Day Three

Szia! 

Dawn over the Danube

Coming to you live from Day Three of our Budapest adventure! Yes, we are still alive and well. We remain well-fed, not Hungary, and we have yet to have been Budapestered by any hoodlums (not that we expect to be!). Instead, our days have been filled to the brim with beautiful architecture, meats and cheeses and breads, exploration, language barriers, and unending enchantment. It's hard to imagine that we've only experienced bits of Budapest--that the city holds even more amazement than we've already seen. 

We arose this morning to our first "normal" day. This includes, but is not limited to, munching breakfast salami with classmates, navigating Buda to the nearest Metro station, dissecting the Hungarian-voiced intercom to discern our stop, and strolling through beautiful Pest to our classroom. 

Holly riding the Metro

We kicked off the school day at 10:00 am with an introduction to Hungarian language, an adventure in itself! Our teacher is a native Hungarian, ever enthusiastic and encouraging--and believe us, we appreciate the encouragement. Although a few important cognates--i.e., pizza--make the language infinitesimally accessible, familiarities/comforts/any senses of understanding are few and far between in this Finn-Urdic language relative. One challenge is that vowel differences are harder to hear. For example, the difference between "to sit" and "to kill" is basically nonexistent. That said, we are all eager to learn, and it's a lot of fun to wrangle through this challenging language with our fellow classmates.

After about two hours of Hungarian class and an hour lunch break, we embarked on our second day of Number Theory. Although yesterday's thrills were hard to beat, today's focus on common divisors poses some stiff competition. As is typical, the "letter as number" to "actual number" ratio in class today was about 10:1, and we wrote more English sentences for our homework than are in this blog post, but this sort of math is what we consider really, really fun. 

Parliament building behind the Danube

Since math class lasts two hours, we have from about 3:00 pm-on to wander Budapest and do our homework. Depending on work preferences, coffee shops, cafes, and our hotel breakfast room each present great places to tackle our Number Theory problem sets with other classmates. Upon finishing homework, we have time to eat dinner, explore more of Budapest, spend time with classmates, and relax. Although famous for paprika and goulash, Budapest is filled with endless restaurants of all cuisines for each of our unique tastes and interests.

Homework in a Budapest coffee shop

After a long, exciting day, it's nice to come back to a reliable, if not lavishly comfortable, bed. Amidst classmates quickly becoming friends, our sweet hotel here in Budapest is starting to feel like a home away from home. We look forward to tomorrow to see what other Hungarian adventures we encounter!

Our class, photo cred Professor Berliner

Holly and Maria