Alright. So what day is it...


I can't keep everything straight anymore, so trying to give a play-by-play of the last few days would be a) inaccurate, b) boring, and c) miss the more interesting things going on. So in an attempt to be very brief, here is what has been going on since we got out of the train station.

1. We arrived at the Peppermint Hostel. Its a great place, friendly, clean, lots of amenities etc.
2. Some sleeping. Always amazing.
3. Some eating. More to come on that later.
4. Walking, walking, walking, walking, walking. Try to type that five times fast... I need better shoes.
5. Coffee. Again, always amazing. And again, more on that later.

Now the rest of what I can tell you will be in no particular or chronological order.


Dog Poo

• Yes. This is a huge issue, but not the reason I need new shoes (although there have been some very close calls). Picking up after pets in this town is apparently not a trend that has caught on yet.

Money

• You know how sometimes you have a brain fart and can't remember what a word means, or what 6x7 equals? Well, I feel like this all day long. Here's why. Hungarians use Forint. 1 USD is equal to approx. 181ft. $5 is roughly 900 ft and for the sake of simplicity, (which trust me, it almost never is...) we can round $10 to a little less than 2000ft. So now, we are walking down the street and let's say we want to buy a coke. Thats 320ft. Ok. Now a sandwich (or szendvics) - 62oft. Ok. Now, we look over in a window to see how much shampoo is. 1.100ft. What?! Right, so that really means 1,100 forint. Ok. Now we decided that 900ft is about $1, so we will round up a bit from that. (Geez Budapest is AWESOME!) Wait, no, 900ft is $5! So that bottle of shampoo is about $6? (Ugh. That sucks!) And thats pretty much how it goes. That is an easy example. I am sitting with Olivia at a coffee shop. We have two coffees. The total for these is 1.465ft. Quick! How expensive are these coffees? uuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh? Right. 1465 divided by 181... How many times does 181 go into .... Or 9 into 14... (I see you whipping out that calculator!) Answer: I dont know. Some.

Hungarian Fashion

• Now this completely boggles my mind. You have the standards: Germans. They just stepped out of a GAP magazine and all have square glasses. Western Europeans. You can tell them apart by their shoes (the ones that velcro to the side). Americans. T-shirt and jeans, grey and white New Balance tennis shoes, sweatshirt. These we can all recognize. But Hungarians? What are they wearing?!?!? There are the standard old ladies that still have scarves wrapped around their heads. But as for everyone else, I cant begin to describe the clothes. They just make no sense. (But I wont even get STARTED on the Austrian fashion. They look like they are all having an identity crisis, or a teenage-life-crisis.)

Language

• This is not as bad as some people have made it out to be. Don't get me wrong. I dont conjugate anything. I actually dont speak out loud even the words that I know yet. I have to get a little more comfortable before I start practicing any of this. (And I had a little incident the first night trying to ask for directions. Seems that when studying, I got the question, "where is..." down pretty well, but forgot to learn the answers.) So Im going to take that slow. I would say a very large part of this city doesn't speak English, but thankfully it seems that the ones that work in restaurants/stores etc, do. But I am catching on. I have learned a few more words and can pick up the ones I know when I overhear conversations. I'm still optimistic.
• Some interesting thoughts on not speaking the language have occured to me. We bought some tortellini for dinner the other night. Obviously you cant see inside of these little guys, and I dont know how to say, "cheese," or "mushroom," or "sausage," in Hungarian. So we lucked out because there were pictures of what was inside right on the package. Now, is this something that is common and on packages in the U.S. and I have just never noticed? Or do we not put these pictures on our food because we expect that everyone knows English? I am just glad that I am not Hungarian going to the U.S. to try and figure all this out. I dont believe I have ever met an American that speaks Hungarian!

Hungarian TV

• Well, you've probably seen some of it, because its American. Well, not all of it. But what is interesting is trying to watch "Stomp" (the American contest show) when its original English has been dubbed into Hungarian. Sometimes if you listen reallllly hard you can hear a few words of English. But mostly, when watching the real Hungarian shows, I just come up with creative stories that match the actions. This is, I think, better than whatever is probably actually going on.

Well, those are mostly all of my thoughts for now. Olivia and I have emailed about a bunch of apartments, and have an appointment to see one tomorrow at 1:00. We think that it might be more within our budget to rent in a group house instead. While these apartments are super cheap, we have also realized that the average monthly wage is pretty low. We have a few ideas on making money and will be working to get the work permits this week. We have spent most of the weekend walking to all the different areas of the city to get a feel for each district. We are also meeting someone that we got in contact with through mom for lunch on Wednesday. We have some questions... I hope I hear from you all soon! I feel like I'm just talking to myself for a realllly long time when I write on this thing. It's weird.