Tuesday

Szia!

Today was our third day of class and our second Hungarian lesson. Our wonderful teacher Erika continued to teach us Hungarian words and phrases that will be useful during our time here. The Bus ride was much easier this time and we think we are starting to get the hang of the transit! School started at 10 once again and after a nice breakfast with both professors we started out to the college.

Here you can see the bus stop a couple blocks down from the school. This massive train station helps us remember which stop leads to school as well as which bus we need to get on to head back to the hotel

Hungarian class was interesting. We graduated from the greetings of yesterday into singing songs. Although a short children's song, it can be intimidating when you have been instructed on the language for a total of three hours beforehand. But as Erica jokingly told us, we are all from St. Olaf, so we should be able to read and handle music. While the statement was not true for everyone, we were able to handle the song decently. After a lighthearted song, we started to get into the nuts and bolts of the language, which proved interesting yet also challenging.

After Hungarian class we had our customary break for lunch. A large group of us went to a cafe by the name of the Goat Herder. They had wonderful coffee as well as very nice sandwiches, including a prosciutto croissant, brie cheese wrap, and assorted pastries. A couple of us walked back to the school and ate in the courtyard while a couple more went back to the classroom and enjoyed the food while watching Netflix.

After our break for lunch we had another exciting math class, which after 2 hours of Hungarian can seem a little strange. Today we learned about the Euclidean Algorithm and how to find integer combinations of diophantine equations. After class a group of us found a room in the hotel and had a homework party. The best party kind ever I know. With the help of each other we were largely able to finish before going to dinner.

For dinner, as usual, we split up into groups to do our own thing. I (Owen) went to Dobrumba with Amanda, Karina, and Penelope. Dobrumba is a mediterranean restaurant on the corner of Dob utca and Rumbach Sebestyén utca in the Jewish quarter. The food was flavorful and delicious and the atmosphere was cozy. We were also impressed by the presentation of the food. I’ve really enjoyed being able to sample the various kinds of restaurants throughout Budapest in addition to the traditional Hungarian places. There is certainly no lack of diversity in the city’s food culture!

As for the dinner with the Profs, Skylar, Derek, Hannah and I (Eric went to a restaurant that may have been called "Presto" or something, and Adam came prepared with reservations that were in his name like a fancy dancy dinner. For a beverage, I noticed that within the group, sparkling water was quite popular with multiple bottles being ordered despite the kola pepsi being slightly above average for myself. The conversation remained on the topic of how one decided to attend St. Olaf, with Bruce slipping though a back door and Adam starting right out of graduate school. As for the food, I ended up ordering a "Lyon" style roasted rump served with French fries, but unfortunately, over the course of ten minutes on my plate, the meal mysteriously slowly disappeared. I am currently sending a brave chimney cake to search for the missing rump. This strange food experience reminds me of the strangeness that I would always get from the Pokémon games I would play. I sunk hundreds of hours into the third generation and I would find all kind of glitches from duplicating Pokémon to surfing in walls. It wouldn't take long to find some game breaking bug, but these small hiccups in the games are what interested me most. I probably would have stopped after the first couple playthroughs if not for these bugs; the mystery of finding how every exploit worked kept me eager to come home right away after school. Eventually, I knew the game inside out, and I was ready to try more games from the Pokémon franchise. But when I did some research, I found that GameFreak, the makers of Pokémon, were making much more complete games, without the bugs. Theoretically, this should make the games better, but when I heard of this, my heart sunk. No more could I hunt to catch 'em all, meaning the glitches, within the Pokémon universe. So I took a different rout. I had a computer at the time, and I would sometimes play Runescape with one of my friends, but then I came at the game with a different approach. I was going to break that game. It took a long time, but I found a ghosting item glitch and even a flying glitch. I eventually got into other games: SimCity, Civilization, and Age of Empires to name a few. These games filled a spot in my life that Pokémon left. I still play games now. XCOM is far from free of bugs and even the sequel can get some entertaining moments, but sometimes I long for a little bit on nostalgia and I would boot up my old copy of Pokémon Ruby. It's an old game now and the clock battery wore out, but when I would go to that one PC that saves just a little longer than normal, I think of how I ever noticed such a minute detail, and where I would be if I never noticed it at all.

Szia!

Luke, Owen, Eric and Brian