critical mastiff

It was the best pun I could think of, and it doesn't even make sense. It's three am and we didn't leave the house all day and I drank coffee around dinnertime and I think I can hear our neighbors having sex. So yeah, figured I should update. Besides the fact that we rented bikes and participated in one of Budapest's twice-a-year Critical Mass(es), this week has been more just general good drunken times and various nightlife. So maybe I'll talk a little bit about the everyday.

Our Evolution of European Political Systems professor is named Bank Boros. His first name is not pronounced like the money lending and protecting business that is currently and massively failing back in my home country, but instead like the onomatopoeia "bonk". It has become a common phrase in our vocabularly, e.g. "these french fries are bonk" or "hit the bonk!" He is a small man who wears military-colored dress shirts that are too big for him, has startlingly bulgy blue eyes, and punctuates every sentence with an alarming amount of of deep, drawn out "uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh"s. He is really smart and totally badass (he's a political scientist who commentates on Hungarian television), but our entire class (of 7 students) almost completely lost it when he hit "um" number 59 on Wednesday. Kelsey tried to cover up her laughter with coughing but it was of no use, and Carolina, attempting to come to her aid, was soon reduced to giggles as well, while Andrew hid behind his notebook, and I thanked God I sat in the back of the room where my doodle of his face and a speech bubble of "uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" could not be seen by anyone. I then imagined my dog dying to ensure that I would control myself.

Feri ("like a little blue Fairy, you see?"-Feri) is our Hungarian professor. He is a hilarious old man who doesn't teach Hungarian so much as tease us, make sarcastic comments, and drop mad wisdom. I love him, and am sad that class will be ending soon. However, I don't think he's ever taught a language before, so he basically stands in front of the board and asks us what words we want to know. Rather ineffective. We got him to talk about nudity and love at first sight for almost an entire class period. Egesegdre.

We thought Contemporary Hungarian Culture was going to be all fun, games, wine tasting, and goulash slurping, but so far we've just been learning about the history of Hungary. It's really interesting, but it's also really fucking depressing. The country has only had its own independence for about fifty years of its ENTIRE HISTORY. There were some in there after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and there's been 19 or whatever since the Iron Curtain fell, but other than that it's just been conquering after land cropping after communist regime. People are still bitter about losing 2/3 of their land to the surrounding countries after WW1, and it's crazy to look at all the old people on the street (and even the regular-aged people too!) and think that for most of their lives, they lived through a dictatorship that was even Orwellian at times. Speaking of the old people, for some reason the ones we've been seeing here are so goddamn cute! And they're way more out and about, you know? You'd never see some shriveled old man riding his bicycle to an antique store in a suit in the states. Or just, like, chillin on their stoop and staring piercingly at everyone who walks by. Anyway, 1945 through 1989 were some rough years, and you can tell just by interacting with people at stores and stuff, that they aren't really over it yet. Weird, too, that we can learn it thoroughly in our history class, but it's clear that we won't really ever understand what they've been through. Even the teachers sort of talk to us like "yeah, yeah, okay, I'm telling you all this, but you're a 20-year-old American, there's really no point."

Last night some guy we met on the street was like, you guys bought horrible wine. We were like, yeah, it's fuckin cheap! He was all, you could get some much better wine for 800 ft (less than two dollars more than we paid for it). So we was like, whateva, we don't give a fuck! In the past week we've drinken (drank, drunk, drunken, dranken?) exactly one bottle of wine we found on the street (opened, but full) and three beers we found at a bar and on surrounding tables(opened, but full. mostly). I have like 4 dollars in my bank account. But it's cool, I got a hamburger bigger than my face (literally) at an American style diner called Feeling. Dank.