they lived happily ever after..... until they died.

i finally got my blog to work! thanks to the fact that it was all in hungarian and i entered my e-mail wrong, things got pretty confusing there. hungary is great, i love it. it's an interesting culture (fairy tales end with "the lived happily ever after, until they died"), but i guess that's understandable in a country that hasn't been on the winning side of a war in over 500 years and is getting over 50 years of communist rule. i promise a better update soon, but here is one that never got posted from last week:

Thursday at 4-

I’m writing this now on a break back at my dorm since I don’t know when I’ll be able to use the internet next, and I don’t want to forget about anything.
So I’m in BUDAPEST! Travels went pretty well. The international flight was actually way better than expected. There was no one next to me, so I had some extra room. Watched a few movies, read a whole book. I stopped in Frankfurt on the way, and that was pretty intimidating. German is basically a scary language. There were these little metal stand things where people were smoking all over the place. Then to get on my plane, first I wasn’t allowed into the gate until thirty minutes before departure. Then once I did, I went through this big revolving door that led to a mini bus outside. We took the mini bus from there to the plane and then we got on the plane by walking up the stairs onto it, it was weird.
Once I got to Budapest and got my baggage and everything, I was met by our assistant director, who is incredibly nice. She helped me by a shuttle ticket and I took that back to the dorms, where we’re staying for orientation. Once I got here, I met up with a girl on my program and we went over to see the school and meet the director, who is also really nice. Our school is this huge old building that’s right on the river, it’s really cool. It’s next to this big market, with all these stand selling fruits, vegetables, meats, cheeses, bread, prepared foods, and about everything you can imagine. It’ll be nice to have that so close.
The first night we took the tram (and got incredibly lost) to this crazy little pizza and beer place that has a communist theme. Also, pizza here doesn’t come with sauce? You just get a container of it to pour on. Beer here is pretty cheap, as is most food.
We’ve been having a lot of orientation stuff the past couple days. It’s tons of information, but I feel like I’m starting to get more of a feel for the city and how everything works. The language barrier is fairly challenging at times, but its possible to get by. A lot of people speak some English, especially the younger people. The city is absolutely gorgeous. There are so many dimensions of it – some parts have an extremely historical feel, some are extremely cosmopolitan, some are really trendy.
The other people are really fun. Last night we went to this crazy outdoor club. The people there ranged from our age to maybe like mid 40’s, and it was basically just a big dance party. They play so much random American music, including a Grease megamix, but that will be followed up by some Hungarian techno sounding song. Pretty wild.