WE'RE HERE!

Internet access! Here's a loooong overdue post. We've been in Hungary for a week now, and it's been absolutely wonderful. We met some fantastic people during orientation in Budapest and fell in love with the city. We did all kinds of things, including--but not limited to--celebrating Burke's birthday on Margaret Island and accidentally discovering the gorgeous Buda Castle hill, wandering around Pest near the Danube and taking in the Parliament building and the Chain Bridge, eating two fabulous traditional meals with the rest of our CETP group. attending a high school Battle of the Bands in a suana of a bar in Pest, taking trams everywhere, eating too much salami, attempting to learn Hungarian from a woman who is Maria from the Sound of Music, and taking pictures of absolutely everything. (I think there's a way that you can put a slideshow in one of the sidebars on Blogger, so I'll look into that...

And now we're finally here in Szeged, hooked into the McDonald's wifi off the lovely pedestrian section of town, Szechenyí tér. This city is gorgeous, very colorful with lots of happy looking families and young people. We really want to get some secondhand bikes but for now we're walking everywhere, working off all the cheese and salami that we ate during orientation. The woman who came to pick us up from Budapest works at our school, and when she helped us move in and buy some things at Tesco, she told us that she expects we'll put on a few kilos because of the way Hungarians eat. Great. But so delicious, so maybe it really is great?

We've more or less moved into our (seriously!) post-communist block of an apartment and now we're getting acquainted with our new digs and surroundings. We live quite close to an enormous Tesco, which is essentially Walmart--kind of awesome for setting up a new apartment. Our apartment is actually totally adorable once you get inside, but the outside is a little scary looking. We have a bedroom, a bathroom with a bathtub, washing machine and sink, a toilet (there's a reason that the Brits call it a water closet...that's seriously what it is), a kitchen, a living room with a TV and a breakfast nook, and a converted second bedroom that is a little study. Great natural light, but hot as all hell without air conditioning. We're getting used to not having a dryer--I'm literally hanging sheets and t-shirts up on a wash line on our tiny little balcony. It's kind of a time warp here, but it really makes us think about how easy we've had it for most of our lives. It's depressing and mind-blowing and makes us think about how necessary experiences like this are. As soon as we get more unpacked and organized, I'll post a few pictures or maybe a video of a walk through the apartment. The silliest thing about it has to be the washer--there isn't any piping and so the washing machine empties through a pipe that is literally designed to hang over the edge of our tub. We've seen it drain out once so far, completely ridiculous but also totally genius. Necessity is so the mother of all invention.

School starts Tuesday, September 1, and we're both nervous and excited. Our orientation prepared us very well in terms of language, culture, history, and teaching methodology, but you never know how all of those things will work out until you're actually in front of a room full of high school kids. Yikes. I can't believe it's so soon!

I'm going to wrap this up, as Burke and I want to go to dinner in our new city. I'm not sure when we'll actually get internet installed in our flat, it could be a few weeks, so I'll try to keep up with this as much as possible until then. In the meantime, we're having a blast and truly loving this country and the adventure that we're having.