Monday, December 10, 2007

Az Allatkert!

Csütörtökön, Christina en is az állatkert városligetben mentek. Sok, sok állat az allatkertben.

It was very interesting to compare the Hungarian and English names of the animals. For example, the nilius víziló, which would literally translate as the "water horse of the Nile" is the hippo. The mosomedve, literally "washing bear" is the raccoon. The vörös macskamedve, literally "red cat-bear", is the red panda.

In addition, they also had rhinos (somewhat slower than the ones Mudd had me used to)

and a super cute kisoroszlán

There were turkeys roaming around instead of peacocks

a pretty wolf

pelikanok that were trying to eat fish too big to fit in their bills

And penguins which only eat sea fish


On Friday we tracked down the honey festival. It which was much smaller than it was made out to be and thus slightly disappointing, but it was still nice. Afterwards we went to a slightly nicer restaurant than usual since we wanted to try something new and it looked interesting. As we walked, the greeter asked us, in Hungarian, if we wanted the smoking or non-smoking section. I responded in Hungarian without really thinking about it and only afterwards realized that I had understood and responded without consciously translating into English and back.

On Saturday, Jessie organized a "talent-no talent" show which was held at Christina's apartment since hers is one of the few with a piano (though it is painfully out of tune). My talent was making cookies without measuring anything. I mixed up several stages of dough for oatmeal chocolate chunk cookies and held something like a cooking show on fast forward. It was fun and everyone got to eat cookies. The whole show was quite entertaining.

Sunday largely ended up being a HW day. In the evening I went to the California Coffee Company for the first time to find the other people that were working on Geometric Graph Theory (apparently it is a favorite place for some people to work). It was ridiculously American - and thus felt very strange. Coming back to America and realizing just how used to living in Hungary I have become and having to re-acclimate myself to living in the US is going to be very odd...

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