all, but it was very tasty.

After I returned home, I finally took it upon myself to finish doing laundry. I had put my clothes into the wash this morning before I made lunch, but the machine takes many hours (3, by my roommate's estimation) so I was unable to do anything else until I came back home. As we don't have a drier, I had to hang everything up from a drying rack in the bathroom, which ended up being successful.

The bathroom doesn't seem the like the best location for the drying rack, as showers will increase the moisture in the air, but I suppose it's the best place possible. I was very excited to get my laundry done, as I've been putting it off and being nervous about it for a bit, as it seemed very complicated. It is strange not having a drier, and I hope that at least some of my clothes will be dry by tomorrow as I'm pretty much all out. Ah well...

And now, I've caught up. Hopefully I won't fall so far behind in the future, but I make no promises.

Saturday was an exciting day. I started the day by going to the Four Tigers Asian Market, which I've been excited about doing since before I got to Budapest. I met up with several people and then took a tram several stops to near the market.I've said it before, and I'll say it again, but the public transportation in Budapest is great. The metro is really nice, but there's also the buses and trams and trolleys which crisscross the city and run at all hours and go everywhere. And all of it is included on the monthly pass. It's great.
Anyways, we walked about five minutes in an abandoned looking part of town to find the market, which was in the middle of a parking lot and looked like a shanty town. We went in through an exit, but we saw people going in and people with bags coming out, so we figured it was probably where we wanted to go, despite the lack of a clear sign.

  

That's the entrance we used. Very legitimate looking I thought. According to what I had read online, this market is of dubious legality, so taking pictures of the inside is not the best idea, since the private security guards may just take your camera. Therefore, I did not take many pictures. The advantage of using my phone as a camera, though, was that I could surreptitiously take some shots. But I didn't really take advantage of this.

We wandered through all sorts of stalls selling many things. It was actually most like a flea market, with people selling all sorts of (non-consumable) goods, mainly clothes of various types, including sweaters, pants, hats, gloves, socks, a few jackets, and a surprising amount of underwear and lingerie. There were also some stalls selling electronics or sunglasses, but not nearly as much. We wandered around for awhile, looking for the food stalls (I had been expecting there to be many more places serving food). Surprisingly, the vendors in the stall were about 50% Hungarian and 50% Vietnamese. There was not much (if any) Mandarin being spoken, which disappointed me and the two other students of Mandarin who came along. Luckily, however, one of the guys who joined us is Vietnamese and so was able to easily talk to people, get discounts, order for us, and so on. If we hadn't had him with us...we might've been in trouble.

Eventually we found the food stalls. And then continued looking before deciding this was the only food we'd find and looped back to eat. There was a large number of gyro stands throughout the market. These stands are everywhere, it's simply ridiculous. I did not expect them in this market, where I expected to find many stalls selling authentic Chinese food.

The place we eventually ate at looked like this.

It was a small stall directly across from the main entrance of the market. Our Vietnamese compatriot ordered lunch for us, which consisted of two bowls of pho, one beef and one chicken, fried rice, a noodle dish, tea, and sweet sesame balls. Pho is a fantastic Vietnamese noodle soup, and this pho here was delicious. The fried rice and noodles were both also fantastic, with some peanuts in the noodles adding an interesting crunch to the dish. The tea was great...I miss tea. And the balls were surprisingly good. Normally I'm not much of a one for Asian desserts, but these were tasty. All of these dishes were split among the 6 of us, and it was about $3 each for a delicious and filling lunch.

We then bought groceries from this stall and the one next to it, buying soy sauce, ginger, tofu, Chinese black vinegar, sriracha, sesame oil, oyster sauce, nori (dried seaweed)...all the essentials. It was decided that we would all need to get together and have a fried rice night using these supplies. Then, rambutan, a strange-looking Malaysian fruit that tastes kind of like lychee was bought and ate on the spot. They were delicious. While the meal was cheap, the groceries were actually surprisingly expensive...

Afterwards, we wandered around the market, looking for things to buying. I bought a knit hat and gloves for the too-cold-for-nothing-but-not-cold-enough-for-lumberjack-hat-and-snow-gloves weather we've been having, as well as a Hungarian soccer scarf that says "Hajrá Magyarorszag," or Go Hungary, with the color of the flags and the national crest on it. We wandered around, exploring more, buying more, for awhile, before we left and I returned to my apartment.

While buying the gloves and hat, I had my most successful conversation in Magyar, with an old Vietnamese couple. It's kind of strange, being surrounded by people whose languages are Vietnamese and Magyar. I was able to say, and be understood, that I didn't speak Hungarian and that I was currently studying it. They laughed, but were able to understand me, which is a plus.

This is the entrance to the market, by the way. It's a neat sign.

For dinner, I met up with people at a metro stop near the language school, then wandered around for about 45 minutes before picking a restaurant. It's a problem when we don't really know the area that well and no one's willing to make a decision. We found a couple promising looking restaurants, but they were all relatively expensive, so we kept walking. Eventually, we found a suitable location about a block from where we started, and sat down in a little cafe.

We had lángos, a traditional Hungarian dish that is essentially fried dough with toppings. It's sort of like pizza, but the dough is fried and there's normally no tomato sauce. I had lángos stuffed with beef gulyás, which was delicious. I started with garlic cream soup, which I can't find the word for at the moment, and is found at most restaurants and absolutely delicious. It tastes kind of like the garlic butter served with escargot, except there's much more of it. It's really incredible.

After dinner, we met up with even more people and took the tram to the south of Buda, where we went here.

A38, as it's called, is an old Russian ship that's been converted to a restaurant, bar, and concert location. The boyfriend of the student coordinator of AIT, the computer science program that goes to the language school with us, was in a band, and his band, Mary Popkids, was headlining a concert last night. I saw three bands: the first was a bad punk band, the second was a really interesting band that combined jazzy music featuring a sax, guitar, bass and two female vocalists with electronic/dance music, and the third was Mary Popkids, which was a pretty good indie rock band. It was a good venue and a neat concert. There was a strange mix of people there, many foreigners and many Hungarians, people who looked like they were in their 40s and people who looked like they were 14, people who looked distinctly hipster-ish and very muscular guys wearing uncomfortably tight shirts. It was a weird mix of people, but definitely a good time. Though the bands themselves were confusing, as they almost all sang in English, without much of an accent, and then spoke perfect Hungarian. It was disorienting.

I left around midnight, with two other people, and on the way back to the tram, I had my most exciting adventure in Budapest. We were walking along, talking amongst ourselves, when a police car drives up and stops along the sidewalk in front of us. The officers step out and say something at us in Hungarian, a phrase that I don't recognize. When they see our blank stares, they switch to (very limited) English. We had been told by the program organizers that in Hungary the police have the right to stop anyone they want at any point without reason and ask to see ID. For us, that means a passport, to prove we were in the country legally I suppose. This was what they wanted. Unfortunately, none of us had our passports. One of us, my roommate, is an EU citizen and so showed his EU ID card, but the other guy and I had no identification other than our International Student ID Card, which we showed, hoping it would be enough. After about 15 minutes of the main officer communicating on the radio with someone while holding our ID and his partner just looking at us while we milled around uncomfortably, he eventually handed us back our cards and told us we could go. It was a terrifying experience. We didn't have our passports, so technically could've gotten into trouble. The officer didn't seem to believe me that Oberlin College was a real place, repeatedly asking about it. And they spoke very little English, so we really didn't know what was going on. I don't understand why they stopped us. Are they looking for people who are here illegally? This seems like an absurdly inefficient way to find them. Not to mention that they easily could've told us, foreigners who speak no Magyar, that we owed them a fine and we would have definitely paid it over, having no idea what was going on. It was a bizarre and terrifying experience, to be stopped after midnight on an empty street by police officers I have no effective way of communicating with...

And Friday.
I've been getting breakfast at the same pastry shop everyday because it's very tasty, convenient and cheap. Today I bought a cheese and tomato-ey thing (I really don't know any of the names), and the lady gave me a free, warm from the oven, cheese scone. I call it a scone because I think that's the translation, but it wasn't. It was more like a popover or a gougere, but it wasn't very airy, it was still fairly dense. It was incredibly tasty, better than the thing I wanted to buy, so I think I may have to try more of them.
For lunch, I went to the sandwich place that I had skipped on the day before. I got like 6 of the little devils, because they were small and cheap. I had one with sardines on it, one with caviar, one with camembert, one with salami, one with what I think was spiced cottage cheese (very interesting and pretty good, but not something I'll seek out), and one with a meat salad (kind of like a bologna salad). I more or less just pointed at random ones and said, I'll take that. It was delicious, and pretty cheap. On the way back, I stopped at a bakery near the language school and got a ... something. The dough was relatively dense and not particularly sweet, it was covered in chocolate on either end, had a light sprinkling of powdered sugar and had two hollowed out cores in it that were filled with bananas. It was very good, but I wish there had been more banana.
The Hungarian word I've gotten the most use out of so far is csapvíz (that i is the one character that I can't get while typing on the Hungarian keyboard setting for Windows, which means I have to copy it from somewhere else, making it the most annoying word to type so far). It means tapwater, and I've used it at every restaurant. I may say köszönöm and bocsánat more frequently (thank you and excuse me or sorry, respectively), but csapvíz has been the most useful. Ordering water in restaurants tends to result in them bringing you a bottle of water, and saying "tap water" in English isn't always understood. Csapvíz is, however, even if you mispronounce it slightly, making the most useful word I've learned.
After class, I returned to the post office for another attempt to buy the stamps that I need. This time I was successful, obtaining them without much problem. I also met an Australian woman who was traveling around Europe with some friends on vacation. They were going around a bunch of countries, to make it worth the trip, and had been in Budapest, left to go to Italy and then returned because they liked Budapest so much. She said Budapest had the best parties; she could go see the sights of Italy later in life, but the parties in Budapest are something she should experience now.
I then returned home, stopping along the way to buy groceries. I made dinner consisting of potatoes, leeks, mushrooms and eggs. I pan fried them all in some canola oil, adding balsamic vinegar and covering the pan after the leeks were added in order to steam them a little. It worked really well, much to my surprise. In the future, I probably won't wing it, but this time was a definite success. Then I headed out to ruin pubs. I met up with one group of people and we went to Szimpla, the oldest ruinpub in Budapest, which has its own garden that it shows movies in when the weather is warmer. I really need to take pictures of these places in order to explain them better, but Szimpla was huge and impressive. It's a very small, unassuming entrance, but when you walk in the place opens up. There are at least 5 separate bars in the pub, and many many separate rooms with various tables and chairs. The whole place is full of art work and artsy looking pieces, and the chairs and tables are very varied. We originally sat outside (the only place we could find an open table), where the table was pretty normal, but have the seats were taken from a train. The table next to us had a bathtub that had been cut open as a seat. It was all very strange, but really cool.
The people I was with decided to head in early, so I then met up with another group of friends in one of the most-incredibly located apartments, where we hung out for awhile before heading to yet another ruin pub, Fogas ház. This one was very different looking from Szimpla. It was smaller, with only one bar, one main room and two side rooms. The ceilings, however, were gigantic and it was in an old stone building, much more sparsely decorated than Szimpla. It wasn't quite as crowded, which was nice. While there, I met an American who works at a resort in Germany and talked to him for awhile about being in Europe and tourists, both being them and seeing them.
Anyways, then I made the long walk back to my apartment, the metro having closed a couple hours earlier. I really need to find out if a bus or tram runs to my apartment, because they run all night. Ah well.

Now, Thursday.
For lunch, I followed people to a sandwich shop a couple blocks away from the language school. The sandwiches looked tiny though, and I was hungry, so I headed next door to a chicken shop instead. I got a chicken sandwich with some liver on it, accompanied by a pickled cabbage stuffed pickle. I'm having a lot of liver here because it's really common and delicious. The sandwich was also very tasty, and about what you'd expect from a lightly fried chicken sandwich. The pickle was interesting, but not exceptional. There's a lot of pickles here too, which is kind of strange.
After class I went on a tour of the Jewish district, which is the area right around the language school. It was traditionally the part of Budapest where most of the Jews lived, and it was also the Jewish ghetto during the Nazi occupation. There are three large synagogues in the area, all of which I saw, and several more small synagogues. It still houses most of the Orthodox Jewish population of the city, and so is home to several kosher butchers, restaurants, and bakeries. But it's all the location of many of the new ruin pubs in Budapest, which leads to a strange mix of people. For example, Szimpla, the oldest ruinpub in Budapest (opened in 2001), is located right next to a mikveh, a traditional bath used for purification. It is definitely a strange mix.

Above are the three largest synagogues of the city, located in various places around the district. They're all very cool buildings, all more reminiscent, to me at least, of Middle Eastern, rather than European, architecture.
After we walked around for a while, we went over to a ruin pub, Lokal for a glass of mulled wine and to relax.

Mulled wine is everywhere in this country. It's delicious and perfect for the winter, and it's slightly different everywhere you try it. It's normally a red wine, but not always, and a different combination of spices are used, depending on the bar. The mulled wine at Lokal was very good, with a good balance of everything.
I then went out to dinner with a group of people, to a place on Ráday utca. We headed down there because we knew there were a lot of restaurants in that area, but we didn't have anything specifically in mind. After walking around for a bit, we found what looked like a good (and not too expensive) place, where I had another glass of mulled wine (it was cold out!), mushroom soup (gombasleves), and fried ribs with honey and chili, which were short ribs (pork, I believe), not actually fried but roasted, served with a mild, sweet chili sauce. They was good, nice and messy, but I was hoping they would be spicier. That seems to be a theme here. Ah well.
Afterwards I went over to the apartment of some of the people in the program, who were hosting a party to try and get everyone together, since we've never all been in one place except for language school. I was dubious that many people could fit in one apartment, but their place was gigantic. It was easily two to three times as big as my apartment, for the same number of people. It was by the river, and so a little more difficult for me to get to, and the road I walked down to get to it seemed a little sketchy, similar to mine, but the apartment building itself was very nice. They had a courtyard. And, as I said, the apartment was gigantic. I think there around 20 or so people who showed up, and they all fit within one of the bedrooms. It was a good opportunity to talk to people, and I hope that similar parties are thrown in the future. I left a little early since I didn't want to miss the last metro back to my apartment and didn't want to be out too late on a Thursday. I ended up managing to catch the last metro, so my timing was perfect.
And that's all that happened on Thursday, more or less.

Alright so I have many days I need to blog about. I guess I'll start with Wednesday.
Hungarian class is more Hungarian class. It is a really interesting language, but the class itself is incredibly draining. We learn mostly vocabulary, which is hard to retain, with a little bit of grammar, which can be complicated. Hungarian still has a fair amount of exceptions and irregular verbs, like English. However, a lot of how things work are based on how the words sound and hopefully it's the kind of thing you develop an ear for. Not sure how much of an ear I'll develop in a semester, but I'll certainly improve.
For lunch, I wandered around with some people to find a place to eat. We eventually settled on an etterem, the standard word for restaurant. It served Hungarian food, and you pointed to the dishes you wanted and they'd pile it on a plate, then weigh it to determine how much you owed. It was pretty tasty and pretty cheap but almost everything was fried, which was unfortunate. I got a salad as well, but it was drenched in dressing and so not incredibly tasty. On the way back from lunch, we stopped at a fancy chocolate store and I bought several different chocolate bars. One was pure dark chocolate, 70%, one was dark chocolate with lavender, and the final was dark chocolate with Sichuan pepper. I ate the lavender one on the way back to class, but the other two are as of now untouched. The shop was also interesting because a lot of the chocolate bars were labeled in French, so it was kind of nice to be able to understand what the items in the store actually said.
After class, I tried to buy the revenue stamp we need in order to get the residence permit. As an American citizen, I don't need a visa to enter Hungary and I can stay here as a tourist for up to 90 days without anything beyond my passport. But, since I'm going to be here for longer, I need to get a residence permit. So, I went off to the post office with a group of people to try and get these expensive and necessary stamps. Once there, I did not do so. There was a group of 5 of us trying to buy the stamps and we weren't exactly sure what we needed. There was one person at the post office who spoke any English, and she didn't speak very much. While we had the Hungarian word that we needed, we thought we only needed one large stamp and the teller started counting off a bunch of smaller ones, so we decided to play it safe and confirm what exactly the stamps were with our program's student coordinator. The teller was very annoyed with us as we told her, in broken Magyar, that we didn't want (without an object), as we backed out of the post office. We then ran into another group of BSM students who were trying to do the same thing. They were confident that the stamps they found were the right ones and so did purchase them.  I was still unconvinced and decided that I didn't want to risk spending about $80 on the wrong set of stamps.
Afterwards, I walked with a group of people to find Csak a jó sörök, or Only good beer, a good beer store in Budapest. On the way we passed by this cool looking statues. There are neat statues all over Budapest, and I should really take more pictures of them.

Anyways, getting to the beer store involved me riding the villamos or tram for the first time since I got here. The metro pass I got covers all forms of public transportation, which means I didn't have to pay anything extra, and it was a very nice and simple experience. I then led the group of people away down side streets looking for a beer store whose name I couldn't recall as it started to get dark. Luckily, we were in a nicer part of Pest so it wasn't too shady. Eventually though, we found the store. And it was fantastic. I'm definitely going to be be going there on a regular basis. They had a wide selection of beers, many I hadn't heard of, some I had. There were some American beers, but a good variety of Europeans as well, including Belgian. I bought four beers, two from a local Hungarian brewery, one a strong Belgian ale, and the last an interesting looking Dutch beer. To date, I've tried one of them, the Black Rose, which is a strong Hungarian black beer. It was sweeter than I expected, but still very tasty.
After the beer store, we headed out for an early dinner. We found Liszt Ferenc tér, named for the famous actually-Hungarian-and-not-German composer Franz Liszt. His real name is Ferenc, but I guess the German was more palatable to people. Also his last name translates to flour, which I find amusing. This square was filled with many very tasty looking restaurants and wasn't as expensive as the other restaurant-filled area I know of, Ráday utca. We picked the most crowded restaurant and headed inside. The meal was delicious, probably the best I've had so far. It was expensive for Budapest, but still relatively reasonable, and a healthy amount of food. I had bone marrow and roasted goose leg with a glass of dry Tokaj wine, a white wine that was fairly fruity and not all that dry.

 

It was delicious. They cut the marrow out of the bone for you, which felt pretty fancy. And it was as tasty as bone marrow can be. I've been looking for it because it's apparently a Hungarian delicacy but I haven't seen it on any menus. The goose was delicious as well, and I ate it straight off the bone, though I felt a little uncultured for doing so. Other people got other delicious dishes. These included duck breast, a traditional garlic cream soup, pumpkin risotto with blue cheese, chicken páprikas, and a meat and something soup (this is what I get for writing this post so far after the events transpired...)

They were all delicious. It was a pretty posh looking place to; I felt a little out of place with my t-shirt and backpack, but it was worth it.
Afterwards, I returned to my apartment where Boris and some people were hanging out. I joined them, and we tried some Unicum, a special Hungarian bitter liquor that's very popular here but not liked anywhere else in the world. It's interesting, very herbally; it has a good initial taste I find, but the finish is very bitter, too much so for my taste. The Unicum itself pours a dark brown, a most unappealing color. Anyways, that was all good fun but I blame the hanging out with people for why I was unable to blog, being too tired and too late for me to put words to paper.
Anyways, that's it for Wednesday, now to Thursday!

I apologize for the lack of post for today and yesterday. I've been busy learning Hungarian, eating, and hanging out with people. Rest assured that a post will soon be forthcoming that details the events of the past couple days.

Now, as I've gone to class for several days, I've started to fall into a pattern. I wake up, grab a pastry on the way to school, have class, eat lunch, have class, mess around, come home, eat dinner, internet and go to sleep. That's not to say things aren't exciting and interesting, but to say that my blog posts may get slightly less exciting.

There's always food to describe though. That's the most interesting things that happened in the past couple days, so don't worry. The pastry I got yesterday was a very good, simple, savory affair. It was long, straight, flaky dough, similar to croissant in consistency though not as buttery or as sweet. It was flavored with various seeds, like sesame and poppy, and was very tasty. Probably my favorite so far. Today I tried a cheesy pastry. It had a similar consistency to the others (this is a popular consistency), but was shaped like a hollow croissant, with a thin layer of cheese in the middle. It was a mild, slightly sweet cheese, very subtle. Again, very tasty.

Much vocabulary has been learned in the past couple days, with some grammar to accompany it. There are several different classes of verbs, it seems, and we're going through them in the present before doing anything in the past or future. This means I can only speak in the present in Hungarian, which limits the amount of conversations I can have...not that my vocabulary is extensive enough to allow many topics of conversation anyways.

Lunch has been exciting. There's a street one tram stop away from the language school, Ráday utca, which contains many many different restaurants. It feels more touristy than most places in Budapest, with definitely a very good English speaker on staff and prices that are a little more expensive, but the food is very good and still affordable. I went to Ráday utca both yesterday and today with people, to two different restaurants. Yesterday we went to Calvin Cafe, a little Hungarian place, where I had a glass of Dreher and Hungarian potato noodles, like I had on Sunday, served with ewe's cheese and smoked meat, according to the menu. It was a tasty dish, with melted sheep cheese and smoked ham. Not incredibly exciting, but very tasty. I really like these potato noodles. They're very small, kind of like miniature gnocchi and seem to go well with a variety of flavors. They're toothsome, giving some resistance and quite enjoyable. Today I went with people to a tapas place right next door to Calvin Cafe called Pata Negra. We all got two or three small plates and shared. Among our dishes were oyster mushrooms cooked in garlic, oxtail, fried eggplants with red wine caramel, aged manchego, spinach with chickpeas and cumin, sauteed eggplant with olive oil, duck breasts with roasted apples, pork loin with manchego, a really nice chicken dish that I can't remember the details of, and possibly more. It was very tasty. I also discovered 3 other people who love bone marrow and have been disappointed that they haven't been able to find it yet. Supposedly it's a classic luxury dish here, but I haven't seen it on the menu yet. I will manage to find it though...The only downside of this meal was that it took a very long time. We didn't get our first dishes until 50 minutes into our hour long lunch break. Needless to say, we were late. We all got back about a half hour late, much to the annoyance of our teacher, but it was worth it. The food was very good, and catching up was not a problem. However, we had also been a little late coming back from lunch the day before, so perhaps tomorrow we shouldn't go all the way down to Ráday utca for lunch...

Anyways, more class was had, with more Hungarian. It is possible in Hungarian to turn most nouns into verbs by simply adding a -zik to the end of the word. Thus tévé (TV) becomes tévézik (watching TV) and pálinka becomes pálinkázik. This is a useful little trick that seems to be quite common in Hungarian.

Yesterday after class I went and met an old colleague of Prof. Pat Simen, the professor I did research with last semester at Oberlin. Péter Várkonyi researches and teaches at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, the university here that my program is affiliated with, though our classes are at an international campus on other side of the city that Dr. Várkonyi was not aware existed. His claim to fame is the mathematical proving of the existence of the gömböc, which is, according to Wikipedia "convex three-dimensional homogeneous body which, when resting on a flat surface, has just one stable and one unstable point of equilibrium." I don't know what that sentence means, but it is apparently relatively famous, as it was part of Hungary's pavilion in the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, so Dr. Várkonyi got to travel along with it. He was a nice guy and he recommended some places I should see while I'm here, praising the hiking in the Buda hills, among other things. 

Anyways, afterwards I returned to my apartment, where I rested briefly before heading out with my roommate to meet a group of people for Chinese food. It was planned by one of the computer science students who is Taiwanese and he apparently had called the place up, told them he had ten people and got a set menu for us to enjoy. It was the Chinese new year yesterday (新年快乐!）, so it seemed like an appropriate meal. I also got to practice a little bit of my Chinese while at the restaurant, which was good, but I can definitely tell I'm out of practice. We managed to get a bit of baijiu 白酒 to celebrate the new year, but not everyone was willing to join us. baijiu is a very popular mainland Chinese liquor that everyone drinks, in this respect one could call it the Chinese pálinka, as one of my friends described it. It's very strong, generally at least 50%, burns, and is made from sorghum, so it tastes slightly like anise. It's an interesting experience, and an appropriate one for the new year I thought. The meal was good and very filling, but not especially authentic. Best Chinese food I've had since I've gotten here, but I'm definitely on the look out for better stuff. Sometime soon I will head over to the open air Chinese market, and I now know several people who would be very willing to join me in my adventures.

Today, I played some games of Magic in a cafe after classes before returning home and making myself an incredibly exciting dinner consisting of a salami and cheese sandwich. I haven't done practically any cooking for myself since I've gotten here, and I probably should soon. But it's a little disorienting being in a new kitchen with someone else's pots and pans and utensils. I recently discovered that we have a large amount of tupperware, so I'll at least be able to save any leftovers, but our oven is broken, and our landlord's had a hard time finding a replacement he can buy without buying a new stove as well. He'll hopefully have it fixed by the weekend. The sooner the better, because I'd really like to bake something...

That's it for now. Turn it again tomorrow for another (possibly) exciting adventure.

Szia.

So yesterday I managed to get up early (for a weekend), ate a quick sandwich composed of caviar, sour cream and arugula, and joined up with some other students on the program to take a tour of the Buda side of the city. We met at the Lutheran Church at Déak tér, which I had tried to find Saturday night. It's not nearly as impressive as the Szent Istvan Basilika.

We then grabbed a bus to get over the river and for the first time, I crossed the Danube to leave Pest and enter Buda. The bus wound its way up Buda for some time (Buda is much hillier than Pest, which is largely flat), until we got off in an impressive old square. Buda is much older than Pest, having been settled by various peoples since Roman times, while Pest has largely been meadowland for most of the city's history. The square featured a very impressive church, Mátyás Templom, named after one of the two most famous kings of Hungary (the other being Szent Istvan), who ruled during the second half of the 15th century.

It's a fantastic church, featuring art nouveau tiles, as our guide told us. The square is known as fisherman's square, or something similar, as it used to be the area where the fishermen sold their wares, even though it's rather far from the Danube. The reason for this is that the Danube flooded quite frequently, so anything setup near the Danube would not be very permanent.

It's a very neat, old-looking structure that provides a fantastic view of the river and both sides of the city. Our guide informed us, however, that it was only built to look medieval. Along with most of the other impressive buildings of the city, like the Mágyás Templom right near by and the Szent Istvan Basilika across the river, this structure was built in the late 19th century, to celebrate the 1000th anniversary of the founding of the state of Hungary, the coming of the Magyars to the region. It's kind of shocking, because I assumed the buildings were much older than 100 years, but I guess that explains why Budapest is called a 19th century city. This was also the time that the first metro line was put down, the oldest one in Europe. I've only rode on this line once, but it's very nice. It's very close to the surface, and very nicely decorated, with tiles everywhere. It looks very different than the second metro line, which I ride everyday.
The statue in front of it is of Szent Istvan, the first Christian king of Hungary, who converted the nation to Catholicism to placate his neighbors. Apparently Catholicism was chosen rather than Orthodoxy because the neighboring Catholic nations were more powerful and the Catholic Church in Rome was more willing to send him priests to help convert the populace.

 The doubled cross is really common in statues and paintings of Szent Istvan or other religious figures. According to our guide it's associated with evangelism and conversion of people. I had always associated it with the Orthodox Church, where it's called the patriarchal cross and quite common, so I was very confused to see it so frequently here in this historically Catholic nation. I'm still not quite clear on it, as I haven't seen it associated with other Catholic nations, but I suppose it's more of a generic cross variant than one associated with any particular branch.
Anyways, the view afforded from this fake-old structure is still incredible, with views of both sides of the city.

 That's Szent Istvan Basilika in the center picture. It really towers over everything else in Pest.
The square in front of Mágyás Templom also features a government building of some type (I forget who works there) and a neat monument memorializing those who died in the plague, since Budapest was hit twice. The building is also an example of what some of the architecture looked like before everything was renovated and done over for the millennium celebration, so it's interesting in that way as well.

Also in the corner of this square was a statue of the patron or protector goddess of Budapest (I wasn't quite clear), Pallasz Athéné:

Or Pallas Athena, another name of Athena, or Minerva, the Greek/Roman goddess of wisdom, among other things, and protector of many many cities, including Athens. I thought it was interesting, a representation of the mixed heritage of the city. I'm not sure quite where to place it, but I imagine it has to do with the Enlightenment and Europe's rediscovery and sudden fascination with classical antiquity.
Down the road from Athena was a much more interesting and practical statue. It is of one of the finest hussars to serve Maria-Therese, the Habsburg queen, a tactician by the name of András Hadik. While the statue makes him look fairly impressive, he was actually a rather squat and bow-legged man, but obviously that would not have made nearly as good a statue, so his appearance was changed to reflect his importance.

The statue is currently important, however, to students, who rub the horse's testicles for good luck before their exams. Our guide, at any rate, swears that it's true. Maybe later in the year I'll return to the statue and see if there are any students doing so, or if it's just the guide pulling our leg.
We walked around Castle Hill, the area where the castle is located, which was hollowed out in order to serve as a bunker and hospital during World War II. It's currently a museum, but the entire hill is still hollow.
We then walked towards the castle museum, which led us past the president's residences and offices. In Hungary, the president is elected by the parliament, and is the secondmost powerful position, after the prime minister.

Saturday, the day before we were here, there were people protesting in front of the president's houses. It has recently come to light that the president, who was an Olympic athlete and then received his doctorate in sports studies or something similar, probably plagiarized the vast majority of his thesis, over 90% of it, translating it word for word from a Bulgarian paper on the same topic. People are unhappy about this, and are now calling for his resignation. He's also apparently made kind of a fool of himself by claiming to be a protector of the Hungarian language, and having that be important to his platform, and given speeches that are grammatically incorrect and mispronouncing words.
Anyways, past the president's house we walked towards the palace (I think), which consists of a series of very beautiful, French-looking (to my eyes) buildings.

We then walked through the museum, which consisted of many different architecture samples and items from the palace's history since its initial construction in the 1200s. The town has been sieged and won and lost many times, by the Mongols, the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburgs, and various Western powers. Much of the city was destroyed during WWII as well, so it has undergone many different periods of rebuilding.
We had to buy a special ticket to be able to take photos inside the museum, so I did not do so. We spent the time just talking to the guide, who complained to us about the local politics and the warm winter we were having. As far as politics go, the situation is not very good. The previous party in power, the socialists or liberal party, was corrupt and very obvious about it, with lots of giving and taking of money. The current party in power, our guide fears, is not much better but much subtler. They are trying to consolidate their power, having over a 2/3 majority in parliament, and getting slightly autocratic. The government has also extended non-voting citizenship to ethnic Hungarians living outside the present borders of Hungary (the borders were shrunk drastically by the Treaty of Trianon after World War I). While at present that doesn't mean much, our guide feared that these citizens would soon be giving voting rights and, as they live far away from Budapest, they would vote uninformed, simply supporting the government that gave them citizenship. She also doesn't like that the second most powerful party currently is a far right-wing one. She didn't explain any of their policies, but I assume it's similar to France and Sweden and other European countries, where parties like le Front National of France operate on very xenophobic platforms.
Afterwards, we headed down the square towards the Chain Bridge, one of the biggest bridges that cross the Danube, and got a nice dinner at a little place a side street there. I had pork golyás served on top of potato pasta, which was slightly gnocchi-like and very tasty. I accompanied my meal with a small elder pálinka, which I assume was elderflower or elderberry. In any case, it was very tasty.
Returning to Pest, we walked back past Szent Istvan Basilika, which is even more impressive at night while lit up.

Boris and I then entertained some of the other students on the tour at our apartment. All the students agreed that the immediate area around our apartment is much more sketchy than any other neighborhood they've seen so far in Budapest, but I'm definitely growing to like it.

Anyways, I think that's all for this post. You'll have to excuse my slight falling behind, but this was a lot of information, and I'm quite tired.
Viszlát.

So last night me and my roommate headed out to try and meet up with several people at a church, that we supposedly wouldn't be able to miss, in one of the most central areas of Budapest, Deák ter. From there, the plan was to head to Gödör, a club that features Hungarian rock and pop bands, in order to see what that would be like. On the subway on the way there, we ran into another group of BSM students heading to the same area, but looking for a bar (which they couldn't remember the name of) instead. We parted ways with them, and proceeded to try and find the church. In the area of Deák ter is the cathedral of Szent Istvan (Saint Stephen I, the first Christian King of Hungary), a magnificent and incredibly large old cathedral. Thinking this was the obvious church, we headed towards it. Upon reaching it, we found no one and so proceeded to wander around the area trying to find the club instead, figuring we had shown up too late. Turns out, it was the wrong church, but I didn't realize that until this morning when I looked up the area and found a completely separate, much smaller Lutheran church two blocks south of Szent Istvan.
After wandering around in circles for about 30 minutes, we eventually discovered the club. It took so long to find because it was actually underground and the signs pointing out the location of the club were very discrete. The large groups of people around it were not, but for some reason it never clicked with us. However, we still couldn't find anyone near the club and, as the club required a ticket that cost more money than we were willing to part with at the moment, we left and tried to find another group of people who were currently at Bobek, a ruin pub several blocks away. After even more lost wandering, we found them and I finally got to try pálinka, the Hungarian brandy. I tried a bit of plum pálinka and some black cherry pálinka. They were both rather strong, and tasted like it, but were interestingly flavored and pretty tasty. Brandy is definitely a misnomer, however, as they share no resemblance to distilled wine, neither in the process it is made or in the taste that results. It's not a sweet liqueur either, though there is some mild fruitiness going on. All in all, definitely an interesting and bracing drink.
A note: there was much lost wandering because most people still do not have phones and, even if phones are had, it is very difficult to get the right number in because you need a code that goes before it. It's either +36, Hungary's country code, or 006, the mobile number code, and seems to change depending on the phone. Also, I discovered that my phone stopped working randomly about halfway through the night, only allowing me to place 'emergency calls,' for whatever reason. Restarting it fixed that, but I am very confused by how mobile phones work in this country...
The rest of the evening was spent wandering around Budapest, heading to another bar, where we met up with the people we had found on the subway, and a different club, where we were the some of the only people there for quite some time. Everything is cheaper though, so entrance to the club was not outrageous, and beer was affordable. It was a nice evening, and I was able to talk with a group of people I hadn't really interacted with that much. I ended up heading home after the metro had stopped, so I had to walk back. However, the walk was only around 30 minutes, and there was a guy who lived in the same area, so it was not too bad.
Today, I took the opportunity to relax. I slept in, waking up in the afternoon only because I had shopping I wanted to do. I finally went grocery shopping, picking up many different things, including sour cream (since it's fundamental to Hungarian cuisine) and caviar (because it cost a dollar), as well as more good looking bread. I've been very impressed with the milk here, it's very tasty and creamy; I think I'm drinking milk with 1.5% milkfat (there's a giant 1.5% on the carton), slightly more than American low-fat milk, and it tastes much richer. Afterwards, I finally, due to the phone my landlord gave me, managed to get in touch with a contact I received through my aunt of a graduate student living in Budapest. I made tentative plans to meet up with him in the coming week, and, more importantly, he told me I could buy a pillow and comforter at the Ikea in Budapest, only three stops away on the metro.
So, I went to Ikea, and was incredibly confused by the layout. While I was, I tried to use a real Hungarian keyboard, and they're pretty confusing.

Lots of extra buttons are needed for all the various accented vowels. Anyways, I eventually managed to find everything I needed and left, having spent more at the Ikea than at any other place so far in Budapest.
On the way back, I bought some roasted chestnuts off a guy on the street near the metro stop, and they turned out to be delicious. I also took the following pictures of my neighborhood, because it never ceases to amuse me. This is the beautiful old train station one block from my house:

And this is the view from the same location, facing the other side of the street:

The contrast between the old and the new is always fascinating, but here it's also kind of amusing because, unlike most of what I saw in China, the new is not the tall glistening sky scrapers of business, but the cheap shops and crass signs that represent the more distasteful side of capitalism. I'll take more photos as I notice it, but it's something I was talking to a friend about. The example above is a little different, because it's of local tacky shops, but he called it corporate graffiti, where a beautiful old building is covered in a sign or advertisement. It happens everywhere I suppose, definitely in America, but it's really noticeable here, where most of the buildings are very 19th century and so seem really out of place with the advertisements.
Anyways, I returned home and then made myself a dinner of the pork knuckle from last night, turning it into a sandwich with mustard, sour cream, fried onions, and arugula. It was tasty but, of course, very rich. I thought putting it on the sandwich would make it more manageable; it did, but only barely.
Anyways, that's it for my relaxing day. Tomorrow I'm off to tour Buda castle, on the other side of the River Danube. It's apparently a beautiful and interesting castle, and I'm looking forward to actually seeing the river.

And a quick addendum to this post. Hungary has a very strong drinking culture. Home brewing your own pálinka, as I think I mentioned before, is very common, wine making has been happening in the country for ages, and alcohol is exceedingly cheap everywhere. Cheers is Egészségedre,which means literally, to your health.And I believe there's a more formal version, which isn't only used when drinking (it can also be a polite way to say goodbye or something similar). However, clinking your glasses together as you toast is (supposedly) frowned upon, as that's how the Habsburgs celebrated their consolidation of power over Hungary in the mid 1800s. Whether the story is true or not I don't know. And whether this is a custom or just an urban legend, I'm not sure. We have been told that it's so, but I haven't been observant enough while I'm out to be able to weigh in.

Today was the first day where our classes took on the schedule they'll have for the rest of the semester. Class start at nine, go to 12:30, with a 30 minute break in the middle, and then continue after an hour lunch break until 4, with a brief 15 minutes partway through. It's a lot of Hungarian learning, but the language is interesting, and it's not a bad way to interact with people.
The morning consisted of another pastry run. The lady who runs it doesn't speak any English, which is actually kind of nice, as I got to practice my (very limited) Hungarian. I asked if the filling of one of the pastries was sour cream (turns out it was cheese, pretty tasty actually), and could understand what she said when she told me the price. So, progress!
The thing with the classes is that we're moving extremely fast, since we're covering a semester's worth of Hungarian in about two weeks. This is good and bad. It's nice because we do learn large amounts of things everyday, but it makes it harder to retain things. There's no down time to allow the vocabulary and grammar that we learned to sink in. There's not much time to review something individually that you had difficulty with.
So class was more learning of magyarul (Hungarian language). I've noticed that it's surprisingly difficult to pronounce normal letters completely different on a regular basis. Getting used to the s as a sh sound (hence the pronunciation of Budapest as Budapesht), the c as always soft, like an English s, and the special two-letter consonants as one letter takes some time. And that's not even counting the sounds that don't exist in English or that I'm still having trouble differentiating, such as the gy and all the o's and u's. I guess this is something I did when I learned Chinese and French as well, but for some reason it seems a little more difficult here. I think the thing with Chinese is that every word, essentially, looked different enough from English or French that I had no trouble seeing it as Chinese, whereas with Hungarian there are some words which I could see being used in English.
The other funny thing I noticed today is that the teachers at several points emphasized the Hungarian is not like German or the Slavic languages: they don't have overly long words and they don't like having words that are almost all consonants. While they're not as bad as German, compared to English, Hungarian has some vary large words, the result of being a language that adds suffixes and prefixes onto words in order to conjugate them, position them, make them objects and everything else essentially. And they do tend to insert vowels to words at about the same frequency as consonants, but again, there's a lot of consonants happening.
Anyways, for lunch I traveled with three friends from my group down to the market that we had gone to on Wednesday for lunch. I settled on a dish consisting of pork and potatoes with a side of sauerkraut and a Dreher Bock, a dark Hungarian beer, for my lunch. Like most meals I've had here, it was rather rich. Not as bad as the sausage I had had last time at the market, but still. It was, however, very tasty.
After an afternoon of more class, we had a short presentation from a group that works with the language school. They were a tour group who would be going to Buda castle this weekend and various other places during our remaining week and a half of language classes. In addition to talking about this tour, which I signed up for, the woman also gave us a list of markets in various places, including one very close to my apartment that I must therefore try, and clubs and bars for people to find on the weekend. Among other things, she recommended we check out ruinpubs (romkocsmák), which is apparently a big thing in Budapest. These are a little hard to describe, but I'll give it a try. There's also a website, ruinpubs.com, that gives some examples and pictures. They're basically bars in sort of run down buildings, sometimes containing gardens and tending to be filled with broken down cars or other bits of trash. They're very artsy and apparently the hip thing nowadays.
So, after getting recommendations about what to do, I returned to my apartment with my roommate. Later, Boris and I met Bob, who lives two blocks away, for dinner. We went to a pizza place near the train station but I discovered something more interesting on the menu. To compliment my Gusser bock, a dark German beer, I had pig's knuckle served with fried onions. This was delicious, with the pork being very tender and fatty with the crispy skin still on and the onions were perfect. It was also, perhaps unsurprisingly, very rich, so I could finish about half of it. I'm actually kind of impressed that the food is rich enough to give me pause. I eat a lot and am not afraid of rich, fatty, meaty foods. But sometimes I feel that this cuisine is just ridiculous. Despite the fact that the food is so heavy, I think I'm actually not consuming that many calories, simply because I tend to have trouble finishing any of my meals. Oy.
Anyways, that's all for this blog post. Later tonight I will have up a post about the rest of last night and today.
Csáó.

I apologize for the lack of post last night. I was exhausted from a long day of classes and little sleep the night before and headed off to bed early. But a lot of stuff happened in the past two days, so I will do my best to get as much of it onto the internet as possible.
Wednesday night I was not very tired and so got little sleep, but this was possibly also due to the excitement/anxiety over the coming day. My roommate and I had to be at the Language School by 8 for registration and we weren't quite sure how to find it, so we left a little before 7:30. Two stops on the metro later, we hopped off and walked north, towards the school.  We found the building the school was housed in, a tall building on the corner that we had to enter through old iron gates and then ended up in a courtyard that looked like it had been around for awhile. We took the elevator up to floor 4 and found the room the school was hosted in. After determining that we had to pay in cash, we left to find an ATM. After returning I handed over my sum of money, all in cash, and received a workbook, no receipt, in return. We then had 50 minutes to kill before classes actually started. They told us registration started at 8; they didn't tell us it would only take 1 minute.
A note about Budapest, as I've noticed it. Buildings  generally aren't super clean, with paint chipping off walls in lots of places, and lots of payments happen in cash. Despite the comments I've made about things looking kind of shady, it's a fairly safe city, with almost nonexistent violent crime. At this point, it's more of a joke among the students than anything else. All the rooms are nice, clean and heated, so the focus has obviously been more on renovating the inside rather than the outside. Anyways, back to the narrative.
So Boris and I walked around the immediate vicinity for a while before returning to a coffee shop to sit down and have a drink before class. The coffee, like most things, was very cheap, about 1.50 for a cappucino or a macchiato. Coffee straight seems to be more difficult to order, as it's called coffee long. Not that I'm much of a drinker of coffee anyways. But I figured some caffeine would help get me through the day. As Boris and I sat down, Bob and his roommate entered into the cafe, so they joined us and we talked a bit before class. Bob's roommate David is also at Pomona (and a math major, obviously), and they knew each other before hand.
After chatting for a bit, we headed on up stairs to our classes. There are four sections, each taught by a different teacher, composed of about 10 or 15 students. Besides the students on my program, Budapest Semesters in Mathematics, there were also around 10 people on the AIT program, a computer science semester also in Budapest. So there are around 50 or 60 people taking classes at the moment, with an unknown number of BSM students still to come.
Now Magyar. We spent most of the rest of the day in intensive classes, where the teacher did her best to speak only Hungarian (though there were many necessary breaks in English). Magyar is a strange language: its closest relatives are Finnish and Estonian, though those are distant, it functions primarily by adding suffixes to conjugate its words, both nouns and verbs, and it has many strange sounds. On the upside, pronunciation is pretty consistent with no silent letters. The downside is I, and everyone else I've talked to, has trouble pronouncing several of these letters. Every vowel, a, i, e, o, and u (y being a consonant) has an accented counterpart, corresponding to short and long, respectively. A is pronounced closer to oh, for example, while a' is pronounced like ah. That's the other thing, as the only accents are single or double lines (more on the double later), Hungarians seem pretty lazy with how they're written. While they're technically drawn going up from left to right, like an accent aigu in French, they seem to be all over the place and frequently just a straight line. Now, the o and u have four forms, with a short and long umlauted form in addition to the normal ones. It is these vowels that are the most difficult: hearing the difference  between these o's and u's and being able to pronounce them is hard, as the sounds don't really exist (at least exist as separate letters) in English or even French or Chinese, as far as I can make out. And then there are the consonants. There are more than in English, with some two letter combinations, such as ny, ly, and gy that count as single consonants and it is the gy that is the hardest. It appears to be pretty frequently used, showing up in magyar, egy (one), vagyok (I am), hogy (how) and several other places as well. And the pronunciation is weird and seems to change depending on context. When in the middle of the word it seems like a gY, with the g being swallowed and the sound being predominantly the y. When its at the end of the word, it becomes like a yj, though slightly different. This makes things difficult, as it is a pretty important consonant.
Anyways, around noon that first day we headed out on a tour of the area with some local university students. We walked along, talking about various things, and headed to the Central Market Hall, where we ate lunch. There were all sorts of options, with gulya's (that's singular, the ' being an accent; and it's goulash, though a soup rather than a stew) and langos (a kind of Hungarian fried dough pizza) being the most popular options, but I opted for some sausage. Here, I made a mistake. I severely underestimated how rich the sausage would be. I saw some little old ladies ordering one sausage so I figured, I'm hungry, I eat a lot, I'll go for two. So I got a blood sausage and a liver sausage, which each came with a slice of bread and some mustard. I got a cup of hot mulled wine to wash it down and headed over to a table to eat. I couldn't finish one. They were incredibly rich, fatty, and delicious. The liver one didn't taste overly much of liver nor the blood one of blood, but they were both very tasty. I unfortunately got about half way through one and a quarter way through the other before giving up and offering it to the people around me. Only one person took me up on my offer, but she agreed that it was indeed delicious and rich.
While at lunch, I talked with various people and discovered that another Oberlin math major was also on the program, which neither of us realized until recently. I also met people who were friends with other students at Oberlin whom I knew. It's kind of strange, realizing how small the world is, when I can randomly meet up with these friends of friends halfway around the world. This is also the only place I've been where almost everyone has heard of Oberlin and knows what it is; probably, as one of them pointed out, because they go to similar schools and likely applied to it themselves.
So after lunch we headed back and continued our Magyar lessons. After class, I met up with a student who played Magic, and we played ourselves a couple games at the coffee shop on the street while enjoying a Dreher, a Hungarian lager. I then headed back to the apartment, determined to find a cheap, nice restaurant in the area. In this, things did not go quite perfectly. There's a large mall across the train tracks from my apartment, so I decided to head over that way to see if I had any luck. Admittedly, this is not the best location for a small, Hungarian restaurant, but I did manage to find a crepe place and had a goat cheese and olive crepe, which was very tasty. I tried ordering it in Hungarian (after reading the description on the English menu), but obviously messed up, as the server had no idea what I was saying. So I repeated it in English and ate my meal.
I then returned to the apartment, where I was to meet with my landlord about the various things that need fixing and the rent. He showed an hour and a half later than we expected, due to a miscommunication and we spent a good hour and change going over everything. He told us how to work mostly everything we were having issues with, though the wifi is still a mystery. We decided to email the students who had stayed in the apartment the previous semester, who managed to get it working, and he left after we finished taking care of everything. He was a very nice man, allowing us to only pay a half month rent for January, though his name is Attila, as in the Hun. While the Huns actually have nothing to do with Hungary, being two different ethnic groups (the Huns and the Magyars) with different histories, there is apparently a long tradition of confusing the two, owing partially due to Hungarians' own desire to claim Hunnish history as part of their own. The Magyars were another horse-riding, bow-wielding group of invaders who came from the East and raided Europe, but they came in the mid 800s and stayed, forming a permanent civilization. This migration explains why Magyar is not a Slavic or Germanic language, like the surrounding languages, since the Magyars brought their language with them from the West of Russia, where these Uralic people lived.
Anyways, I crashed afterwards and, upon waking, determined that I need to get a comforter or something, as the mattress of the bed is very thin, more like a futon than an actual mattress. On the way to school this morning, Boris and I stopped in a little bakery that spoke no English and so pointed to two random things to try for breakfast. Boris got a crescent shaped bread, called a kifli I believe, that turned out to be stuffed with a sweet, chocolaty filling, and I got what appeared to be a croissant with sesame seeds on top. It also had a surprise filling: a hotdog. It was actually pretty tasty, so I ate it without complaints. Hungarian class was pretty much the same as before, though we had a different teacher who did, I think, a better job, explaining more of the words a little better. More vocabulary, about foods and colors, were added, as well as some elementary grammar on conjugations of verbs and declensions (as they're apparently called) of nouns. Because the verb is always conjugated in a distinct way for the subject, the subject is often dropped, especially if it would be repeated (the exception is for the singular third person, where the verb 'to be' is implied; instead of saying "I student am," the sentence is just "he student"). But the verb ending depends on how the verb is being used (with a direct or indirect object, for example) and the sound it makes. The ending for first person will be either -ok or -ek depending on what vowels appear in the word when it doesn't have the ending. The 'deep' or 'back' vowels get an -ok, o being itself a deep vowel, while the 'high' or 'front' vowels get an -ek, with e also being a high vowel, and if there's a mixture of the two categories, the deep ending is always used. So after covering this and how to conjugate nouns to be objects, we left the school, grabbed a bite to eat from a fast Turkish place near the school, and walked the 30 or so minutes to the university, where we will be taking math classes in a couple weeks.
Turkish places, serving gyros, seem to be everywhere, as well as Chinese-ish places. It's very strange, as they are the most visible and obvious, while it appears you have to search for Hungarian food. Apparently mealtime is considered a big deal in Hungary, but it seems they lack the pride in national food that the French, for example, have.
Our visit to the university consisted of mainly bureaucratic stuff and meetings, with us going over safety and what we needed to do for classes before math starts. We also had an informative presentation about Hungarian culture from a Scottish man who moved here in 1993 while in his early 20s. In it, he passed out samples of some traditional Hungarian dishes: dough stuffed with cooked cabbage, a candy bar consisting of cottage cheese covered in chocolate, palinka, a traditional fruit brandy that is the biggest drink in Hungary and often home made, and a light grape-ish soda of some kind. After the presentation, I hung around to try and ask him for restaurant recommendations in the area, and got much the same answer I had received from my landlord the day before: most of the good restaurants within student price range lie between the language school and the next metro station farther east. Then, however, a group of 6 other people and I got together and headed out to dinner. On the way, we traveled with a group of three students, discovered another connection, this time to my high school, Wilmington Friends School, and picked up a monthly metro pass. I had bought one the day before, a student pass, but apparently those are only for Hungarian students. After having talked to my roommate, the internet, and another student in the program, I discovered that, while it would be sold to me, if a ticket inspector stopped me and asked for identification, I would most likely be fined an amount more than the cost of the student pass and about two thirds the cost of the full pass. I decided that it was not worth the risk and so bought a full pass.
Anyways, the 7 of us went to dinner at a very posh Hungarian restaurant by the language school. First we wandered around the metro stop for a while trying to find the way to a restaurant I thought I knew of. Unable to find that, two students who lived in the area took charge and led us away. We entered the following place, XO Bistro:

I had a meal consisting of gulya's, my first in Budapest, quite tasty, and duck liver on toast which, though rather small, was quite enjoyable. I accompanied it with a class of dry Tokaj wine, Tokaj being the most famous wine-growing region in Hungary. The wine, a white, wasn't very dry but, unlike most Tokaj, also wasn't very sweet. It was tasty, and reasonably priced. Other people had chicken in paprika, duck breast and potatoes, and more gulya's. We then passed the evening in enjoyable conversation for a good two hours before leaving and going our separate ways. We lived all over the city, with one pair being near the train station between my apartment and the language school, Blaha ter, one guy living in an apartment in Buda, and one pair living in a homestay way away in Buda.
I then returned home, where I still have yet to my homework for tomorrow. Ah well; the day was most satisfactory.
I'll leave you now with a photo of Marx, pontificating in a university by the river Danube. Not quite sure what he was doing there, but it's a cool statue, nonetheless.