Budapest

Budapest is a beautiful city.


Here are some more pictures

My Birthday

I have been craving Mexican food really badly so for my birthday we found a Mexican restaurant and went there for dinner. It was actually pretty good!

Hungary

Trip

Things are going well here so far (I've been here since February 3rd). The trip here was a little crazy. I was stuck in London for a day because every flight was canceled due to snow. Then they couldn't find my bag for five days...after about five or six days in the same clothes (because I didn't have my bag while stuck in London either) I ended up buying some clothes because my mom was worried about me not being able to make new friends when I was wearing the same clothes everyday. The clothes were in general pretty cheap but the weird thing is that every article of clothing cost about the same (1000-2000 forints or $4-8 dollars). That is cheap for pants. It is quite expensive for boxers!

Not much to see from London. I spent most of my time in the airport and when outside of the airport it seemed pretty much like an expensive version of the U.S. where people talk funny.

It's interesting though that British Airways serves wine on the flights (for free). This Italian kid who sat next to me, Andrea, chugged two (maybe it was even three) of these little wine things...some people are just built to drink. I realized after about a half bottle that I am not one of them. I just wanted some water!

Hostel

I stayed in the Hostel (Hotel Ventura) for the first eight nights. It wasn't a bad place but after a while you are pretty ready to get out! It was cramped and living out of a suitcase makes it hard to stay organized (as you can see in the picture). It was also a long way away from everything. We were glad to get an apartment.
Apartment

Here's what my apartment looks like




I was living with a kid from UW, Brett and a guy from Turkey named John.



Unfortunately, John had to go back to Turkey because of some class scheduling conflicts that would delay his graduation back home. It's too bad because he became a good friend while living here (him, Brett and I were also in the same room in the hostel). Brett and I hope that we can go visit him in Turkey sometime this semester.

A guy from Brazil, Mauricio, took John's spot when he left. He's a cool guy too and we're good friends.

I didn't know Brett before studying abroad here but he's a good guy. He goes to UW but is from the Boston area.

Friends

Everyone here is pretty nice. There are seven of us from UW. Many of them are friends from back home so they hang out together a lot. I hang out with them sometimes but not all of the time.

Since this is a technology-orientied school mostly everyone is in engineering or architecture. I think that this gets a pretty good group of kids because anyone who is going to study abroad is somewhat social and engineers who have people skills are often very fun people. Just ask Lisa, she loves engineering boys! (We'll see if she's reading this!)

I play soccer with the Brazilian guys once and a while. It's a lot of fun. In the U.S. soccer is really rough and dangerous (lots of knee injuries). When they play it's almost more like basketball where passing is more important than just kicking it really hard.

Language

Hungarian

The Hungarian Language is kind of crazy. It isn't related much to any other language in the world only distantly to Finnish and Estonian. Only newer words like szenvics (sandwich) which is pronounced "send-veech" are anything like English. Also, multiple words are sometimes concatenated so if you see a word you don't know, it can be very hard to look it up in the dictionary. Either way, I'm trying to learn a little bit of the language. I feel like it is rude to go somewhere and not at least learn to say "Hello" and "Thank you" in their language.

Spanish

There are some Spanish kids here so I get to use my Spanish while talking to them. Spanish is an awesome language. It just flows so nicely. I really wish I could have studied abroad in a Spanish-speaking country but it just didn't work out with my summer plans.

Portuguese

My Brazilian friends have been trying to teach me a little Portuguese. I don't know if you have ever heard Portuguese but it is a really cool language. It sounds like a smoother and softer version of Spanish. I would say Spanish makes English sound ugly and Portuguese makes Spanish sound ugly. If you know Spanish you can read some Portuguese (a decent number of words are spelled similar their Spanish counterparts) but when spoken it is much different. It is not "the same thing as Spanish" as many people say. The pronounciation is quite difficult because like English (and unlike Spanish) the same letters don't always make the same sound. Also, at least in Brazilian Portuguese, many words can be pronounced a few different ways.

What I've been up to this last semester

Hey everyone! A lot has happened in the last few months and I haven't talked to some of you who live far away in quite a while. Here's a little update:

I'm studying abroad in Hungary!

Why Hungary?

It actually wasn't too much of a choice. Since I am studying abroad as a second-semester senior, I will be in school an extra semester (now I'll graduate in December 2009). Since I'm going to be in school another semester, I also get another summer break. Unfortunately, many schools in other countries have school schedules that go much later into the summer than schools in the U.S. I decided that at as awesome as study abroad sounds, doing a summer internship (see "This Summer" below) has also been a great experience and that I should fit study abroad around that. Mexico and Hungary were the two places I considered. UW-Madison has an engineering study abroad program with a similar school schedule in both of these countires. Mexico would be cool because I could use my Spanish and Hungary would be cool because I would be in Europe and could travel around to other places in Europe. Eventually I decided that I wanted to go to Hungary.

This Summer

I am going to intern at Facebook. I guess this means I have to get better at responding to wall posts!



I'm really sad to leave Intuit. The people that I have met there the last two summers (maybe you who is reading this) were so much more than my co-workers. They are great friends and they also often felt like family away from home. I'll still be in the Valley this summer and so I will still get to hang out with all my old friends. Even the ones who now work at Google. I won't mention any names!

I bought a mac!

When Apple came out with the new MacBook Pro I bought one of the old ones (because of the several hundred dollar price drop). It has taken a little while to get used to but it's pretty awesome.

One of the best features the mac has is that it comes with a program Apple created specifically for easily and efficiently downloading Firefox. It's called Safari!



I hope that all of you are doing well and that you are now up to date with my life! If you have a blog or personal website make sure you put a comment with a link (or e-mail me it). I'm in the Chicago airport right now so I will write more when I get to Hungary!