From Somewhere between Dallas and London

I'm on a plane to London right now that took off just a little over two hours ago. In another seven hours, I'll be rushing to catch my flight to Budapest, Hungary, and who knows what will happen then. Supposedly there will be someone from the BSM (Budapest Semesters in Mathematics) office to meet me and take me to my apartment, where I will look over a lease contract, sign it, pay rent, and so forth. You know, all the things that adults do in real life.

I do not live in real life. I am a dreamer and so oftentimes I invent the way I want to see things, rather than seeing things for what they are. But so it is. Maybe this trip will teach me that independence requires a grounding in the real world.

But that is something I don't need to worry about now. For now, I'm a jumble of mixed feelings. I am terrified of the prospect of being in an unfamiliar place where the unfamiliarity extends into almost every aspect of life: language, technology, telephones, food, money, transportation, culture. And yet. I am jittery with the excitement of getting to learn about all these different things and getting to experience something new. I haven't even left the country (we're hovering somewhere above Michigan) and already I miss home, miss my family, miss the friends I've left behind in Arizona and California. And I am simultaneously eager to meet my fellow BSM-ers, to get to know them, see what they're like, hear their stories.

In my dreamt-up plans of this upcoming semester in Hungary, I somehow manage to take a lot of classes and learn a lot of math while simultaneously spending a significant amount of time with people traveling and exploring. But. I realize that in real life, there is this thing called time that puts me in a tough place in trying to balance the math and the non-math. I would love to take lots of classes and spend all my time studying, but then why travel halfway around the world to do exactly what I could do back at Stanford? So I need to scale back the academics and work in more of the social aspect of it all. I think it's necessary to get to know people, to go on excursions to explore Budapest and the surrounding places, to immerse myself in the environment and culture. I need to remind myself that BSM is just as much about the B as the M.

I hope I can do this. For now, I need to worry about getting settled into my apartment, figuring out how to do laundry, finding grocery stores, managing my way around clueless and utterly lost in translation. My friend lent me this pocketbook of useful phrases in a variety of European languages, so I might take some time out of the next six hours of being in flight to memorize some phrases.

And lastly, just a note about this blog. I want to have a place to keep track of whatever adventure I may have during my studies abroad. I hope it's not too boring to read. I'll try to include a lot of pictures so it's a bit easier on the eyes. I realize that this post is a little heavy on the text side.