Bhutan? Bangladesh? Bulgaria? Ohhhh, BUDAPEST.

Sometime at the end of May I decided I wanted to leave Washington, DC and have a new life adventure.  I frantically threw applications together and ended up with a job offer to teach at a primary bilingual school through the Central European Teaching Program.  I have learned two major things since deciding to move to Budapest:

1.)  No one knows where on earth Budapest is.  "You're going where?  Bhutan?  Bangladesh? Bulgaria?  BUDAPEST? Ohhh.  Where is that, Turkey?"  

If they do, the first question is always, "Hungary?  Who the hell wants to go there?"  

First of all, let me point out that I am by no means judging anyone who does not know where Hungary is.  I think that it wasn't until after my second Skype interview that I decided to actually pull up a map and locate it myself.  Upon realizing that it is not, in fact, next to Turkey, I discovered that Hungary is actually bordered by Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria.  Since learning this, I've spent many hours with the Lonely Planet guide of Eastern Europe,  drooling over the day trips and weekend adventures I plan to have in many of these places.  

2.)  Attempting to learn Hungarian is a good way to make you feel extremely, extremely incompetent.  My position as a teacher in a bilingual school means that I will be teaching Hungarian children Reading/ Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies in English.  My Hungarian co-teacher will be teaching the same content in Hungarian.  Thus, while I am not required to learn extensive Hungarian, I thought it would be useful so that I will have at least a little bit of an idea of what is going on around me.  I figured that a lot of solo trips to Starbucks with my computer and a free learn to speak Hungarian app would suffice.  Boy, was I wrong.  Hungarian, let me tell you, is fucking difficult.  Mom and I sat on the couch last night for example, trying to learn how to count from zero to ten.  It ended in a lot of coughing/choking on phlegm and some screaming things like, "How the? Who the hell knows how to make that sound?"  Mom was a good sport and helped me look up the pronunciation of each word.  Let's take the word for one- "egy."  After pronouncing it as "eggy" at least thirty times, we learned that the pronunciation is more like  "ayy- dge" - with a d sound that sounds like the "d" from adulation.  Who the what? All day my parents have been asking me questions like "How old were the children you taught?" and have been making me answer in Hungarian.  Sooooo, needless to say I've spent a lot of time out of the house/ hibernating in my room today.  Sorry in advance for butchering your language, Hungarian kiddos.

Anyway, I thought I'd write my first post today because I leave for Hungary in exactly one month.  I still have approximately a million things to do/people to see before I leave.  I'm trying to find to do these things but between my recent Arrested Development obsession and my summer job as a 7 & 8th grade camp camp counselor (that might deserve its own blog), it has been rather difficult to find time to do everything.  Somehow I have faith that everything will get done and I will be shipping out thirty days from now on the adventure of a lifetime (if I can read enough Hungarian to figure out how to get out of the airport first)...