I know, it’s been forever! I’ve been keeping myself busy and that has led to fewer blogposts. But today I’m home in bed thanks to some kind of what I hope will only be a 24 hour bug (no worries, I’m fine), so at least the good part of this is that I can finally update this.
Last week was pretty uneventful. Classes are still going well, and are actually starting to feel like real classes as our books are showing up. Thursday night my apartment (Jacqui basically counts as our third roommate) threw a dinner party for one of the apartments of guys. We provided the food, they provided the desserts and wine. Jacqui and I had quite the adventure running around the market trying to find all of our ingredients. Luckily we found a cute little stand that had everything we needed, and the guys working it were very nice and played along with our attempts to communicate only in Hungarian. The cooking itself was kind of an adventure too, since we don’t quite know how to work everything in the kitchen, so there was a good amount of guess work to it. But we pulled off in my opinion a good meal of pasta, salad, and garlic bread. And the boys provided plentyyy of wine and incredible pastries, so I’d consider the evening a success.
This weekend we did a lot of taking it easy, since we had traveled the weekend before, and are traveling the next two weekends. We did some more exploring around, hit up 2 different H & M’s, went to IKEA for 100 forint hot dogs, and our biggest accomplishment was probably finding an incredible Indian food restaurant really close to my apartment. Jacqui and I had been craving Indian, so we decided to try a place we had just seen a sign to, and we were not disappointed. It’s weird that you can feel at home eating Indian food in Hungary, but we totally did.
This week I started one of my volunteering programs. One of our Hungarian teachers, Maria, also teaches at a college across the bridge from us that is mostly attended be Hungarian students from smaller towns. I’m working with students there who are taking English so they can practice their conversational skills. The students are all very nice and are trying so hard to learn the language. It’s amazing, so many of them can speak like 3 other languages. It makes me feel spoiled to have grown up with a language that I can get by with basically anywhere in the world. It feels good to be doing volunteer work in my “host country” though, like I’m getting more involved and giving something back, as small as it is.
I’m incredibly excited for this weekend. We’re leaving at 6:45 Friday morning (eek) to go on our second group excursion, this time to Northern Hungary. Our first stop is the caves of Aggtelek, then we’re headed to Szilvasvarad, what I’m the most excited for. We get to go to the Lippizaner horse farm and museum, which should be incredible. After that it’s off to Eger, where we’re staying the night. We’re making a trip down to their wine cellars, where they have their famous wine, “Bull’s Blood.” The next morning we’re doing more sights around there, then heading to Recsk (the site communist death camp) and then climbing to the highest point in Hungary before we get back to Budapest Saturday night. Wine, horses, and sites, what more could I ask for?
<3 ali