Friday in Budapest

Today we saw some sun for the first time! The first few days here in Budapest were quite cold and dreary, although nothing like Minnesota. But today the temperature reached into the 40s, the fog lifted, and the sun peeked through the clouds. The weather should be similar, with a little rain, for the next few days so we are excited for that. I know I wasn’t really prepared for 20 degree weather for the whole month.

One of our newest discoveries is the bakeries selling delicious pastries for about 200 forints (1 USD) in the entrances and exits of the subway system. It’s often the first thing you smell as you go down the escalators, which have big fans (which we decided are probably there to keep the warm air down in the subway and the cold air up near the surface) wafting it up at you. It was becoming very hard to resist, so now chocolate croissants and pastries filled with raisins and cream cheese are becoming our mid-afternoon snack.

We are starting to get into a routine here, with class in the morning and afternoon, separated by a lunch break. Exploring parts of the city follows class until we have to return to our hotel to do homework before going to dinner and further exploring the city. Today was one of our last Hungarian lessons. Today we mostly worked on numbers and directions. I think I’m starting to get the pronunciation down, which we spent a large part of the first few days doing. Hungarian has lots of different sounds that English doesn’t really have, but it’s a very phonetic language, so once you get the sounds down, reading it becomes relatively easy. Understanding what you’re reading is a different story. The grammar is very difficult. Prepositions and other modifiers are tacked on to words as suffixes to indicate meaning so you get really long words that would really represent multiple words in English. An extreme example is legeslegmegszentségtelenítetthetetlenebbjeitekként, which means “like those of you that are the very least possible to get desecrated”.

In math today we learned about mathematical induction, which basically is a way to prove properties concerning all the positive integers: 1,2,3,4,... In an induction proof we use an assumption about a positive integer n to prove something about n+1. Because we’ve had such an awesome time the first few days here in Budapest, using Math Induction we know that the n+1 days (the rest of the trip) will also be awesome!

-Mike and Christian