szeretlek, szeged

We LOVE Szeged. Check out facebook for lots of new pictures of our apartment and the city, including this weekend's stellar fish soup festival!

Lack of internet continues to hinder my blogging--we're still here at McDonalds--but basically, here's what we've been up to. Our first week of teaching went well, overall. The schools are a bit disorganized (example: I don't receive a list of names of the kids for most of my classes, which forces me to ask them their names, which are all impossible to make out because they're HUNGARIAN, and then they have to spell them out for me. Yikes) but Burke and I are trying to make sense of how much the kids know and what they need to learn. We finally got some books and CDs to look through as a sort of jumping off point for curriculum building. We still haven't taught at all of our schools yet, and we're both off to new places tomorrow morning. More about school soon, hopefully with some pictures.

This weekend was pretty fantastic, as it was the fish soup festival here in Szeged. There's an enormous "bogrács," or pot/cauldron thingy, that cooks up 900 portions of the delicious halaszle, a very simple soup consisting of flavored stock and fish, basically, that you can add hot peppers to. They serve it up with big rolls and red wine, and it's pretty good. The festival also had all kinds of other food, and we went back today for sausages and pastries and beer. The food here isn't exactly light, but I think if we learn to moderate our intake, we'll be okay. It's all really, really good.

We did more sightseeing around town yesterday and went to a bar to watch the Hungary-Sweden match last night. 6 glasses of wine and 2 meals for $24. This country is totally reasonably priced, which is a very welcome change from New York, for example. We're pretty set up in our apartment now, which is nice, and I think things are going to start to settle into a routine. It's a strange feeling to be here--sometimes Burke and I will be talking or reading in our living room and all of a sudden, we'll hear someone yell something in Hungarian outside, and it reminds us that we're actually here, actually living in another country. It's a weird and fantastic sensation that I can't imagine getting old...