Jon a tigris!

Sziasztok!

If you don't want to read through all of my rambling, there are pictures at the bottom ;-).

On Friday morning as I was riding the bus to school I realized that I was starting to feel much more comfortable with the general flow of life in Budapest. For instance, riding the 16 bus to school feels natural, I can quickly navigate the mess of a metro station (everything meets there) that is Deák Tér, Astoria (the square the language school is located on) has begun to feel very familiar and I am able to read (or at least discern the meaning of) more and more signs. Friday afternoon, Christina and I decided to go find a park that we had noticed on the map, so we took the blue line farther south than we had previously been in the city. The metro station there had a completely different feel, than the ones we use frequently. Once out of the metro station, we realized that that part of the city also had a rather different feel to it, and we quickly concluded that, while a very small portion of the city has started to feel like home, we are definitely still in strange, new city.

The Hungarian language is absolutely fascinating.

Possession uses a very different construction. If you want to say Marsha's dog, you add a possessive ending to the word dog, not the word Marsha. The Hungarian word for dog is kutya, so you would say "Marsha kutyaja".

It also has no word that is the equivalent of "to have". If you want to say "Marsha has a dog" instead of "Marsha's dog" you simply add "van" (which means "he/she is") to obtain "Marsha kutyája van".

This week has consisted largely of going to language class and studying the language. As interesting as I find it, I have to admit that I agree with the general consensus that we will be glad when math classes start... On Szerda (Wednesday) several of us met for dinner at the palacsinta place and then went over to Christina's to hang out and play set. On Csücsörtök este (Thursday evening) Éva's grandson Zoli came over. He started out trying to just talk to me, but quickly realized that I did not understand him at all, so he started quizzing me on the colors and counting everything in the room :-) The color sárga seems to incorporate everything orange and yellow. He stayed with us until this morning and has been patiently teaching me various Hungarian words. For instance, yesterday while I was at school he went to the állatkert (zoo) and saw az anya majom és a kis majom (a mother and baby monkey). As a mentioned before, Christina and I went to explore a park on Péntek (Friday). It was really pretty and had lots of trees. We were happy to find that it felt much less urban than most of the other parks we have been to here. After walking around the park for a while we went to the Pink Cadillac - a pizza place that had been recommended to her by several people. It turned out to be a really cute place with absolutely delicious pizza. We split a pizza that had ham, onions, spinach and garlic. After the pizza we stopped at one of the little ice cream shops - I had citrom, lemon. As we were walking back towards the metro station we looked down a side street and noticed and amazing sunset, so we set off towards the river and walked along the Duna (Danube) for a while. It was quite pleasant. Tonight I am planning to meet up with Christina to do something - we have not decided what yet, but it will undoubtedly be fun.

And now, pictures:

Buildings on the top of the hill I live on in Buda:

I tend to ride the 16 busz to and from Buda



At the park we found this building. It was fenced off and we think it was some sort of electrical building, but it looked cool and I got a nice picture.

Swinging at the park


A street in Pest


Sunset over one of the bridges