I am enjoying squash more than I thought it would be possible for any one person to do so. My house is filled with blue smoke, but at least if we asphyxiate it will be to the smell of olive oil and delicious squash.

I have also been f*cked by the Hungarian VAT. I tried to order contacts online and send them to my parents' house. However, you need either an American doctor (if you want to mail something to an American address) OR you need to 1. order by phone and 2. fax your prescription. Well, finding a fax is a pain in the derrier and I have a tough time calling 1-800 numbers for whatever reason, so I decided to just bite the bullet and send everything to Hungary. Mistake! While ordering contacts online was significantly cheaper, I now have to pay more than 12,000 forint (or about $75) to pick them up. Fuck me.

On a different note, I've been thinking a lot about language in context.

Until last Wednesday I taught a class of five advanced students. I don't know what it was exactly that brought it up -- probably the bitchy one snickering when I asked them how they were doing -- but I realized that they were completely ignorant of any general conception of cross-cultural differences. I asked, "Do you have foreign friends?" They did not. I asked, "Do you use English ever?" They do not. So, they are grinding away at a language in order to pass an exam to get, what? A better job? Academic credentials? A gold start on their CVs?

Despite how uncomfortable my daily "How are you?" made them, I continued, because I saw my role as that not only of an English teacher, but of a conduit to living English-language culture. I'm an American; likely, I always will be; and where I come from we ask how you're doing. It doesn't mean you have to answer honestly (people rarely do), but you should ask.

A living language is more than a merely collection of grammar rules and vocabulary. The difficulty I see in almost all my students is that they have little or no feeling for this other spoken life. And that begs the question, how well can you really learn a language if you're not interested, to at least some minimal degree, in its cultural trappings? I meet students who are quite fluent but who have never read a poem, or a short story, or a play. I get the impression that in schools here, whether out of bureaucracy or sloth, teachers churn through language book after language book. Students continually discuss such inane topics as "hobbies" or "holidays."

I agree that this is as good a place as any to start. My only points of reference are my study of French in high school and my current study of Hungarian (the sun and the moon). In French we moved through a textbook for perhaps the first two (or even three) years, although this was heavily supplemented with Madame's own worksheets. By the second year, though, she had us reading poetry, and then a detective novel, The Little Prince, and eventually the Stranger. We watched movies, too. I think she let us read subtitles once and then forced us to listen on our own.

Now, this was an extremely different situation for any number of reasons. Being at an international school meant we were largely unhindered by state or national requirements. Madame also had us for four years, instead of a couple of months, like I have my students. She made us suffer and if we couldn't handle the suffering, it was suggested that we discontinue French. Clearly, I can't do this to students who are volunteering their time to take a language class. Finally, Madame was a truly exceptional woman and teacher with few equals.

But it seems slightly hypocritical of me to accuse my students of being disconnected from English when I learned French in Tokyo. To be fair, many of them watch English movies, and sometimes even in the original language. It's just... I feel like there is so much more out there for them, if only they would take an interest.

Perhaps this is the burden/wish/regret of those who speak a lingua franca as a native language; for most people, it's merely about functionality.

Feeling more full of life than usual, I climbed Gellert Hegy in time to see the sun set over Budapest. On the way up, I passed a dog park full of people just home from work or airing their dogs after a long day of retirement. I was able to witness a very small part of the universal Human Condition: a dog owner pleading with her disinterested pet to fetch. I think this experience brings us more together as a species.

At the top of the hill is perhaps the statue that is the unofficial emblem of Budapest. I forget her name, but she stands tall with flapping dress and raised olive branch, keeping watch over the city. Her resilience throughout time is much like that of the Hungarian people themselves -- she was a symbol of fascism, then communism, and while they both passed on, she has remained.

She is flanked by two, much smaller, "soc-réál"* statues. The first, I supposed, is intended to be a man sprinting forward with the torch of progress or some such. A flapping cloth was thoughtfully sculpted around his front so as to conceal his genitalia. However, he looks more like a blossoming youth from an ancient Greek wet dream, sprinting around the locker room trying to slap one of his burly comrades with a wet washcloth. Mischievous passers-by have plugged the crack between his buttocks with chewing gum.

The other statue is a burly man beating the shit out of a three-headed dragon.

On my way back down I noticed that our lampposts had been dressed as Christmas trees. Lacking Thanksgiving, Hungarians have no natural limit on how early one can decorate for Christmas. But I am cheery; it reminds me of good things yet to come.

*socialist-realist

I just wrote a semi-formal email in Hungarian... Man, I hope whoever reads it laughs.

Things in Budapest have gone from bad to much better (knock on wood). Yesterday, today and apparently tomorrow, the bad weather let up; currently the colors of the city are singing as only I have seen them do here. The plan for this afternoon was (and still remains) buckling down and programming some Java, but I think first I'll profit from the fresh air and write on Gellert Hill.

(en profiter de qq chose is much more French than English, I think)

Speaking of programming, I was speculating with Baldur yesterday that since at least two of my students are software engineers, they must know something about Java. A topic in one of our classes might have to be "de-bugging Natalie's code."

I taught a student of mine "might have to" today. In Hungarian it's... kellene lett? I should have written it down when she said it.

On a mostly unrelated note, learning Hungarian (and Deutsch) now makes me think a lot about what learning French was like all those years ago. Fortunately, I have forgotten much of the suffering that was involved (and there was quite a bit)... I do think it strange, though, that so many of the things I have to concentrate on when studying Magyar seem completely different then those that threw me for a loop in French. Really, though, I think this is partly true, and partly because English and French are vastly more similar than English and Hungarian, but partly also I have forgotten how much time Madame spent hammering us about correct use of prepositions or how many diagrams she drew illustrating when to use the continuous past and when to use the past simple... There was a lot of work involved.

I've finally succumbed to the perhaps inevitable fall cold. My roommate has been under the weather for several days, and I didn't exactly treat my body well this past weekend, so it's no shocker. I'm hoping that sleep + rooibos will fix me up in a day or two, but one of those two is substantially harder than the other.

Teaching is a drag! I can't say how much I'm looking forward to being home for almost a month, but it is quite a bit. Things that have happened in class recently:

- A girl (who always does this, btw) was saying something in Hungarian while I was writing on the board... When I said, "Speak English!" she stopped talking altogether. I turned and asked her to repeat what she said, and she replied, "I'm sorry, I've already forgotten."

- I cut my hair last week. In class I was doing reported speech*, so I asked one of my students to say something... He got flustered for a minute and then came out with "I like short-haired women." That is not appropriate! The next class he started asking about my dietary concerns and then followed that with the whopper, "How do you maintain your figure?" I could give him the benefit of the doubt, saying that he might not realize quite how offensive it is, but to be honest I'm not at all inclined to.

- Speaking of the same class, the students hate/don't understand the material but I'm not sure I'm allowed to teach them something other than business English. It's also a shitty long commute.

Time for bed. Goodnight, twenty-two!


* e.g., "John said that he would gladly pay any price you might demand for these delicious bananas."

I ran errands this morning, which involved filling out paperwork and rustling up cash (returning books, selling books,etc.) I now have miraculously increased my pocket money tenfold!

The paperwork is ridiculous -- my language schools aren't so bad, but one class I teach is actually contracted from another school (this state of affairs in and of itself no doubt is the result of some condition outside the understanding of any human in my immediate contact circle). The paperwork would be enough to ballast an ocean liner. Almost all of it is filled out in duplicate or triplicate (yes, there was a form they needed *three* official copies of!), which in my mind is useful only insofar as it provides an opportunity to teach the phrase "in triplicate." Finally, for whatever reason, the material I actually teach is different from the official material, so to fill out what I "teach" every month, I copy it off an official syllabus. I taught Oscar Wilde the entire month of October.

Oh, paperwork!

[would that be the ablative case in Latin?]