First Week in Hungary: Settling In

Today marks one week since I have been in Budapest. So much has happened that it's hard to believe it has only been one week.

The "Danube Bend" -- beautiful views!

We had orientation until Friday, and we took a nice field trip to Szentendre, a small artist town up the
Danube a bit (which I will surely be visiting again!). We punctuated our sometimes dragging lectures with delicious Hungarian food, so orientation was on the whole a great experience. Although it was very informative, it was nothing compared to the 10 weeks of intense training we got in Mozambique as Peace Corps volunteers! I feel like I still have a very tenuous grasp on the language and there are some cultural mysteries I have not yet worked out.

Still, these little discoveries are all part of traveling. Today, I had a small victory. After much confusion and several unsuccessful attempts, I finally put credit onto my phone. Apparently, you're supposed to be able to do this quite easily using an ATM or online, but only if you have a Hungarian bank card. If not, you can go to the newsstands in the metro stations, but the lovely resident newsstand lady refuses to help me because I don't speak Hungarian-- even when I learned the Hungarian phrase for "I want to top up my phone." Not all Hungarians like foreigners -- more in this later. In the end, I just went directly to the main Telekom store, where I had to wait a bit, but a lovely person helped me to put enough credit on there to last quite some time. So, that's settled for now, and now my phone finally works properly.

As soon as orientation ended on Friday, I came down with a cold, and spent my first free weekend in bed with a fever -- which was not exactly what I had in mind. Still, I forced myself to not mope around all day, and I made two excursions in between bouts of sleeping and binge-watching Netflix in bed (which works here!) First, I explored the Budapest Cat Café with some Fulbright friends. Unlike the cat café in Houston, which is basically a normal café next to a cat adoption center, this place legitimately just had cats wandering all around the cafe. There was a big cat with tufty ears that just wanted to sleep, and a little rambunctious kitten that kept trying to drink everyone's foamed milk, and also a Siamese looking thing that didn't want to have anything to do with anybody. It. Was. Awesome.

Also, I went to a concert on Sunday night. Kriszta, one of the Fulbright staffers, invited us to attend a concert of a Hungarian folk singer that she really likes, Palya Bea. The open-air concert was in a picturesque little courtyard, and we sat, talked, drank some beer, and enjoyed the beautiful music. Palya Bea is a very evocative and passionate singer who delves in her Hungarian, Jewish, Gypsy, and Bulgarian roots to create a unique sound -- you can hear some of her music here and here. Beautiful!

This week the real work starts, by which I mean my teaching at ELTE university as well as my work at the Fulbright EducationUSA advising center. Later this week I'll write about how the first days of work went. Wish me luck!