iskola!

Szeged is a beautiful, pastel little city full of pedestrian walkways and happy, bicycling families. It’s like something out of a children’s book. We love it. Our flat is about a twenty minute walk from the city center, but we’ve learned how to use the myriad public transportation here, and a trolley can get us from the intersection by our apartment to the downtown in about 5 minutes. Our school, Eötvös Jozsef, is a fifteen minute walk from our building on Csö utca—twenty with a coffee stop from the most adorable little lady who makes fresh doughnuts every day.

Burke and I are working at several schools (iskolas) in the area—Sándorfalva, Szatymaz, Tiszasiget, Weörös, Deszk, Szöreg, and Eötvös—so there’s sort of a different commute every day. The number of the schools that we would be traveling to came as a surprise to us, but I think it will prove to be more of an adventure, even if it is harder to keep track of everyone’s names. The furthest distance that we have to travel is about 20 minutes by bus—the bus thing is probably the most complicated part about it. On Monday, our contact teachers took us to visit all of the schools and then took us to Mars tér, the bus station, to show us each of the gates and bus numbers. We wrote everything down and then came home and made a chart. So far, we’ve both taught at Sándorfalva and Eötvös. I taught middle schoolers at Sándorfalva, and they were pretty adorable. One little girl told me that all she wanted to do was go to Tennessee and Miami. Interesting reference points, but I'm going to go with it. Another boy told me that he loved to watch CSI and listen to Akon. I get that—maybe we have more in common than I thought! Teaching is hard work, but I think that we'll end up doing pretty well. They ordered a ton of books for us, which will be great, because for now we're kind of improvising—we have no idea how advanced these kids are, or what they need to learn, and there's no curriculum.

On Tuesday, we had the opening ceremony at Eötvös—totally hilarious. In Hungary, for special school events, everyone has to wear a dark bottom and a white top. So Burke and I dressed in our finest catering attire and started to walk to school, taking note of the dozens of kids who had put their own spin on the dress code. Skaters, slackers, emo kids, girls who had tried their hardest to find the most see-through white top to show off their black bras, girls who looked like they were ready to go to the prom—essentially a totally accurate portrayal of the teenage niche communities that form in high schools all over the world.

The ceremony itself took place on the black top, with all of the sections of the 9^th, 10^th, 11^th and 12^th graders lined up in a U shape around a small stage that was flanked by enormous speakers. The lineup included the Hungarian national anthem (easily the most depressing, mournful piece of music of all time), some of the kids singing a cover of a famous Hungarian pop song, some poetry, and a welcome address by the headmaster. The welcome address included our introduction as English teachers, in which Burke and I awkwardly stepped forward and sort of waved at the kids while the headmaster butchered our names and hundreds of pairs of eyes bore into us. Yikes. But everyone at the school has been above and beyond nice. Our contact teacher translated the rest of his speech for us, another member of the English department went with us to get bus passes for the month, while yet another awesome lady promised to bring us some the poems she wrote in Hungarian and translated to English—it’s some pretty fine literature, let me tell you. Amazing.

I need to be better about updating, because I feel like things are a bit longwinded, but it’s hard when we don’t have internet in our flat! We did go to the immigration office today, and we are officially, legally in Hungary until June 30, 2010. Our contact teacher, Ágota, also took us to join the University of Szeged library, which is awesome because they have lots of books in ENGLISH! And I’m a nerd. More soon, I promise.