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.