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Right now, my mom should be still fast asleep, fighting off jet lag. She just returned from visiting me in Hungary for a week. I loved having her here. It would have been very odd to have lived in a foreign country for half a year and have none of my close friends or family come visit. So, now I have someone at home who will know what I'm talking about when I mention Marxim, a great communist-styled pizza place, or tell stories of my landlord Istvan. Here are my half of the photos of her visit. I think she took better ones with her camera:
http://colorado.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2197477&l=6021e&id=10215414
We did all sorts of fun stuff during her visit. First, we went to a wine festival at the Budapest castle district, where we saw live music (including an acapella group that performed Michael Jackson songs in Hungarian - quite strange) and saw an opera. La Traviata was not the most exciting of shows, but gazing at the ornate frescoes of the opera house made it worth it. Plus, opera tickets are less than the cost of a movie, so no one should miss out on it. My mom and I also spent a night in Eger, which is the wine region of Hungary. It was a cute, smaller town, known for women who fought off the Turkish army. The wine area was really cute - it only took about 20 minutes to walk from our hotel to the "Valley of Nice Women," which is what the region is called. I've also heard it called the Valley of Beautiful Women. In this valley, there are over 200 wine cellars to go sample from and plenty of wine to buy. Their specialty is called Bulls Blood - a deep red wine, so we lugged a few bottles of that back to Budapest.
In Budapest, we saw the main sights and met up with my mom's friend Gena from Fort Collins who happened to be in Hungary as well. We grabbed traditional Hungarian food and went to this really fun music pub I recently discovered. I think I will become a regular. On our last day, we were very indulgent and went to Gellert Bath and spa - the most ornate of the baths in Budapest. There we both got Swedish massages and soaked in the thermal waters. We also played around in their wave pool too. I want to do that every day! The massages were funny, because they give them to you when you're in your swimming suit, and they'll have 3 or more people in a room giving different people massages, and the ladies just jabber away in Hungarian to each other - but it's still relaxing nonetheless.
Now, it's back to work for me and Mike. He's been ill today, so we've just been staying at home. Of course, he won't admit he's sick, but just that he's "not well." I don't think staying up until 5:30 a.m. this morning to watch Arkansas play Alabama helped his cause. I could only make it through the first quarter and then I crashed. I am just not as good of a sports fan. Coming from Colorado, I missed out on the Southern, die-hard football gene. Luckily, Mike has met people in Budapest who do possess it.
My lifestyle has gone from a slow, self-dictated pace, to scattered and crazy. Of course, it's the latter style that I am most used to, but it came as a shock to my system this week to have very little free time. I guess it's time that I joined the working world. Teaching is going well so far, and I am lucky, because the school spoon-feeds my lesson plans to me. So, if I don't feel like getting creative, I don't have to. So far, I have 5 different classes that I teach, but I've only met three, one of which I am dropping. The students I see the most are two business men from South Korea. They are here working at a bank for the next two months. As if the culture shock between leaving their families in Korea and moving to Budapest weren't enough, they've subjected themselves to taking both English and Hungarian lessons simultaneously. Yikes. I really like them, and I think they like me too, except they are not accustomed to the American accent, so I am hard to follow as they say. The next class is advanced speakers which I have already dubbed the Bullwinkle class. This is because it has two people in it, and one of them is from an area right outside from Russia, and her name is Natasha. Naturally, she is pretty, tall and pale, just like the cartoons. She is a great student who learned English while working for the Red Cross. Now, she's taking lessons to master her English and entertain herself while her kids are at school. Today, she brought her adorable 3-year-old son to class, and he slept through the entire thing. Hopefully, that's not an indication of my teaching enthusiasm. The other man is Hungarian and named Atilla . . insert Atilla the Hun jokes here. He is another businessman and is a very good speaker, so it makes my job easy. Things will go well as long as I don't slip and call him Boris. My other class is horrendous and will be dropped asap. It begins at 7:30 a.m., which is do-able. But, when I agreed to take it, the secretary neglected to tell me that it is on the Eastern outskirts of Pest, which is about as far away from my flat as you can get. Some of Berlitz's classes are taught in actual businesses, and this one was at a Volvo factory. I left my apartment at 6:30 and still managed to be half an hour late. I had to ride the entire line of a metro, get off, and take a bus for 45 minutes. So, I commuted for 3 hours to teach and get paid for 1.5 hours. Of course, the day I had to go was only 50 some degrees, windy and rainy. I was sleep deprived, grumpy, and not prepared to teach level one students, which is exceptionally challenging. Luckily, Berlitz realized that this was ridiculous and told me I don't have to do it anymore, except for tomorrow. So, my alarm clock is set for WAY too early tomorrow. When my alarm clock goes off, I wonder how I ever woke up for swim team practice at 5:30 am all those years . . .Starting the week after next, I get two more groups of students. I hope they are as interesting as my current students. On Saturday, my Mom gets here, and I can't wait! We have lots of fun activities planned, and I took most the week off from teaching, so we can go explore wine country and Budapest.
