Week 2.5

After the end of my first week of classes I've decided that this might actually be the most difficult "year off" I could have possibly concocted, perhaps short of pulling a John Petkun and joining the marines. I guess I could have hit my head against a brick wall for nine months, but that probably wouldn't have merited government sponsorship.

While ELTE's website eagerly boasts of the dozens of English-language programs availible to foreign students (BSc's! MSc's! PhD's!), in practice I am one of the first two students to ever try this out, at least in the math department. (The other is Baldur, a comically awkward fellow approximately my age from Iceland) My classes this semester were chosen from the ten courses listed as being taught in English(1). Since half were thrown out because I lacked the appropriate background, course selection itself was mercifully easy. Additionally, I'll be doing quite a bit of learning on my own.

I have to introduce myelf to each of the professors and explain that yes, I am one of the problematic foreign students (egy külföldi diák) and yes, I don't speak enough Hungarian to follow a lecture. Fortunately the other guy is in two of my classes, so it's not always just my fault that everyone else is forced to follow a topic in a second (third? fourth?) language.

On the bright side, everyone I've talked to so far has been helpful, and most have been fairly enthusiastic. As I mentioned earlier, as a native speaker of English I am a rare and exotic commodity. One of my professors (who I've definitely heard of before, although I don't know when) came up to Baldur and me after class and asked us how we thought things went and how we ended up at ELTE. He listened to Baldur's explaination and then said to me, "You must have been BSM. The only way someone from Penn-syl-vania comes to ELTE is from BSM." Another professor, who initially helped me out in the fall, talked to me in her office for a while to figure out classes, see how things were going and so forth. As I getting ready to go she said, "And if you have any other problems, you should come to me. How old are you? Twenty-one? Right between my children. If you have any personal problems, you should come to me."

One of the perks of being a proper student is that the two of us get an office! The math building itself is a bit grim, and I would rather not spend a zillion hours here, but it will be really great to have a quiet place to sit down and work. It even has a computer, hence the current post.

In other news, for three glorious days we had wired internet in the flat, although everything got screwed up when we tried to install the wireless and now we're back to square one. I think I might call my dad tomorrow to see if he can get things sorted out. I haven't cried about it, though, or any other part of settling in, so I think I'm doing pretty well.

1. To be fair to ELTE, this is partly because I didn't actually tell them I was coming until May or June, and then it was unclear whether or not I would actually register as a student...