I am thankful for conversations with Chadwick! :) He makes me smile! (I miss that man! It's just not the same without him!) I got to talk to him through instant messaging and then for a little while on the phone last night!!!
It's been a Kecskeméti weekend. Very laid back and a little lacking on the productivity scale, but it's been good. I needed just a weekend in Kecskemét.
Yesterday, I awoke a little earlier than I would have liked, especially since I didn't go to bed till after 1am. (My body never seems to like to let me sleep in...guess that's a good thing in some aspects.) I spent an hour and a half writing postcards...lots of postcards...and then hopped off to post them before the post office closed. Gallavanted around town a bit but justed ended up getting grumpy. As I walked out of the last store, though, to head back to the Institute, there were snowflakes swirling in the air!!! :) Yay! Still no real snow, but that's a start. Back at the Institute, Wendy and Hilary were so funny...they ran outside, Hilary still in her pjs and were jumping around and shouting. The porter thought we were all crazy...then we told her it was snowing, and her face lit up, too.
The rest of the day was very unproductive. Feel a little guilty about that but not as much as I probably should be. I did practice a little piano and some of the piano stuff for solfege and also worked on memorizing a Kodály piece for voice. I am not great at memorizing, but I am finding it is far more difficult when you are trying to figure out/learn the language, too! I really like the language, but it is very difficult. (Although János tells me, "Oh, it's not difficult. Very simple," every time he tries to explain something in Hungarian to me...yeah, simple because you speak it as a mother tongue. You know, I am so amazed by the fact that people...especially the teachers here...can speak 3, 4, 5, some even 6 languages! That is just incredible! And they can switch between them with the blink of an eye. I wish I could do that! But that is a qualm I have with the American education system that I don't really want to go into.) I must have sat there for two hours looking at this piece...and it is only three strophic verses...I ended up flipping through my dictionary to find a word-for-word literal translation, and that helped a lot...building my Hungarian vocabulary, too. However, I awoke this morning with it going through my head...I think I may have got it...or am very close. :)
In the evening, as with many evening, especially weekends, a bunch of us sat chatting around for a couple of hours in the dining room. We have some of the weirdest conversations, though. Adds to the list of very memorable moments of life at the Institute! haha!
This morning I awoke, again, early and with memories of crazy dreams I'd had. (I have the weirdest dreams! I don't always remember them, but the ones I do are always so strange!) Sun-Xing and I went to the open market. Oh, the adventures at the open market! It is very cold out today but nothing too horrible, and she looked at me and said, "Is that the coat you are wearing?!" I had on my winter pea coat...she had a "marshmallow" coat (you know...those puffy winter coats). I just laughed. She cracks me up. This is the snow...or rather "wanna-be" snow...we found when we walked out of the Institute:
It's practically just a bit of frost! And this is the snow Mom sent me from home:
I showed that picture to Wendy and Hilary, and their eyes got really big!
The open market is always an experience. It's fun. However, I don't particularly enjoy walking past the dead pigs and what not. Yuck!
I saw Poinsettas for Christmas already! :) This place is great for practicing Hungarian. We met this one man that we were buying veggies off of. He was so funny. I had to ask him to repeat the price like five times before I got it. He was like, "Nincs problemo." I said, "Bocsánat! Most tanulok magyarul. Csak kicsit." (translation: "Sorry, I am now studying Hungarian. Just a little." He was impressed that we were even studying and trying to speak the language. (Spending a few months in a culture, you start to pick things up eventually! I find it hard to believe that some people spend years in a foreign place and never learn any of the language. How can you not when everyone around you is speaking it?) Turns out he spoke some English, so the next ten minutes were him quizzing us on how much we needed to pay and how much change he was giving us back. haha! That's really why we go to the market...to learn Hungarian. haha! :)
I really need to accomplish some work today, though. (Although it is already nearly 1pm and still haven't touched anything.) I made mashed potatoes today, though! Yum! Very exciting! However, it kind of makes me homesick for Thanksgiving. (My grandma promised me a turkey for Christmas, though!) It's this Thursday, and there aren't any plans yet...
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