September 3

Here goes the inaugural web update for my year in Hungary. The story so far:

After my mom dropped me off at the airport, I flew to New York, met the new teachers who had flown together from Los Angeles, and continued with them. The flight went well, except my headphones didn't work. I strongly suspect, though, that the movie was awful. The American one, at any rate. I did watch the Czech one that came after it (we were flying on Czech Airlines), though. It seemed about 20 years old, and is about a man who works in a machine shop who the boss wants to promote but won't unless he returns to school. At first he doesn't want to, but then the other people in his shop convince him to go because his smarmy and generally unattractive rival is going to take the classes and get the promotion if he doesn't. So he goes to night school, and hijinks ensue. He attends the same school as his teenage son with the same name, and there is the requisite confusion of identity relating to a passed love note. There are also many crazy minor characters, mostly other middle-aged men in the main character's classes. 

If you want to know the ending, you will have to go to your local Czech-English video rental store, because I'm not going to give it away. I liked this movie because I liked knowing what passed for comedy in the communist era. The formula seemed to call for tired jokes in a workers' setting.

That was the flight. I talked a little to the person sitting next to me, but couldn't do much. She was a 14-year-old Czech girl who didn't speak much English, and I don't speak much Czech.

There were a few bags lost when we arrived in Budapest, one of mine among them, but they were delivered the next day. After giving the airline our address, Tracy, Annika (the other new teachers at Trefort) and I were met by Kate, the vice principle of our school, and Edit, the bursar (I think). They took us to our flats in Edit's tank-like Fiat, and we also saw the school that first day.

Subsequent days during the first week mostly consisted of us going to school for a morning meeting, then traipsing around the city during the afternoon and evening. The first weekend brought a birthday to one of the ESIers; Laura, who lives in Dunaujvaros with Amy, and who is now 24. Laura and Amy took the bus up from Duna (1-1.5 hours south of Budapest, depending on the time of day and mode of travel) on Saturday morning. A group of us took them up to see the castle district, where all kinds of magical things awaited us, including an old man sunning himself in his underthings on a bench in broad daylight (you may of course ask yourself, "How can you sun yourself in anything other than broad daylight?" I don't know. You got me.) That one magical thing has actually crowded out most of the other magical things in my memory, though that is not on purpose.

Afterwards, our small group met a much larger group at a restaurant on Liszt Ferenc Ter (a square named after the famous pianist and author of several Hungarian Rhapsodies, Franz Liszt) and ate outdoors at a restaurant there. Then there was a walk by the river with everything lit up.

School started on Monday, with an opening ceremony and not much else. Classes started on Tuesday. Everyone who knows says that school is generally chaotic for the first week, and then less chaotic, but still slightly so, for the rest of the year. This has certainly proven true in my experience. Today, for example, I was teaching my first lesson of the day, and 15 people walked into the door about halfway through. Turns out they were the other half of the class I was teaching (classes are divided in two for language teaching) whose teacher had not shown up that day. Later on, I had a lesson free, and was told three minutes beforehand that I would substitute for another class. We talked about the differences between Hungary and America, what they wanted to do when they graduated, smoking (their choice of subject, not mine), politics and Budapest. I consider it a victory that they did not destroy the room that we were in.

That's the way things stand now. School is crazy and no one knows what is going on. If someone does, he or she is not telling anyone else. We are given free rein in our classes until the books we order arrive. Or, in my case, until the vice principal tells me what my Literature/Culture classes will be about. Literature or Culture? I suppose we'll all have to stay tuned to find that one out.

September 14

Neal and I live in an 11-storey apartment building in Kispest, on a street named for a great Hungarian statesman from the 19th century.

Based on the preceding information, there is no way anyone could find our flat, even if they had lived in Budapest their whole life. The reason for this is that Kispest (pronounced "keeshpesht") is awash in 11-storey apartment buildings. You can't swing a cat around here without hitting one. Over the past half century, the government threw them up everywhere. And not just in Hungary; all of Eastern Europe is made a little uglier by the presence of these prefabricated concrete dominoes.

Another reason for the impossibility of finding our flat is that nearly every street here is named after some famous Hungarian or other. It is difficult to see who is immortalized the most in street names, statesmen or poets. The only street that I can think of that is NOT named after some famous Hungarian is Ulloi ut, one of the main thoroughfares. It is named for the village just outside Budapest to which it leads. On either side of it, for kilometers and kilometers, are rows of 11-storey apartment buildings on streets named for poets and politicians. Our building is so close to the next one that all we can see on the horizon when we look out our living room window is a wall of windows.

That's not to say that Kispest is an ugly place. It's true that the apartment blocks are its most readily noticeable feature, but there are many interesting things besides them. In the same valley between blocks that contains my school, there is an open-air market. At this market, you can buy just about anything: clothes, fruits and vegetables, unappetizing hunks of meat, flowers, chinese food and pizza. We have to walk through this market every morning on the way to work, because it lies between the tram stop and Trefort Agoston Kettanyelvu Szakkozepiskola (Augustus Trefort Bilingual Vocational Secondary School, which hereafter will simply be referred to as "Trefort," or "school").

Aside from the queasy feeling that such a strong smell of meat can bring on early in the morning, it is easy to get to school from home. The nearest tram runs along the aforementioned Ulloi Ut, and school is only two stops (or about six apartment buildings) away.

There are also two other ESI teachers at Trefort, Annika and Tracy. They live a few minutes west of the school, and Neal and I live south of the school, so we form a little triangle. The girls live in a little cottage in the courtyard of the Kolegium, a dorm complex where Trefort students who are not from Budapest live. But they live separately from the students, and the cottage is so quaint that you could almost believe that you were in a cabin miles from anywhere if it weren't for the kids playing soccer outside and kicking the ball up against the wall from time to time.

September 22

the enter key is apparently not working.  so i'll do the best i can without it. I'll make new paragraphs with this symbol: #  I'm writing this in the office at Trefort.  This update will not be long because of that.  It is not that I don't have enough time, but I can't put up with the quirky keyboard for very long.  The "enter" key doesn't work today.  The shift key STICKS.  Some keys are hard to press, while striking others will unleash a torrent of the same letter.  It's a bit dusty, too.  Maybe it would be fun to write the rest of this update without correcting the errors that the keyboard causes.  #  It occurred to me that those who are checking this web site regularly might want to know about my students.  I TEach seven classes, for a total of 20 hours per week.  They are in three grades, or "forms," NINTH< TENth and eleventh.  All classes here are divided into bilingual and non-bilingual groups.  The bilingual groups study English intensively during their first year here.  So the class that I SEE THE MOST IS A GROUP OF BILINGUAL NINES>  I SEE THEM EIGHT TIMES A WEEK>  EVERYONE ELSE I SEE TWICE A WEEK>  #

HEY! THE ENTER KEY JUST STARTED WORKING!  BUT THE SHIFT KEY IS STILL STUCK>

Anyway, most of my classes are English, but I DO HAVE four hours of "CULTURE" per week.  This I TEAch to bilingual students.  At first, I Didn't know what to teach them, "culture" being so broad a subject, but then KATE< the vice principal, gave me a list of topics to cover.  So I'm doing that now.  IT makes things a little difficult, scrambling to find articles and activities and projects to read, but I THINK that I have a great opportunity in those classes to talk to students about things that are important to them, and explore what their worldview is and how it is formed.

For all of my English classes, I USe a book.  OR< I Will use a book, when the books come in.  They were ordered last week, and should get here next week.  Right now I"M doing topical units and adjusting them to the students' level.  The only group of non-bilingual students I have are in the eleventh grade (OH by the way, bilingual students are denoted by the letter "d."  So when I TALk about 9.Ds, I'm talking about a group of bilingual students in their first year at this school.  And when I TALk about 11.ABCs, I'm talking about a huge group of non-bilingual students that I babysit twice a week.)

ONE more important thing for you to remember in thinking about Trefort is that there are very few girls here.  The ratio is about 75/25 in favor of male students.  I have two classes with no girls, a few more with just one, and the maximum amount of femaleness in one of my classes is four.  ONE might think that all this testosterone in one place would cause a lot of discipline problems, but it doesn't.  I"M not sure why.  Perhaps it is because this is Hungary, and not America.

I do actually have a bit of trouble with one of my classes.  They're rude and disrespectful and lazy.  They are also intelligent, which makes it all the sadder.  Hopefully they will come around at some point before the end of the year.  If not, it could be a long ten months for them and me both.

So that's a brief synopsis of the school situation.  I Do get to see students outside class from time to time, which is nice.  Every other Friday, the other ESIers and I HAVE English club at NEAl's and my flat.  LAST FRIDAY was the first one, and eight or so kids showed up.  A little subpar, I"M told, but I"m still excited about that many.  Also, we play softball on some Saturdays while the weather is warm.  WE played this Saturday, with three students.  It was mostly batting practice.  Anyhow, I'm not discouraged.

The keyboard is finally getting to me, so I"LL SAY GOODBYE FOR NOW>  IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS< FEEL FREE TO DROP ME AN EMAIL>  if you don't mind lots of capital letters, I WILL SEND YOU A REPLY>