So today's blog is going to be much less exciting than anticipated. Due to the lack of windows in my room and, more likely, the little sleep I've gotten recently, I slept in until 2. This was a setback, as I planned to get up early and explore the city. Ah well.
On my way to the subway, I took some more pictures of the area around my apartment. It looks better in the daylight, it must be said. Also, my phone, which I'm using for a camera as I forgot a real one, takes much better pictures with the sun. The construction is really interesting, just not incredibly clean.

Though the area immediately around my apartment doesn't look too much better. The view from the entrance is this:

The rubble's apparently been here for a little bit. It's pretty funny, actually, because most of the area around here does have interesting architecture. But my view is not very scenic.
Anyways, then I took the subway down two stops to try and find the location of the language school, which I'll need to find bright and early tomorrow morning. I didn't succeed in this. I wandered around the area lost for awhile, unable to find any street signs (later I discovered that they are not, in fact, on the street, but on the buildings), until eventually I gave up, got on the subway and headed back. I did manage to find the following, however.

This is the Dohány Street Synagogue, or the Great Synagogue. It's a really beautiful building and right near the language school, though I didn't know it at the time. Later, when I returned to the apartment, I looked up the school and discovered that I had walked right by it and, hopefully, I should be able to find it without too much trouble tomorrow.
When I returned to the apartment, me and my roommate headed over to the City Park, where there's an ice rink that people were going to meet at. We were, however, late, and confused by the ice rink when we found it. The entrance building to the ice rink itself, which you can kind of see here on the left, was pretty cool looking, and there was an incredible castle off to the right.

So we couldn't get into the rink, and spent several confusing minutes wandering around trying to find a way in. There was a long line of people outside the entrance, waiting to get in for something, but there weren't many on the ice. We eventually discovered that they would open the doors at five. Since we couldn't get in, we figured we would hang around outside and hope eventually we would see people speaking English heading out. We didn't. After hanging around for awhile, we gave up and walked back to the apartment, getting dinner on the way at one of the many strange Chinese-ish places that seem to cover this part Budapest. It was cheap and reasonably good, but not very Chinese.
Tomorrow, everything exciting happens at once. We have the first day of Hungarian classes, which means we have to get to the school between 8 and 9 for registration and stay there until like 4 or 5. For lunch, I'm planning on heading with some classmates to the Central Market Hall, a large indoor market similar to the West Side Market and Reading Terminal Market (from what I can tell). And then after dinner the landlord will be stopping by so we can figure out the rent, get things fixed, and get the cell phone worked. Hopefully, he can also give us recommendations about things in the neighborhood, because it's a little confusing wandering around when you don't speak anything.
I've also marked out two important areas I will need to check out this weekend: Csak a Jó Sör and Jozsefvarosi Kinái Piac. The former is Only Good Beer, a good beer store between my apartment and the language school, the latter is Four Tigers Food Market, apparently the place to go for good, authentic Chinese food in Budapest.
Alright, I believe that's all for me for tonight.