isten hozott!

Isten hozott! I'm nowhere near the fluency ballpark, but I plugged this into a translator and it assures me that this means 'welcome' in the language that I'm trying to learn in preparation for my move to the land of salami and paprika. I know, how lucky am I! And where is this magical place? Hungary! More specifically, Szeged (seg-ed). Here it is on a modern map, nestled in with a bunch of other fab countries that everyone (oh, fine, just Americans) forgets about:

Need more perspective? Here's a bird's eye view. The giant red dot = my new home:

Burke and I will head off on this adventure on August 20, 2009. We have signed contracts with the Central European Teaching Program to bring Hungarian high schoolers conversational English from September to June. Til then, I'll be posting about the process: visas, logistics, planes, quitting my high-powered and incredibly important (read: soul-sucking and cubicle-dwelling) first real job out of college as a marketing assistant in Philadelphia, packing up, moving out...you get it.

So at this phase in the adventure, we are: two NYU grads figuring out how to pay our way through Europe. We've been biding our time for a year now, as we were lucky enough to graduate immediately before, you know, the market crashed and no one can get jobs and the sky repeatedy falls all day every day because we have no future and are most likely infected with swine flu. Sweet. So we've been scrimping and saving by living at home (thanks mom!) so that we can try our luck somewhere else. Here's us:

Current challenges: the visa application! Also finding reasonable airfare, getting every official document we ever had notarized, and making doctor's appointments. All the while, we will be attempting to learn the crazy language that is Hungarian. Which bring me to the final point of today's post: hogy vagy! In Hungarian, "gy" is a tricky sound. Burke and I have had several arguments over how on earth you're supposed to say it, and unfortunately, our copy of Teach Yourself Hungarian, by Zsuzsa Ponifex, is totally written for Brits. So although it's a great book, the pronunciation guides are a little wacky for speakers of bastardized English such as ourselves. We have to put on our best British accents to try to figure out what the Hungarian should sound like. It's a bit convoluted. Also our British accents are actually geniunely terrible, despite our love for tea and scones and pubs. Anyway, the point is that "gy" is pronounced like the "d in during"--but only if you're British. It's kind of a very soft "g" sound that cause your tongue to linger on the roof of your mouth for a second. But perhaps the easiest way to explain it is by providing the phonetic Anglicized/bastardized spelling "hodge vodge", which means (we hope?) "how are you?" in Hungarian. So isten hozott, and hogy vagy?