I have arrived! After flying through Dallas and London, with very little sleep, I finally made it to Budapest.
The apartment I'm living in is in Pest, the side of the city to the west of the Danube, within walking distance of the university. It's a nice flat, but the neighborhood it's in looks kind of sketchy. Very Communist-blog, too. I'll post more pictures of the surrounding area tomorrow when it's light out and I can get better ones, but it's very amusing.
While I met up with Bob Lutz, a highschool classmate also on the program, in Heathrow and noticed several other people probably from the program on the same flight, I have no idea where any of them are. After I made it to the airport, we split up, being taken back to our respective apartments. I met one of my roommates, Boris Brimkov, from SUNY Buffalo, who arrived a couple hours before I did. Our third roommate will arrive after the upcoming two-week intensive Hungarian course that I, and others, are taking. This third roommate was here last semester and so apparently doesn't need the Hungarian practice the rest of us do.
I'm looking forward to learning some of it...Hungarian, or Magyar, sounds nothing like any language I've heard. And for good reason, as it's a Uralic language; the only other major languages it's related to are Finnish and Estonian. Looking at the words, I have no idea how to even start pronouncing them. I learned how to say thank you from the guy who showed me to my apartment, and it's spelled köszönöm, pronounced koh-soh-nom, as best I can tell. I was able to buy groceries and dinner without too much of a problem, but I'm looking forward to knowing how to speak some of this language.
After examining the apartment, I was then shown to the nearest subway stop and explored the immediate area around the apartment. My two major impressions are: cold and sketchy. It was freezing out, and things looked slightly shady. For example, there's a row of abandoned warehouses facing the entrance of my apartment building. And the view from the balcony that is directly outside the door of my apartment is more blockish apartment buildings and rubble. And then there's more rubble, construction, and things aren't super clean. Perhaps it will all look better in the sunlight. There are several bars and restaurants in the area, I believe, though it is hard to tell when I speak nothing of the language. I ate a gyro in pita from a stand-type place. It was tasty, warm, and cheap. There's grocery stores in the area...all in all it seems relatively nice, despite looking rundown.
I should note that it's not all bad. Near the subway stop is this magnificent old train station, and some of the buildings near it are quite impressive looking.
Now, having unpacked, I must off to bed before my first full day in Budapest. Tomorrow I will explore the city, try out the metro, and make sure I can get to the places I need to go to.

I'm going to try and do pictures, see how they work...

 

The above photos are of the street my apartment's on. Note the abandoned warehouses.

The flat itself is pretty nice. Wood floors, nice furniture. It's well furbished and we have pretty much everything we need. Though the plugs are in really strange locations and the wifi's not working, so we had to do some finagling with ethernet cables and the router to set it up so both me and my roommate can have internet in our room, but it's working so far. The landlord's supposed to come around on Wednesday and help us get everything working. Because beyond the wifi, the washer, the oven and the cell phone they left us all apparently don't work. So...that's helpful...

So here's the nice architecture. The building on the right is the train station, which is really large and really cool looking. On the left is the view across from the train station, which (despite the prominent Burger King) are really nice looking as well.

Okay, so now I'm done.