Hello From Hungary

Hi everyone. It's now been over 24 hours of being in Hungary and out of airports (yay). After the longest line of flights I met my host parents on over 27 hours with no sleep but also arriving late because I had to file for lost luggage in Hungarian. They were delivered today though with all contents okay and accounted for. I've been shown around the city a little bit by Júdit, a friend of the family's daughter and I will be going again tomorrow with more time for taking pictures. I would put pictures on this but I really haven't had the time to mess around with all the cords since my luggage arrived.

Dinner was a bit strange. They eat watermellon for dessert, which wasn't overly weird until they asked me if I'd prefer to use a spoon or a knife. I asked how you eat it with a knife so they gave me a giant metal serving spoon to eat a giant hunk of watermellon. It was so difficult I had to explain to them why I looked so awkward and then they told me I could slice it and eat it whatever way...which I dont want to do.

The keyboard is hard to type on because there are 10 extra keys with accents úőűáéÓÜÖÍ and the y and the z are switched as well as the 0. All of our commonly used symbols are also moved around to strange places so I apologize for future misspellings. Also, the copy and paste (after much trial and error figuring out which that is) for some reason does auto spell check so all my phrases come out in broken english similar to how they speak.

I met with the Rotary club in a cafe right outside of the Church which is famous here. They said I have to go to their meetings every week but they seem like a fun group. I had a translator who was an exchange student to America two years ago though some of the Rotarians speak a bit of english. There was about 15 people at the meeting but when asked how big the one in Sidney was they said that it wasn't that big. I suppose they were expecting me to say 200 people. There are also no women in the club but it's not at all formal like I have heard about in other countries. They're amusing after a few beers, even in another language. They all assume Sidney is a large town and keep telling me how Debrecen, a city of 200,000 is so small and that they are in the country.

I will be going to Tóth Arpád Gímnazium which is the high school. My host sister, Zsuzsi was telling me that it was a very good school as well as Júdit. The president of the music department at the college they were trying to get me into said he would be my connection because the saxophone department is new. I think he may have meant the teacher. If he likes my audition I'll be playing with them in a group and having lessons after school. Also Rotary is sendint me through 6 weeks of Hungarian lessons after school as well with a test at the end so I can get a certificate.

School starts on the first of September though I have no idea what classes I'll be taking or what I'll need (or how to understand them for that matter). The Rotarians had told my host father that they shouldn't be speaking English but Hungarian with me, which I agree. After he told me this he started immediately rattling off in Hungarian and then just looked at me, then laughed. I'm really looking forward to the lessons though. They are in the mean time teaching me a few words each day. He had told me the first five numbers in Hungarian and then started making me do math problems without much time to let the numbers sink it. I was a little embaressed to get 2+2 wrong in public.

I'll try to update again after school starts and definitely after the vacation they are taking me on in October in Spain. (So exciting).

Víslat!