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.