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.


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