Sziasztok!

I now understand Hungarian pronunciation (though some of it is still tricky for me), know a rather strange collection of nouns, a handful of suffixes with which to modify the nouns, a small but useful collection of verbs and how to conjugate them in the present tense (both in the definite and indefinite situations) and a few silly songs. For four long days of class that seems like a reasonable enough place to be. I am slowly training myself to say "kösönöm" instead of "thank you" and "boscánat" instead of "I'm sorry" or "excuse me". To cope with having the intensive language class all day everyday, I have been going straight home after class. I study vocab for a while, watch the evening news (in Hungarian) with my host mother (and attempt to pick out words and phrases I know - commercials are especially good as they tend to have lots of numbers ;-) ) and go to bed relatively early. Now it is the weekend though, so it is time to explore some more!

After class yesterday Christina and I decided that we should go exploring around the city some more. We started by stopping by my apartment and then going up the stairs next to it to explore the castle. Part of it is under restoration construction, but the rest of it was beautiful! Once we had wandered around the castle for a while we walked around the top of hill. There are some amazing views of Pest from up there :-)

Castle pictures

Pest, the church sticking out is Szt. Istvan's Baszilika (I think I spelled that right...)

There also really nice views of the rest of Buda, but with the location of the sun I was unable to get any good pictures. Maybe some other time. After wandering around Buda for a while we stopped by her apartment in Pest and then met up with several of our other friends and went to Széchenyi Gyógyfürdő Városligeten (the baths in the big city park). The baths are basically three large swimming pools - one kept very warm, one kept quite cold and the other at a medium sort of temperature. In the medium pool there is a circular path in the middle where (sometimes) there is a current. It is far more fun than it has any right to be to ride the current around in circles :-). It was really fun and relaxing to just hang out and chat in the water. After leaving the baths a small group of us rode the metro back to Buda and had a snack at the 24 hour palacsinta (the Hungarian version of crepes) place. Between the Hungarian I have learned and my pattern matching abilities I managed to order in Hungarian! It was delicious and a wonderful end to a great evening. Tonight I am planning to meet up with Chelsey to make dinner. It should be fun!

Viszlát!