It's Christmas Day and I'm sitting in a hotel in London. My family is asleep, and it's just me listening to music, at the work desk, sorting through the hundreds (in fact, thousands!) of pictures I've taken over the last four months. It's been an eventful semester, and I think I've learned quite a lot.
When I first got to Budapest, it was a complete and total shock to my system. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who spoke a language I did not understand. I was living in an apartment, fending for myself in terms of food, no comfortable dorm support system or cafeteria to fall back on. And really, almost everything was different. I had never really seen dirty places before I got to Budapest---I grew up sheltered in a nice part of town and when I left home, I headed to a university that spends millions of dollars every year keeping its campus picture perfect. And then I arrived at the Budapest Ferihegy International Airport, met someone BSM had sent to pick me up, got into a taxi, and then walked out onto a street spotted with dog poop, ridden with the stench of sewage. Welcome to Budapest, and in that moment, I made the identification in my head: Budapest = dirty. Eww.
I didn't talk to that many people about my distaste for the city, and those that I did talk to shared my viewpoint, thereby encouraging this perspective that Budapest was nothing I expected it to be. Language school started, and the nine hours crammed into a stiflingly hot, stiflingly small classroom didn't exactly help me appreciate things more. And then I got sick (terrible stomach problems), missed a few days of school, realized how much happier I was staying home, and then became the first language school drop-out. Yippee. When people were learning Hungarian, I was sitting at my desk doing math. The days felt pleasantly long, and I was safely in the confines of my apartment walls---the one place in Budapest I felt comfortable. Sometimes in the evenings, I'd go to a friend's place for dinner. Eva (my flatmate) would let me know what sort of hang-out things people were doing so I wouldn't miss out. I was doing what I wanted to do. Occasionally spending time socializing, and mostly staying in and studying.
When language school ended, Eva and I took a trip to Sarajevo, which was absolutely lovely. I never wrote about it here on the blog, but hopefully I'll get around to it eventually. We took a 12-hour train to Bosnia, stayed in a hostel (I never realized that there were non-hotel/resort accommodations prior to this), met a lovely Bosnian girl through couchsurfing who showed us around, and had a fantastic time. It was a fantastic trip and was the first step to lessening my apprehensions about traveling and exploring new places.
And then school started. I would go to class and learn math, and then I'd go home and learn more math, and then I'd fall asleep to a bedtime story of math, and then I'd wake up and learn math, and then repeat. Day in, day out, so much math! I was an extremely happy camper. Amidst all of this math, a few of my friends decided to form a cooking rotation type thing, and so we'd have dinner at each others' places. It was great to chat with them and have a good time, but I always felt like I was wasting time by being there. I thought: It'd be so much more time-efficient if I just stayed in and shoved something down my throat. Then I'd get to learn more math, and I wouldn't waste hours every night just doing dinner. But when I tried doing this, my friends would pressure me into going out---you've been doing math all day!, they'd say. They were right, but that was exactly what I wanted to do. Math, math, math. Nothing else. And in my narrow-minded perspective, I thought that they were not serious students because they wanted to hang out over study. I thought: Don't they see how every moment they spend talking over dinner is a moment lost in learning math? Don't they see how this is going to affect their futures? Don't they understand the importance of studying? How short-sighted and narrow-minded and judgmental of me.
Over the course of the term, the way I divided my time slowly shifted away from studying, and I think that I have come to realize the worth of getting to know people. It seems like a really trivial statement, but it wasn't an obvious thing for me. I wanted to get to know people, but that would take time, and I thought my days would be better spent trying to learn as much math as possible. My friends would pressure me into hanging out with them, and it wasn't like I didn't want to hang out with them---I just thought studying was the one and only important thing. And when I look back on it now, I'm so glad that they were so bent on drawing me out of my room. Because the thing is this. When I look back on this last semester, what I remember are the people. The people I traveled with (to Sarajevo, Prague, Istanbul). The people I cooked and ate dinner with. The people I went on long walks with. The people who would come over to our apartment to eat, the people who would come over to do math, the people who would come over just because. I got to know a lot of really amazing people this last semester, and I've made some really wonderful friends. That's really the heart of it, I think. I think that's what I've learned this semester.
I love math, and it's wonderful when I get to do it all day. But there's more to learning than just studying. There are people to meet, places to see, and doing these things has exposed me to new and different perspectives. Example: When I was in Istanbul, I was talking to a friend, and we were talking about how to us, math matters a lot, and it's probably going to be a big part of our future, but there are people who live their whole lives selling gyros. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's taken me a few months to realize that there is a lot that matters in this world, and in the phrase "study abroad," it's the whole term that matters. It's not just about studying. And it's not just about being abroad. It's about learning new things, seeing new things, meeting new people, gaining new perspectives.
Yesterday, I left Budapest, and said goodbye to a place I have grown a soft spot for, in spite of its poop-ridden streets. It is a place I have grown a soft spot for not because of the place itself, but because of what I have experienced and learned there. Yesterday, it felt like I was just leaving for a short trip, and I'd be back soon. But I think it's slowly sinking in that I'm not really going back. And now, looking at the hundreds of photos I took this last semester makes me nostalgic. I miss the people. My friend wrote me an email, and he quoted something from "Dune" that I think is appropriate: "Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place."
Merry Christmas everyone! And in Hungarian: Boldog Karácsonyt!
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