From Pest to Buda and back again Posted on January 27th, 2010 by Jennifer Van Osdel

I realized today that I have only been in Budapest for ten days now, but it feels like I’ve been here at least a month because every day is so jam packed with things to do. This past Saturday, Rachel (my flatmate), Melissa (my neighbor), and I went and explored the castle district of Buda. We live on the Pest side of the river, which is nice enough, but when we were walking around Buda we felt like we had finally arrived in Europe. It was touristy, which was to be expected, and a vast number of my pictures look remarkably like the postcards that they sell in all the shops, but it’s still breathtaking to stand on top of the Buda hills and look over the Danube. I still find it hard to believe that I’ll be living here for the next four months. I’m still in the honeymoon, tourist stage where my biggest concern is what part of Budapest to explore after language school. I’m sure this will come to a screeching halt when the rent is due and math classes start. But for now I am content to feel as if I am on some sort of bizarre extended vacation that includes learning Hungarian intensively for seven hours every weekday. Although it is a very long time to sit and learn about one subject every day, I have actually learned a lot of useful Magyar (which is the Hungarian word for Hungarian). Using these newfound Hungarian language skills, I can introduce myself, order food in a restaurant, tell the time, give directions and say excuse me when I run into someone on the metro (assuming that the vocabulary stays in my head once I leave the school, which it seems keen on not doing). Today at lunch I was really excited that I could understand the slogan on the side of a truck outside our restaurant. It said something like “Ez nem csak a könyvbolt,” which is “it’s not just a bookstore.” But even with our store of Hungarian words, there’s still a lot of pointing at whichever food we want and saying “kösönöm” (thank you) when they hand it to us because even though there is a lot of English in the touristy areas, we live in a very Hungarian district. It still amazes me that even with a language barrier, I’m still able to eat, shop, and learn without an extreme amount of inconvenience, (granted the modern day universality of the English language is a great help). If anyone reading this is considering studying abroad, I highly suggest not letting differences in language or culture make you hesitate in choosing a country. In fact, these differences and little quirks are why I absolutely love Budapest, and they are also what make something as simple as grocery shopping a challenging cultural experience.