Hogy van Magyarul Hey!

The first few days of Budapest have been an absolute whirlwind!  There is almost this frenzied sense of not wanting to miss anything and then you catch yourself with the reminder that we'll be here almost three weeks and with a little thought and planning, the highlights won't be missed.  Above is a photo of Buda on the left (the hilly side, which isn't as obvious in this pic) and flat Pest on the right.  The Duna (Danube) flows between with the Chain (Széchenyi) Bridge connecting them and Margaret Island in the middle of the river.  We took a city tour by bus on Monday and I now have a long list of places to go back and see.  I don't care for pictures taken out of a moving bus window...

Most of the group (13/16) went to the Opera Gala to end the season Monday evening.  Carridy, Frantzie, Rita and I got a box, which ended up being the last four tickets for the sold out event.  It was amazing to not only see the inside of the opera house but hear a performance inside.  The Budapest Opera House is supposed to be the second best accoustically in the world(?).  We learned on the city tour that Hungary and Budapest is known to be second best in many things, ;-)


Today the lectures began and brought our first Hungarian history lesson and language lesson.  I had known beforehand that Hungarian is not related to many other languages (basically Finnish and Estonian, but even these three languages are very distantly connected) and that leads to it's reputation as being very difficult.  I still can't decide if my grasp of German helps or not...there are a few vowel sounds that I seem to be able to hear easier than others, but so many more consonants are swallowed, that I think it makes the pronunciations difficult to retain.   Luckily hi and bye are the same word, so for now...szia!