First I want to apologize for the lack of posting and long wait! This is just part one and I should have Part two and possibly three up soon.
April 3-10:
The last week of school before Férias de Páscoa, or Easter Vacation I spent in Hungary with a group from my school in Portugal. This made my Férias de Páscoa three weeks long instead of two weeks.
Anyway, there are exactly two high schools in Hungary that teach Portuguese, and one of them has a relationship with my school in Portugal and every year in October Hungarians come to my school for a week, and every year in April Portuguese go to their school for a week. In our group there were 6 Portuguese plus Ying, another AFSer who lives in my town, and I. We each stayed with a different Hungarian family in Budapest who's son or daughter was studying Portuguese. My host family lived in a suburb called Budaörs, about an hour outside of Budapest by public transportation. Every morning my host brother Szombor and I would wake up at 6am and leave at about 7 to catch three different busses and a tram to get to the school. Public transportation is everywhere in Budapest, there's a bus for pretty much every street in the whole city, you just have to know what you're doing. Just take the budaörs local bus route 42 to the main road, if bus route 208 was late then you'd catch bus route 182 and then switch at this station rather than that one to catch this tram to catch bus route 102. Simple enough, right? The busses in Budapest were the main way that we all got around and they're dirty, really hot, and uncomfortably shoved with people. So all of us went to school for the first two days, which was interesting. All the classes are in languages you choose, each student picks two languages and they learn almost all classes in those languages. So for us, going to classes in Portuguese and English were pretty easy and mostly the teacher just talked to us or we did activities,they weren't like normal school days.
Anyway Hungarian as a language is really really ridiculous. It's not even an "indo-european" language like English, Portuguese, or German. It has roots from nomadic people in the Ural mountains of Russia. It's distantly related to Finnish, Saami, and Estonian. Pretty much every word in Hungarian is 8+ letters long and has tons of accents and 'z's and 'k's. One of the days in school the teacher was trying to teach us some Hungarian so she had one of the students write "Hello, my name is __, I'm sixteen years old and I like sports" on the board. Then Ying wrote it in Chinese, and then I wrote it in English. It was really funny to see the amount of space the Hungarian and Chinese took up on the board to write the same thing as the small simple sentence in English.
I did learn a few things in Hungarian though:
Szia, hogy vogy? Tonynak hivnak, tizenhat évesvaggyök.
Hello, How are you? My name is tony and I'm 16 years old.
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| Sign in Budaörs |
Budapest sits on the river Danube and is divided into two sides, Buda and Pest. Budapest is a really cool city and it's really big and interesting. Wednesday we walked all around the city and then we went to the embassy of Portugal, and met the ambassador there. I don't really know what the point was but it was a big ordeal.
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| Moskóv Tér(Moscow Square), Buda, Budapest |
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| Hungarian Classroom |
We went to this "Hospital in the Rock" in Budapest. A long time ago there was a cave and cellar system dug underneath the castle in Budapest for storage and things. And during the early 20th century the city of Budapest hired a man to excavate the cave systems and see what was really down there since they weren't really in use anymore. Well he found over 10km(roughly six miles) of caves. During WW2 they needed a secret, secure place to put a hospital where they could treat patients without anyone knowing, so they built a hospital into the cave system. At the time it was really modern and it was used up until the cold war where they had special filters so that in case of a nuclear attack they could bring in water and air and purify it from radiation. Also they had nuclear bunkers down there and air pressure systems so that after the attack all the remaining air would be pushed out just in case anything got exposed to radiation. It was actually really interesting to go there and see.
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| Budapest |
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| Buda, Budapest |
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| Buda, Budapest |
I guess somehow the Portuguese ambassador in Hungary found out we were there and invited us to the embassy and he talked to us and we took this picture, which includes our Hungarian host siblings and the Hungarian/Portuguese teachers as well.
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| Pest, Budapest |
Food in Hungary is really good. It's 100 times better than Portuguese food(which I don't like at all). It reminds me a lot of my granddad's and mom's cooking too, which would make sense as my granddad's heritage is from the Austro-Hungarian empire. Generally during the school days, Hungarian kids bring a giant sack of sandwiches and chocolates and fruit to school and they basically never stop eating. They'll have a sandwich or an apple every 35-40 minutes and don't really have meals. Hungarians don't really eat breakfast and for dinner it's just some toast, cheese, cucumbers, beets and juice. But on the weekend they cook meals and they're really good. Goulash soup and poppy seed rolls were the best things I ate in Hungary.
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| Trams in Budapest |
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| Budaörs |
Budaörs is the town where my host family lived, these two pictures are taken from the top of this hill/cliff where apparently a battle happened when the rebel Hungarians were trying to take back Budapest from the Ottoman Empire(Turks), and at this battle the Hungarians won and apparently made the Turks choose to be beheaded or to jump off the cliff.
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| Budaörs |
One day we took a coach bus into Vienna, Austria. It's about two hours east of Budapest. Vienna is really cool and the weather was great. 99% of the cars are Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche, Bentleys, etc. The city just seems to radiate with money. I even saw quite a few ferraris and rolls royces.
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| Cathedral in Vienna |
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| The Danube River, on the left side is Hungary, on the right side is Slovakia |
Another day we took the same bus and drove up through the Hungarian countryside up until this little town called Esztergom which was the capital of Hungary in the 10-13th century(I think), and it's across the Danube River from Slovakia. So we walked across the bridge just to say that we've been to Slovakia.
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| Danube River |
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| Forint |
Hungary is in the European Union but like the UK or Sweden it doesn't use the Euro. Instead it uses 'forint.' $1.50=One Euro=250 Forint. When you walk into a corner store to buy a water in Hungary, you see like 'Water Bottle 500;-" which is really confusing because everything just looks really expensive and once things start getting past 1000;-Forint it's almost impossible to have a feel for how expensive the things you're buying are. I think generally Budapest is a pretty expensive city because little things like water, food, and postcards were double what they are in Portugal and even America.
I'm really glad I went to Hungary it was a cool experience and it gave me insight on my trip in Portugal too.
I'm going to try and update on the rest of my Easter break soon!
