karamel fagylalt = heaven

First let me say that I’m terribly sorry for being a lazy blogger. Somehow, I just was not very motivated to write this week. I seemed to be oscillating between being completely in love with Budapest and being a grumpy American and defiantly wearing my sweatshirt outside. I suppose I’m at the cusp of the honeymoon phase. Also, nothing especially exciting happened this week.
I had the best ice cream cone of my life, however, which is certainly worth noting, and anyone who visits me is going to have one too. This place makes the waffle cones in front of you…mmm heaven.
Well, I suppose it was inevitable, but classes and school are starting to feel like a real schedule. I had to buy some books and readers this week, and nothing made me crankier than having to pay full price. How I have been spoilt by Amazon. Actually, I’m enjoying classes now, they’ve become predictable, and although it still throws me for a loop that the locations change. For instance, my political problems of transition class meets in C Building 208 on Monday and then the main academic building in 3002 on Wednesday. Any guesses on how often the Americans are 5 minutes late? Also, as a side note, something so entertaining to the expats here… the floor numbering beings at zero. So if you live on the third floor, it’s really the American fourth floor. This does tend to cause confusion because half the time we are converting it in our heads and have to clarify if we’re talking about “Hungarian floors” or “us floors”.

So I never actually wrote about our trip to the Danube Bend. For everyone who is confused as to what that even means, it is just a bit north of Budapest where the Danube makes almost a complete right-angled turn. The towns most well known are Viszegrad and Esztergom. There we saw the Esztergom Cathedral, which is the seat of the Catholic Church in Hungary. It was incredibly grand. Afterwards we traveled across the Maria Valeria Bridge, into Slovakia, for a traditional lunch of cheese dumpling and beer! It was very cool to just pop across the border for a quick lunch! Probably the best part of the trip was that as we disembarked from the train from Budapest, Elizabeth, our Director, spotted a tcsoo-tcsoo train (that would be pronounced choo-choo) Basically a Disneyland-esque tram that she managed to secure for our ride to the cathedral, and then across the bridge into Slovakia. Please take a moment to imagine a group of 20 American kids on a little train, crossing the border between Hungary and Slovakia. You really can’t buy memories like that.

So I’ve been an expat for officially one month! I’m still so glad I decided to come, and actually am quite sad when I think of only having three left! I’ll update much more this coming week, cross my heart.

Egy, ketto, harom, negy, ot, hat, het, nyolc, kilenc, tiz
“one through ten”