Orientation Day 3

Orientation is going steady--tomorrow is the last day.  I'm enjoying the time at the hostel, especially considering it's my first time staying at one and I am sharing a room with so many people.  In general, everyone's very polite and respectful of everyone's space and sleep time, so it's really not too bad. 

Today, a super helpful guy came to help with the arrangement of our Hungarian SIM cards/mobile phones, came to help.  He brought a couple SIM cards and tried to get everyone to try one or the other to see if our phones were locked to our previous networks or if they were open and could readily accept a Hungarian card to make them operational.  It turned into a sort of fiasco for a while because the SIM cards were not yet activated, so they didn't work in anyone's phone.  However, he figured out the problem, took the cards back to T-Mobile, and got them activated.  Then, it was "Wa La!" they were all working (for most people anyway). I really hope that he didn't spend his entire day working on it though.

Tonight after the orientation, the two CETP helper teachers organized a trivia game about the things we've been talking about all week.  It had 8 rounds consisting of topics such as labeling Hungarian cities on a map, Hungarian language questions, listening to a Hungarian song and writing down the words we hear, labeling pictures of famous places in Hungary, and more.  It was really fun even though my team came in second to last!  Oh well.

Also of particular noteworthiness today was the fact that the hostel cooked us a traditional Hungarian dinner in these huge outdoor pots--their treat!  It was called "Paprika Potatoes" and it was basically a hot stew-like thing made up of a ton of potatoes, some onions, water, butter, oil, sausages, and a lot of Paprika spice.  It was SOOOO GOOD.  It's also a very original and simple Hungarian dish that they make all the time.  They gave me the recipe and I'm going to try to make it later.  Here's a picture of it as it was still cooking!

Me and the Paprika Potatoes!  It smelled SO GOOD, I can't even tell you!

That's all for now.  After tomorrow, the last day of orientation, we will meet our school contact person and be taken to our apartments in our towns.  This little get-together will be over.  I don't know how many people will stay in contact with me, but I hope that I get to keep a couple friends from here.

Day 1 of Orientation Week

Ok, I know this post is now going back a couple days, but I couldn't find the cord to get the photos off my camera, but I just did, and now I can finally post this with some pictures!

Friday, August 23rd

After an awesome sleep, I woke up at 7:00 or so, ready to go.  I didn't feel jet-lagged at all.  Everyone else was fast asleep, so I did my best to pull my clothes out of my locker at the bottom of the beds, but of course that stupid tarp Ikea bag where I had put my clothes was louder than one of those eco-friendly Sun Chips bags.  Nobody said anything, but when you share a room with like 9 people, you still feel like a jerk if you make ANY sound whatsoever.

 We sat around talking in the morning before breakfast, which is actually pretty nice.  The hostel staff brings a cart of stuff to the kitchen, including a meat slicer.  They slice up fresh meat and cheese, give you bread and jam, and even cut cucumbers and tomatoes for the "weight conscious" people.  The breakfast I grabbed consisted of a really nice slice of French/Italian bread (can't ever tell the difference) with cheese piled on top and a little peperoni with a side of tomatoes and cucumbers.  It was goooooood, especially when I was so hungry.

During breakfast, some people were talking about going to the store to find food because eating at restaurants all the time can get expensive, so after several hours of waiting for everyone to be ready/decide they really wanted to go or not/go to the bathroom, etc., we were off.  We really had a VERY vague idea of where we were supposed to go, and only one person had a map.  Oh well, that's cool!  I think it must have been like 10:00 or so when we finally got out.

Seven of us started walking to the metro station and it was a good adventure in itself just to figure out how to tell which direction the subway trains were going.  After much deliberation, we got in a car, thought we missed our stop when we really didn't, got out, and started walking.  We found a mall with a supermarket and went shopping, which is not the place where we were told to go, hahahah.  We never did find the original destination.

After shopping, I had a somewhat heavy bag of apples, eggs, grapes, and bananas, so I decided to go back to the hostel to drop it off.  Another girl came with me while the rest of the party kinda broke off and did other stuff.  After leaving our stuff in the fridge, this girl and I decided to go for a long, aimless walk.  We asked somebody how to get to Buda Castle, so we set off walking.  We were told it was a fairly quick walk from where we were...Boy, we made some really wrong turns, but we saw a ton of awesome stuff, none of which I know the names for.  Here's some pictures though:

Not sure what building this is, but it looks awesome!

Hungarian National Museum with an awesome statute in front.

Again, cool but I'm unsure as to what it is.

St. Steven's Basilica

Buda Castle on the hill.

Me on the Elizabeth Bridge.

View from the top of the hill on the Pest side of the city--this was NOT from Buda Castle though.

Beautiful tree-lined hilltop street.

View of Buda Castle at dusk from the CETP Welcome Dinner.

All and all, we walked for nearly 6 hours, and we must have covered well over 10 miles.  If I had had GPS, I could have mapped out exactly where we went, and I wish I had, because it was pretty darn impressive.

We returned back to the hostel, and I had to take a shower.  I was pretty gross.  After that, it was time for the CETP welcome dinner.  We got back on our feet and walked to the restaurant, which was, coincidentally, nearly exactly the same route that my friend and I had JUST WALKED.  Needless to say, I was exhausted, but it was still awesome.  I don't think I could ever get tired of walking through this city.

The meal was very good, and we ate outside in absolutely beautiful summer dusk weather in full view of Buda Castle up on the hill, all light up and shining yellow and orange when the sun went down.  It was then that I realized that my friend and I never actually made it to Buda Castle like we thought we had--instead, we walked right past it and ended up on a totally different hill with a totally different thing on top!!!  I can't even describe it.  At any rate, after the meal, we walked back to the hostel and got together with the dude from Seattle who had like every movie ever made on his computer.  We watched Star Trek (2009) until about 12:30am.  I couldn't sleep at all and woke up today, the day I'm writing this, at 5:30, and just decided to give up.   So, here goes the first actual day of orientation. 

Orientation General Schedule

Orientation is going well.  It follows the same pattern every day for each group (times vary by about 30 minutes as they had to split up this group of people into two main groups and 3 Hungarian Language groups:

8:00am-9:50am - Breakfast
10:00am - 11:00am - Practical/cultural tips
11:00am-12:00pm -Teaching Tips
12:00-pm 1:30pm - Lunch
1:30pm - 3:00pm -Hungarian Language
5:00pm - 6:00pm - CETP info session (announcements, reminders, cultural recommendations)

Overall, it's been really good so far.  They really try hard to cover all the bases and prepare you for what you'll need to know to lesson the "blow" so to speak of the new country.  I'm doing my best to really work hard in the Hungarian lessons, but it's so difficult!  Oh well, I'll get there eventually.

Arrival Day

Well, the arrival part worked out pretty well even though the departure got off to a rough start.  After a chaotic chain of events in Sea-Tac beginning with the losing of my phone and culminating with me boarding the plane nearly dead last due to the running (yes, literally running) back to the TSA checkpoint, riding the tram again, dealing with TSA who were wondering why I was going backward when my plane was "back there", I finally arrived in Budapest. 

When I arrived at the Budapest airport, nobody hassled me, and I just picked up my bags and walked out.  Mary and Hajni from CETP were waiting there right outside the arrivals door with their CETP signs and were easy to spot.  It was nice to finally meet them!  They had been waiting there for several hours already and had even more left to go while waiting for other people to arrive. Little did I know but there was a guy from Seattle on the same flight as me, and he was standing with Mary and Hajni before I got there, so that was cool. 

Upon a 30-minute wait for another girl who was supposed to be on our same plane, it was decided that she might not be coming, so Hajni sent us two off in the airport taxi.  It felt like a long drive, but maybe I was just tired.  I want to say it took nearly an hour to get to the hostel from the airport, but when you're so tired because you haven't slept for 20+ hours, any time spent awake feels like a long time! 

When we arrived at the hostel, two current CETP teachers were waiting to greet us at the front door and help us carry our bags to the elevator and check in.  That was super helpful because I was so tired and really not in the state to do all that.  When we got up to the 5th floor where the hostel is (after first going DOWN half a floor to the 2-person elevator from the Paleolithic area followed by a 5-story rise and a 1-flor downstairs trudge because the elevator stopped on half-floors), we checked in and saw our rooms. 

I am in the 12-bed room, which is two sets of six bunk beds and two bathrooms.  I got the top bunk, which is kinda cool because I never had one before, but it also sucks when you have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night!  I almost died, I swear.  The bathrooms are nicely sized and pretty clean.  I took a shower and went to the common room where a bunch of nice Ikea couches awaited my tired backside.

Other people who arrived just before I did joined me, as well as people who were arriving after me.  I sat in the common room for a while and talked with everyone--it seems like they're all really nice people.  I don't have the exact numbers, but one of the CETP helpers here had said there were around twenty return teachers and forty new ones this year.  We talked about Budapest, CETP, teaching (briefly), but mostly we just sat there like vegetables.

At that point, I was getting REALLY hungry.  I mean so hungry that I was shaking, so I asked about a cheap restaurant.  I was directed to some Chinese restaurant down the road, and since everyone else, for the most part, had already left to go somewhere, I walked down there by myself.  It was easy enough to find, and it was really cheap.  I had a generous portion of Kung Pao chicken and noodles for about 650 forint, or as today's exchange rate says, about $2.89.  Not bad.  I walked back and could finally sleep because my stomach wasn't imploding on itself.

Mmmm Chinese

Needless to say, at this point, I was really, really tired, so I went back to the room and snapped this shot of the view out the window:

I then felt like I was dying, so I went to bed at 8:30pm.  I was the first and ONLY person sleeping in my room for several hours, and most of the room's residents returned back between 10-11pm.  I slept like a rock!!