More Travel

So, I'm going to Scotland!
I leave March 20th and get home April 1st. I will be traveling with students from a school from another Hungarian city. The kids are going to Scotland to try to practice their English, so hopefully I will be able to help them out a bit (me still speaky a little English). We will be traveling by bus to Scotland and on the way we will spend a day in Brussels. Then we will hit up such cities and sights as: Edinburgh, Queensview, Glasgow and the Lachness Monster. We will then spend one day in England (not sure where) and then head back home.

Expect to see lots of pictures soon!


And now I give this message to you in Hungarian:

Szóval, fogok menni Scotiaba!
Indulok március 20 és vissza jövök április 1. Fogok utazni egy iskolával egy másik városban. A diákok az iskolából akarnak angolul tanulni és talán ségithetek (beszélek egy kicsit angolul). Busszal megyunk Scotiaba és fogunk megálni Brüsszelben . Utanna fogunk menni Edinburghba, Queensviewbe, Glasgowba es meglátogatni a Lachness szörny. Akkor folytatódunk Angliaba és akkor vissza Magyarországra.

(I wrote that all on my own, isn't that cool?!)

How Embarassing

If you all remember, I dressed up as a bird for a Rotary event a few months ago. After the party, my friends and I were goofing around and there is now a video of me doing my wonderful rooster impression on YouTube. Check it out, but please don't judge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsIcCW5mzvU


P.S. More lovely photos of that evening: squaking and laying an egg.

Skiing in Austria

All of last week, from Monday to Sunday, I was skiing in Austria with 3 other exchange students and 5 or 6 Rotary families. We were staying in the small city of Mariazell, where there are 4 or 5 ski hills within a half hour drive of the city center. We skied for 5 days of the 7 and were treated to almost perfect weather. While the mountains in Austria reminded me a great deal of the Rockies, I would say that, in general, the Austrian mountains are smaller. There are no big monster resorts like Lake Louise in Austria. Each resort takes up only one mountain and will have maybe 3 chair lifts and a t-bar at maximum.

Everyone stayed together in a big house with rooms full of bunk beds. All of us kids slept in one giant room and we played poker and swapped swear words from our native languages. Our house was right across the street from the ski hill that we spent most of our time on, so everyone could come and go as they please, which was wonderful. Gemeindealpe (don't ask me to pronounce it) is the name of the ski resort we were at, and when you took one of the chair lifts to the very top of the mountain, you had a 360 degree view--gorgeous!

Mariazell is an important pilgrimage site in Austria because (according to Wikipedia) "the object of veneration is a miracle-working image of the Virgin, carved in lime-tree wood." I have no idea what that means, but it must be important because last September, the Pope chose to visit Mariazell.

All in all, I am happy to report that Austria is beautiful and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the people there and my time on the ski hill. The snow was near perfect, and we couldn't have asked for a better week.

Farsang Carnival

Okay, I know I have been a bad girl and haven't posted anything for a very long time. As unfortunate as my busy life may be for all of you readers, my lack of free time has been really great for me lately. My life has been filled with visiting and traveling, which is just the way I like it. I have been away in a different city every weekend for the past three weeks. 3 weekends ago, my friend Alexandra, a fellow Canadian and I volunteered for the Canadian Embassy. There was a huge exhibition in Budapest about secondary education and the Canadian Embassy had a booth representing all of the universities in Canada. Alex and I handed out brochures, attempted to speak Hungarian with those people that had questions, and took silly pictures with the cardboard Mountie posed beside us. We worked both Friday and Saturday and the embassy was very happy to have the extra help.

Saturday after work, Alex, a couple of other exchange students and I went to the "Terror Háza" in downtown Budapest. The Terror House was the headquarters of both the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party and the Hungarian Nazis, and then the headquarters of the Communist terror organizations ÁVO and its successor, the ÁVH. The building housed not only the offices of the people in charge of the above organizations, but the basement was a maze of torture chambers and holding cells for those who didn't agree with the party's ideals. Unfortunately, the museum was only in Hungarian, so it was very hard for me to follow what I was seeing, but it was still chilling to see what terrible torture hundreds of Hungarians were put through.

The next weekend was spent in Komárom, a city approximately 4 and a half hours from Nyíregyháza where my friend László lives. László was preparing for an English language exam so the weekend was spent watching movies and having conversations in English. Komárom is an interesting town because it is split right down the middle by the Slovakian border. From László's house it only takes about 10 minutes to walk across the Danube into Slovakia. Needless to say, I felt the need to cross the border (in defiance of Rotary's "no travel outside of Hungary" rules) to visit an "Irish" Pub (does a Guinness sign outside the pub qualify it as and Irish pub?) which was filled with musicians singing famous Hungarian songs.

Hungarian train workers have been striking every few months since I arrived here and I thought that my weekend plans were going to be ruined by the strike that started on Thursday evening, but luckily the strike lasted only about 9 hours, so by the time I arrived home from school last Friday I was able to pack up my bags and jump on a train to Szolnok where the Rotary Club there was holding a Farsang (don't ask me, I don't know what it means) Carnival. Everyone was required to dress up for the carnival and my friend Skyla and I had planned that we would go as a pair. Skyla dressed as a tree, and I went as a bird. Unfortunately, since I hadn't thought that I would be going to the carnival, the first train that I could catch arrived 30 minutes late, so I ended up putting my costume on in the tiny hotel bathroom. Believe me, when you have to put on fake eyelashes adorned with feathers, you don't want to have to do this in a public bathroom with 3 angry Hungarian woman waiting behind you so that they can wash their hands. Luckily, in the end my costume came together much better that I had hoped, so the evening was a success.

I know I owe you a bunch of pictures, but unfortunately, in the move from host family to host family, I have misplaced my USB cable. As soon as I get it back I will upload a bunch of new photos for you. In the meantime, please feel free to laugh at Skyla and I in Skyla's photos of the Carnival. (The girl wearing the polka-dotted t-shirt that says Pöttyös on it is Christine, who was dressed as a Túro Rudi, the famous Hungarian chocolate bar that I blogged about a few months ago.)

New Family

Seeing as my exchange year is close to half over, the time came for me to move in with my second host family. I am now living with the Veisz family, and I am thoroughly enjoying all of my new family members. Maria and Laszlo are my host parents. Laszlo is a doctor, and Maria is an agricultural engineer. I also have two host brothers: Robi and Rudi. Robi is 19 and Rudi is 21. Both are currently attending the College of Nyíregyháza.

My room is decked out with a TV, computer, and stereo system, so I am in 7th heaven. Also, I now live near the city center and I know that I am going to enjoy not having to take a half hour bus ride to school everyday.

This New Year is going to be a very busy one for me. I have a language exam and persentation about Canada in early February and I am going skiing in Austria for 5 days in late February. In April, I am going travelling around England and Scotland for 10 days, and in late May, early June, I am going on a Euro Tour with the rest of the exchange students. There are lots of things to look forward to!

Here is my new address:

Emily Buck
4400 Nyíregyháza
Sipkay Barna utca 1
Hungary

And my new home phone number:
36 42 443 659

Christmas

Christmas this year was spent with my host family in Nyíregyháza. While it was really strange to be away from my family for Christmas, almost all of the Baricskas live in Nyíregyháza, so family get-togethers are frequent, just like at home, and Christmas was no exception to this rule. On December 23rd, my host brother Norbi and his girlfriend Adri came from Budapest to stay with us for the holidays. In Hungary, presents are opened on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas morning, so on the 24th, we all ate Christmas dinner together (traditional Hungarian Fish Soup) and opened presents. Unfortunately, men are impossible to shop for, so I crawled into a corner and died of embarassment when my host father opened up his gift from me, which contained foot cream. (Nice foot cream, I might add, but still, foot cream.) Even though I gave him a terrible gift, Béla did not revoke my present, and I was given a bunch of new pairs of socks and a pair of pyjamas.

On Christmas day, we all went to Erika's parents' house for lunch. Erika's sister and her son were there, as well as Béla's father, an adopted aunt, and a great uncle. We ate lunch together (cabbage rolls), stuffed ourselves with Hungarian sweets and cakes, and then stuffed ourselves back into the car and went home to sleep off our calories.

The Christmas break here lasts until January 7th, so I am planning on going to visit one of my Hungarian friends who was on exchange in Calgary last year, and I am going to try to buff up on my Hungarian. Studying maybe a long shot though, as I have spent very few hours outside of my pyjamas so far this holiday, which is just the way I like it.

Boldog Karácsonyt! (Merry Christmas)