Today was the first day where our classes took on the schedule they'll have for the rest of the semester. Class start at nine, go to 12:30, with a 30 minute break in the middle, and then continue after an hour lunch break until 4, with a brief 15 minutes partway through. It's a lot of Hungarian learning, but the language is interesting, and it's not a bad way to interact with people.
The morning consisted of another pastry run. The lady who runs it doesn't speak any English, which is actually kind of nice, as I got to practice my (very limited) Hungarian. I asked if the filling of one of the pastries was sour cream (turns out it was cheese, pretty tasty actually), and could understand what she said when she told me the price. So, progress!
The thing with the classes is that we're moving extremely fast, since we're covering a semester's worth of Hungarian in about two weeks. This is good and bad. It's nice because we do learn large amounts of things everyday, but it makes it harder to retain things. There's no down time to allow the vocabulary and grammar that we learned to sink in. There's not much time to review something individually that you had difficulty with.
So class was more learning of magyarul (Hungarian language). I've noticed that it's surprisingly difficult to pronounce normal letters completely different on a regular basis. Getting used to the s as a sh sound (hence the pronunciation of Budapest as Budapesht), the c as always soft, like an English s, and the special two-letter consonants as one letter takes some time. And that's not even counting the sounds that don't exist in English or that I'm still having trouble differentiating, such as the gy and all the o's and u's. I guess this is something I did when I learned Chinese and French as well, but for some reason it seems a little more difficult here. I think the thing with Chinese is that every word, essentially, looked different enough from English or French that I had no trouble seeing it as Chinese, whereas with Hungarian there are some words which I could see being used in English.
The other funny thing I noticed today is that the teachers at several points emphasized the Hungarian is not like German or the Slavic languages: they don't have overly long words and they don't like having words that are almost all consonants. While they're not as bad as German, compared to English, Hungarian has some vary large words, the result of being a language that adds suffixes and prefixes onto words in order to conjugate them, position them, make them objects and everything else essentially. And they do tend to insert vowels to words at about the same frequency as consonants, but again, there's a lot of consonants happening.
Anyways, for lunch I traveled with three friends from my group down to the market that we had gone to on Wednesday for lunch. I settled on a dish consisting of pork and potatoes with a side of sauerkraut and a Dreher Bock, a dark Hungarian beer, for my lunch. Like most meals I've had here, it was rather rich. Not as bad as the sausage I had had last time at the market, but still. It was, however, very tasty.
After an afternoon of more class, we had a short presentation from a group that works with the language school. They were a tour group who would be going to Buda castle this weekend and various other places during our remaining week and a half of language classes. In addition to talking about this tour, which I signed up for, the woman also gave us a list of markets in various places, including one very close to my apartment that I must therefore try, and clubs and bars for people to find on the weekend. Among other things, she recommended we check out ruinpubs (romkocsmák), which is apparently a big thing in Budapest. These are a little hard to describe, but I'll give it a try. There's also a website, ruinpubs.com, that gives some examples and pictures. They're basically bars in sort of run down buildings, sometimes containing gardens and tending to be filled with broken down cars or other bits of trash. They're very artsy and apparently the hip thing nowadays.
So, after getting recommendations about what to do, I returned to my apartment with my roommate. Later, Boris and I met Bob, who lives two blocks away, for dinner. We went to a pizza place near the train station but I discovered something more interesting on the menu. To compliment my Gusser bock, a dark German beer, I had pig's knuckle served with fried onions. This was delicious, with the pork being very tender and fatty with the crispy skin still on and the onions were perfect. It was also, perhaps unsurprisingly, very rich, so I could finish about half of it. I'm actually kind of impressed that the food is rich enough to give me pause. I eat a lot and am not afraid of rich, fatty, meaty foods. But sometimes I feel that this cuisine is just ridiculous. Despite the fact that the food is so heavy, I think I'm actually not consuming that many calories, simply because I tend to have trouble finishing any of my meals. Oy.
Anyways, that's all for this blog post. Later tonight I will have up a post about the rest of last night and today.
Csáó.