Miscellany.

I've started drinking milk and Nutella mixed together. The result, of course, is Nutella milk. It tastes delicious. I found a shop by my apartment that sells Nutella in 400-g (14-ounce) containers for just 550 forint. That's 2.60 dollars. I never knew happiness could be so inexpensive.

Since I can't really cook, my two roommates cook most of our meals, in exchange for which I do the dishes. Thus, I started a tradition in my apartment: while washing the dishes, I put on Brahms's Hungarian Dances at a high volume. It makes the chore feel much more dramatic.

Upon searching the web for Budapest delivery pizza, I discovered that there exist Pizza Hut locations in Budapest. Of course, I immediately went to the nearest Pizza Hut for dinner. It turns out that, in Budapest, Pizza Hut is a fairly classy sit-down restaurant. I ordered a garlic–chicken pizza. It obviously did not compare to Chicago deep-dish pizza, but it was nevertheless very good.

I'll write about my math classes in my next entry. For now, here's an interesting problem from my geometry class: give a bounded subset B of the Euclidean plane and an angle t such that the rotation of B by angle t is a proper subset of B. I couldn't think of an example on my own, but I later found one on the internet that was absolutely amazing.

Chocolate Festival and the Opera.

I did two big things today. First, I went to the Chocolate Festival. Then, I went to the Opera.

The Budapest Chocolate Festival is exactly what it sounds like. There were about a hundred stands outside, each one selling different kinds of chocolate. There were caramel chocolates, hazelnut chocolates, marzipan chocolates, chocolate candy bars, chocolate gelato, fruit-filled chocolates, wine-filled chocolates, free samples of chocolate, chocolate biscuits, big chocolates, small chocolates, more chocolate than my body had room for. Metaphorically, anyway. Probably the best thing I tried was a chocolate filled with marzipan and nutella in layers. I had a breathtakingly delicious afternoon.

The Opera was good, too. I went with a few friends to Budapest's beautiful and famous opera house. We saw Don Pasquale, by Donizetti. It was in Italian with Hungarian surtitles, so I doubly didn't understand it. Fortunately, the program had a summary in English, so I vaguely understood what was supposed to be happening. The music was good, and so were the performers. This was the first time I had ever been to an opera, and hopefully not the last.

And now, the moment I know many of you have been awaiting: my next journal entry will be about my first week of math classes!

Not the right question.

I was riding the metro the other night when I overheard a couple speaking American English. They were trying to figure out when their stop was; knowing the metro pretty well, I asked them where they needed to get off, and it turned out to be the next stop.

They asked me, "Do you live here?"
I do live here for the semester (I got my residence permit a week ago!), so I said yes.
They then said, "Your English is very good."
Rather embarrassed at the misunderstanding, I said, "Well actually I'm American."

It turned out that they were here on a cycling tour (I assume they meant bicycling, because do they even make tricycles for adults?) and had just been in Bratislava. It also turned out that one member of the couple grew up in the same state that I'm from in America—and here we are, meeting in Budapest. What a huge small world.

Also, people need to pay attention to the difference between "living" and "being from".

THE ICE-CREAM EXCHANGE RATE.

I mentioned in a previous post that the meals here are significantly cheaper than in America. Thus, while a ten-dollar meal is cheap-to-medium by American standards, it is medium-to-expensive in Budapest. Thus, the official exchange rate of 200 forints to 1 U.S. dollar doesn't really give a good sense of how expensive a meal is, in the context of other Budapest meals.

I have remedied this situation by choosing a relatively stable food item and defining it to be the same price in both locations. Ice cream seemed like the obvious choice. I estimate that a nice cheap scoop of ice cream costs 2 dollars in America and 150 forint in Budapest. Thus, by the ice-cream exchange rate, we define

2 dollars = 150 forint

(this would look so much better in Latex). Thus, there are 75 forint to the dollar.

Let's see how this works in practice. Suppose I buy a meal for 2100 forint. By the official (but misguided) rate, this is 10.5 dollars—pretty reasonable, right? However, by the ice-cream rate, my meal is 28 dollars. Golly!

Well, I admit that ice cream could be cheaper in Budapest by a significantly greater degree than most other food is. Maybe. More research has yet to be done on how much of a difference this makes. Until then, I'm going to use this as an excuse to talk about ice cream and be a cheapskate.

Prague post.

We had a few free days between the end of the language program and the beginning of the math classes. Thus, some new friends and I went to Prague for three days. (The photographs in this Prague post were taken by me!) We took an overnight train and arrived in Prague at 4:30 in the morning. We were really tired and stressed out at first, but our trip got Pragressively better. We Czeched out the famous Charles Bridge, toured the Old Town, went inside a stunning cathedral, and walked the grounds of the royal palace. We also paid our respects at the John Lennon wall, a huge wall of Lennon- and Beatles-themed graffiti:

 One of the best parts of my trip was the food. We had a lot of traditional Czech cuisine, including several varieties of meat, with delicious creamy gravy. And the dumplings. Oh, the heavenly Bohemian dumplings.

We also toured the old Jewish quarter. There were lots of interesting museums and synagogues, with historical Czech-Jewish artifacts. Many of the old ritual objects were ones that I recognized from growing up in a Jewish family; I felt like I was connecting with my Eastern-European–Jewish heritage.

We came across a shop selling absinthe ice cream. I did not partake, but some of my friends did. The ice cream looked creepily green. My friends said it didn't taste like anything—it just burned. So that was a fun experience.

One last thing, Prague over the Danube at twilight:

Food.

The teacher of my Hungarian class told us about Túró Rudi, a candy unique to Hungary. It is a chocolate bar filled with cheese curds. Intrigued, I bought some, and enjoyed it immensely. I would bring some with me when I come home in December, but I'm pretty sure they have to be refrigerated.

One day, the ice-cream shop by my apartment was selling Túro-Rúdi–flavored ice cream. I love ice cream, and I love Túro Rúdi, so surely I would love this flavor. But I didn't. I am glad that I tried it though: it was an interesting taste experience, and now I know that I shouldn't put cheese items in my ice cream.

I really like the ice-cream shop by my apartment. They always have the basic flavors, like chocolate, but I'm pretty sure they switch up the other flavors that they offer. There were a few days when they had a Tiramisu ice cream; I got that once and it was amazing. And the ice cream is pretty cheap, too—only 140 forint per scoop.

At this point I should explain Hungary's money system. The currency is called the forint. The exchange rate is approximately 200 forint to 1 dollar. As a result, I'm a millionaire in forints. There are coins worth 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 200 forint (there are no 1-forint coins). There are bills worth 500, 1000, 2000, 5000, 10000 and 20000 forint. A medium-price meal in Budapest tends to be about 1000 forint. However, note that this is only about five dollars! Also note that the ice-cream cone costs the equivalent of 0.70 dollar, which is ridiculously cheap in the United States. This is my motivation for the ice-cream exchange rate—but more on that another day.

The chicken here is really good. This is fortunate, since chicken is my favorite animal to eat. One time I got chicken with a paprika sauce. Another time I got chicken with a cheese sauce. Both were excellent. The cheesy chicken in particular gave me that distinct mix of feelings that arises from eating something incredibly delicious but also really unhealthy. It was a satisfied contentedness, mixed with guilt and regret, mixed with astonishment and wonder. If "feeling the fat clogging one's arteries" is an emotion, then add that to the mix as well. I'm not sure if this unique emotional state has a name. Let's call it foojitty.

I also felt quite foojitious when I got a palacsinta (crêpe, basically) filled with cheese and topped with cheese and sour cream. I got it at Nagyi Palacsintázója (English: Granny's Pancakes), which I mentioned in my first post. The banana–nutella palacsinta that I got there was the best breakfast food I've ever had. It's really cheap, too: depending on the kind of palacsinta, it costs 200 to 400 forint apiece.

Budapest has a lot of gyro restaurants. I get the feeling that gyros in Hungary are the cultural equivalent of Mexican food in America. Just like America, Budapest has a lot of Chinese-food places, including fast-food ones. In fact, my first meal in Budapest was at a Chinese buffet. The other day, I went to a Thai-food restaurant and ordered something that ended up being pasta with turkey and garlic, Italian-style. So I've eaten Italian food from a Thai restaurant in Hungary. I'm so multicultural.

Magyar, the language of suffixes.

English and Spanish, the two languages I know, are both Indo-European languages, along with hundreds of European and Indian languages. On the other hand, Hungarian (magyar) shares a language family with just two other major languages: Estonian and Finnish. That is, Hungarian is a really weird language.

I've been taking an intensive two-week introductory course on Hungarian which is supposed to be equivalent to a semester-long course. It's different though: with the two-week course, I don't have a whole semester to let everything sink in. I've pretty much been submerged in Hungarian for days. Fortunately, I find the language really interesting. I will now talk about it, for the benefit of my linguistics friends.

The alphabet is an extended Latin alphabet: in addition to our 26 letters, there are also ö, ü, gy, ty, ly, ny, cs, sz, zs, dz, and dzs. Most of these extra letters are pairs of characters, but in Hungarian they count as letters since they make their own distinct sounds. Also, the seven vowels all come in short and long forms; the long form is denoted by putting an accent mark over it. The hardest letters to pronounce are gy and ty, which make sounds that are not found in most other languages. Fortunately, knowing how a Hungarian word is spelled is enough to know how to pronounce it. That is, the spelling determines the pronunciation, unlike in English (cough dough rough through). A Hungarian word's stress is always on the first syllable, no exceptions.

Everything in Hungarian is a suffix. You want your noun to be a direct object? Add -t to the end. Indirect object? Add -nak or -nek to the end. You want your noun to belong to me, you, him/her? Add -m, -d, -ja respectively to the end. You want your verb to denote an action that I do to you? Add -lek to the end. A lot of nouns can be made into verbs by adding the ending -zik: for example, "piano" is "zongora", and "plays piano" is "zongorázik". A lot of prepositions are made using suffixes, too. For example, to say "in [noun]", just add the suffix -ban or -ben to the noun; to say "with [noun]", add the suffix -val or -vel to the noun. There are more suffixes that I learned about, and even more I'm sure that I haven't learned about.

Hungarian is a beautiful language, partly because of the principle of vowel harmony: each word's vowels are either all low vowels (a, o, u) or all high vowels (e, i, ö, ü). All of the suffixes come in high-vowel forms and low-vowel forms, and the one you use depends on the harmony class of the word. For instance, "in the bag" is "táskában", whereas "in the cabinet" is "szekrényben". This principle gives words a nice flow and makes Hungarian elegant and interesting.

One more thing: Hungarian does not have gendered nouns, like many languages do. In fact, Hungarian doesn't even have gendered pronouns (he or she). Take that, English.