Day 65/69: Birthday Dinners, Drunken Singers at Metro Stations, and Some (Incohesive) Musings

This last Saturday, my roommate and I threw a party in celebration of our 21st birthday. Neither of us turned 21. But! I turned 20 on Saturday and she turned 22 today, and so on Monday, we turned 21. In any case... Saturday night was fantastic. We had a group of friends over for a potluck and told them we'd provide dessert. We ended up having a dinner of grapes, latkas, and three types of salad (fruit salad, caesar salad, and another delicious leafy mixture), and then we followed it with six different desserts, made almost exclusively by my roommate, who had been baking for the previous three days straight.

Cinnamon buns, white chocolate ice cream, white chocolate cake,
chocolate mousse cake, baklava (which were all consumed before dinner),
and blackberry-blueberry individual pies. Yum! :)

Each of us consumed more sugar that night than people should ever be expected to consume in a month, and it was fantastic. There was music too (I have a violin that one of the BSM professors lent me, and my friend brought over his mandolin), and there was SET (my favorite game in the whole world), and there was math (naturally :P). It was a fantastic birthday. Good food, good company, good times. :)

Today, it was my roommate's birthday, and we went out to dinner with some friends. It was the first time I had eaten out in over a month, and I'd have to say that this place was really quite delicious. I shared a dinner special for two with her, and we had an absolutely enormous amount of food.

And this was only half of the meal...
(Sorry about the blurriness... it was
a bit dark in the restaurant.)

I'm still full to bursting (and it's been over two hours), but it was definitely a good meal. Unhealthy, yes, but good. It definitely beats the Kinai Gyorbüfes, which are these terrible super-cheap Chinese fast food places where you tell them what you want, they scoop it out from some container, and stick it in the microwave for a minute. Fast food indeed. If you can call it food. In any case... This place was great. It's called St. Jupát, and it's on the Buda side (really close to the Moszkva tér stop, which is an intersection point of a lot of different public transportation routes).

Here's a picture of the group pre-dinner:

Oh! We decided to meet at Moszkva tér and make our way to the restaurant together, and my friend Stu and I got to the station about half an hour before everyone else. This random guy came up to us and started talking in slurred Hungarian, and with each syllable he spoke, I could smell a strong stench of alcohol. He didn't speak a word of English, and as I haven't been very successful at picking up Hungarian, I was completely lost. But Stu was a different story. He conversed with this guy for half an hour and they were actually talking! In Hungarian! I was so impressed. The guy also sang to us in Hungarian. It's definitely not every day that you get to be serenaded by a drunk Hungarian.

But this brings me to something I was thinking about as I watched Stu conversing with this guy. At the start of the program, I was really excited to learn Hungarian, but about a week into the Hungarian language program, I was completely sick of being stuck in a stiflingly hot, teeny tiny classroom for 8 hours every day, and because of a number reasons (including this terrible stomach thing I had for several days), I ended up just dropping out of the language program. I wanted to stay in my apartment and do math. I thought to myself, What use will it be to learn such a minimal amount of Hungarian? And for 8 hours a day? Torture! Over the last month and a half, I have limited my contact with Hungarians as much as possible. Aside from occasionally going out to see a concert or an opera, my adventures around Budapest extend no farther than a 1-kilometer radius around my house. The grocery store is a 5-minute walk away, the school is a 5-minute walk away, and when I'm not at either place, I'm either at a friend's house or in my own apartment, studying or cooking or hanging out with people. The point is this: for me, BSM has been very much been about the latter two letters, and for Stu, his experience has been so enriched through his proactiveness to try and really get involved in the culture and the language and the food and everything. I know there are a lot of people who would say think that the way I am spending my abroad experience makes it not much of an abroad experience at all, and sometimes I think they are correct. Why am I studying in Budapest if I'm not even actively seeking out Budapesti experiences? (Oh look! Hungarian! When you add "i" to the end of a city, for example, the word becomes and adjective.) Am I doing something wrong? Should I reconsider how much time I spend in my apartment and make an effort to go out and about, to mingle with the locals, to get a feel of what it means to be Hungarian?

I've been thinking about this for a while now, but tonight in particular made me really question whether I was spending my time here in a worthwhile manner. And I've come to the following conclusion. It is true that I have not traveled as much as some of my peers have, and it is true that sometimes, I opt to stay in the apartment rather than go out for a night of fun. It is also true that my experience here could be a lot more Hungarian, so to speak, than it has been. And yet. It is also true that I have learned a lot in spite of all this. 

I have learned that not every place in the world is sparklingly clean like the Foothills, the upper-middle class part of town that I grew up in, or like Stanford. Here, I walk past mounds and mounds of doggie doodoo on my way to class, most of them swarming with flies and some dried out and half-rubbed into the pavement. Musty, dirt-covered basement windows are shattered and in most cases, the gutter-like space between the window and the sidewalk has become a garbage bin, where broken glass and apple cores lay out to rot.

I have learned that cooking is a lot of fun, and that it is important to plan ahead and make sure that there's enough food in the apartment. Also, a cooking group is great for not having to cook every day and also for making cooking a more social activity.

I have learned that this is a different way of life, and that new environments call for flexibility and open-mindedness. Even basic things like grocery shopping are different. The first obstacle is language. And then there are also the things that no Hungarian would ever think to tell you, because it is such a part of their routine. Examples? Bags aren't free in grocery stores. And so most people either put everything into their backpacks or they bring their own bag to put their groceries into. To get a shopping cart, you press a 100-forint coin into this little slot on the side of the cart, and it unhinges it from the cart in front of it, allowing you to use it. You retrieve your coin when you return the cart and hook it back up to the chain of carts. To buy vegetables and fruit, you put what you want of an item in a bag, look at the number on the placecard, go to this machine, put your bag on the scale, and press the number. The machine spits out a sticker with the price and item name of whatever you wanted, and you stick it on the bag so that the cashier can scan it when you go to pay. These are such basic, ordinary things to your local Hungarian. But for me, these were things I had never encountered before in my life.

This post isn't very well written, and I don't think I've done a very good job of expressing myself, but maybe I'll post again sometime soon with something more cohesive and such. It's getting late, and I have class at 8am tomorrow, so it should be bedtime for me now. Good night!