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...