Time to Catch up on My Life

Ok so here’s the first post but because I am so behind this will be a basic overview of things I’ve done here that I feel are worth mentioning. Don’t get too excited about all the things your about to read because my professors, my parents and their friends and people who do not need to know a ton about my personal life read this blog so it will be extremely pg but you’ll still get the overall picture I promise. Of course if you want further information about something you read I would be happy to divulge this information privately. I’ll try to make it as enjoyable to read as I possibly can and after this I’ll probably make a couple other posts about trips I’ve taken, but one step at a time. So here we go.

Well I got to Budapest on August 22^nd after an extremely interesting flight. First off it was my very first time ever flying alone and the plan was Logan to JFK and then an overnight to Budapest; customs dealt with in English and the long part of the flight would be the last part so I could pass out (I hate planes so that was the plan). Well mother nature had no intention of making travel that easy for me so instead I got a flight 3 hours later (great cause Logan is just so interesting), took a 7 hour plane ride to Amsterdam where I landed at about 5am. Got to sit in the Amsterdam airport until about 10:30 (kinda interesting cause it was Amsterdam so I saw my fair share of blurry-eyed people) and then fly for another 2 hours until I finally got to Budapest. So after all that I had been traveling for about 14 hours and all I needed to do was get to my apartment, in a city I had never been too, where they didn’t speak English, no sweat at all right. I swear when I walked out of the terminal and saw this nice, young, Hungarian girl holding a sign with MY name on it, I thought I was dreaming. She had her own car and brought me directly to my apartment, things were looking up thank god cause my eyes were slowly closing the whole car ride there. I got to my place, dealt with some of the boring stuff like leases and phones and how the washing machine worked (probably should have paid attention to that one seeing as when I went to use the washing machine a week later I had no idea what to do). But that’s beside the point and when everything was taken care of I picked out my room, unpacked and as you could probably guess, passed the f*$% out. Woke up about 3 hours when my first roomie got there, she unpacked and what do you think we did? Found the nearest grocery store and I bought my first ever-legal bottle of vodka (trying to pay for it was interesting especially when I looked at the price and it was 2200 forints and I had no idea what that meant). Needless to say I didn’t need alcohol to fall asleep that night and I slept for a solid 14 hours and loved it. The next two days consisted of us wondering around the city trying not to look completely lost even though that was 100% the case.

Loving the City Already

For you Dad :)

We had this thing called survival Hungarian for the next couple of days where we learned some key Hungarian words and basically the do’s and don’ts of the city. The third night we were here we got to go to a beer festival, in a castle never the less, and it hit me then that a beer over 3 dollars is very expensive in this city. If I hadn’t fallen in love already well my heart had been won. Where else could I go to a castle and buy beers for 3 dollars and listen to a live band and overlook the whole city lit up and beautiful. Not to get all sentimental but when your overlooking a river with beautiful buildings lining it, perched up in a castle its hard not to smile and realize the next 4 months of your life will be spent in this amazing city. My first week also included my first ever bar which was accompanied by my first legal tequila shot. One week after we got there we went to Lake Balaton as a group, saw an amazing Abbey and even got to go swimming in the Lake which was so fun and we also got to see a town that was devastated by a Red Sludge incident (flooded by red sludge from a nearby storage container that bursts and the sludge is very toxic and harmful) which was a very eye-opening experience seeing as houses in that area were red and the incident happened about a year earlier. Overall the first week in Budapest was extremely successful and I just didn’t believe it could get better than it was then. But oh boy did it.

Beautiful Budapest Baths

The next week we actually had class, which put a stop to my sleeping until noon habit I was slowly forming, which was probably a good thing. We had our first field trip (see bellows blog post entitled “US Embassy” for more information) along with our first Hungarian classes where we met our professors who seemed pretty awesome (thank god cause even though the class is only once a week having a crappy professor for 3 hours straight would suck no matter what). I went to one of the 7 baths in Budapest, which is a walled in area with 2 giant warm pools, one much hotter than the other, and tons of smaller pools inside the building. I went to a hookah bar at this place called Szimpla, which was fun, and then on Friday took my first ever trip to Vienna. A blog post about this will be following this one.

Family for the next 4 Months

How I would describe the next two or three weeks after I got to Budapest would be, to put it simply, a lot of new things. The school aspect was that, besides the class I’m taking with a UNH professor everything was different; the school, the classes, the professor and the workload. When it comes to the living situation; I was in a country where I didn’t speak the language at all, nothing was familiar and the 10 other people I was going to spend the next 4 months with I had met 2 weeks prior (thank god they all turned out awesome and I love every single one of them). Let’s just say I had to get my shit together and quick; none of this relying on other people to tell me where to go, I had to grow up and had to do it pretty dam fast. As for the social aspect, for those of you older than 21 it’s like the first couple of week’s when you can buy alcohol whenever you want and drink it whenever you want and in my case drink while walking down the street with an open container if so inclined. It was a whole new thing to me to be able to walk into a store and get alcohol so I apologize to my bank account for those first couple of weeks because yep, that’s where a lot of my money went (thank goodness alcohol is very cheap here or else I would have zero dollars right now). Don’t worry mom and dad the excitement has warn off and I now know that just because I can get a bottle of wine or a beer whenever I’m out doesn’t mean I HAVE to (see I’m slowly learning).

Overall my 1^st month I Hungary was a success. Of course there were some ups and downs but the ups are what counts because I have not been either deported, arrested or kicked out of my program WAHOOOO! I’ve been to 3 different countries, learned about Communism and Nazism from people who lived under it, been to two different festivals in a CASTLE, met people from tons of different countries, been to a typical European market, been to the Budapest baths, hung out on an island where the fountains put on shows and have experienced Hungarian culture all in one month. What else could a girl ask for?

I hope this wasn’t too long and you enjoyed it. Look forward to more but less long posts to come.