Day Three Slip Up

Jocie, Sam and Anabel

Unfortunately, the jet lag prevented us from remembering to post yesterday. So you, the lucky reader, get two blog posts today! We will be recapping our adventures on Wednesday, January 7th.

To start, we realized the bus trip to McDaniel College is much quicker than the metro. This helped since we were already running a bit late. You can probably tell this day was not going to be the best (although you are in for a surprise ending). Once we got to class, Erika (our Hungarian teacher) reviewed what we had learned the day before and then jumped right into to teaching us more numbers! Towards the end of class we learned a melodious Hungarian tune called "Olvadás," Anabel was particularly talented at reciting the song in an original, beauteous fashion. Here is a version of the song, we unfortunately could not find the version we learned in class.

After Hungarian class we were off to lunch! We found a quaint family restaurant that had lots of pasta on the menu, this was great because Anabel is vegetarian (if you're curious the Hungarian word for vegetarian is vegetariánus). Even though we went for the pasta, Anabel decided to get cheese and dill stuffed mushrooms which came with her favorite side dish, pilaf. Samantha and Jocie got the same pasta dish, it was ginormous. Anabel dared Jocie to eat the ENTIRE meal, but Jocie couldn't do it. We were, again, running a bit late to class so we sped through the rest of lunch.

For Number Theory that afternoon we learned the Euclidean Algorithm. This helped us find specific integers x, y that were solutions equations that we later learned were called Diophantine Equations. Professor Hanson loves his colored chalk and that day people became very invested in what color should be used for Theorems, it turned into quite the debate. After class we took the bus to Tesco, which was a bit of an excursion. Anabel became frustrated when she couldn't find any peanut butter (to which Jocie responded, "Europeans don't eat straight fat.") and the shelf checkout caused a few issues to say the least. The language barrier caused the woman at the register to giggle at Anabel's ignorance when it came to the Hungarian language.

After we got back to the hotel we worked on some homework and Jocie went off to dinner with Professor Hanson, Professor Dietz, Salih, Emma and Jonathan. They went to a very traditional Hungarian restaurant to eat, and walked by the residence where previous St. Olaf students in the program stayed before. Sam and Anabel, on the other hand, went to the oldest restaurant in Pest (which is right next to our hotel)! Both were delicious and relatively cheap.

After we converged back at the room, we decided to go listen to some live music at a restaurant down the street. Jocie met a few men from Norway and got to practice her Norwegian language skills. We had a fabulous time dancing to the music even though we couldn't understand the most of the songs. Clearly a change in the tone of our day three, as we went from zeros to heroes in a matter of hours! Then, we walked back to the hotel and went right to sleep. I'm sure you now understand why writing the blog post slipped our mind!

Overall our third day here in Budapest was very exciting. Here are a few photos. One of the bridges we see daily and a shot from a trolley ride. Sorry for the lack of photos, it was a busy day for us here in room 352 (for everyone that gets the joke)!