it's like catching lightning

What's so interesting about living here in Budapest is that I'm with more Americans than I've been with in several months, not counting my week and a half at home in June with my extended family.

Math is incredibly difficult and incredibly rewarding. I can't believe I'm doing all of this. Skip the math camp on crack business, it's like we're all on mathstasy and the Mathlete commission is going to ignore the test results that said we're all on mathroids and let us run the race anyway. Our Halloween party at Dinah and Diana's was wildly successful. I was SohCahToa, Max was TanGent (with cane and bow tie), Shira was the New Math. There were a lot of contradictions, Sign & COSign, a set of linear equations, etc. There were normal costumes too, like a three-toed sloth, Hungarian fashion, and a turtle. No one ever said a bunch of math majors were normal.

Then Hungarian National Radio was at my house on Election night for some reason, when a bunch of people were here and stayed up til 6 a.m. to watch the results come in. That was extremely intense. I went to bed at 1:30 after the first came in and woke up at 6 to celebrations. Barack means peach in Hungarian, so we had a bunch of peach drinks. Our election sleepover was much better than the debate that Shira, Amelia, and I had gone to a few weeks ago at some university in Budapest.

As usual a lot has happened over the past month, notably that Max and I started dating. Last weekend we went to Hortobagy, a giant plain in Hungary (largest in Europe!) just to get out of the city. It was a three hour train ride, but knowing my luck with public transportation it took us much longer and cost much more to get there. I'd like to make an exhaustive list here of my bad luck with public transportation that began this year of travel:

1. Going home on December 21, 2007: I was supposed to grab a 5 a.m. shuttle to JFK and fly straight to John Wayne. Instead I missed the shuttle, flew out of Bradley at 11, got stuck in Chicago for awhile because I missed my connection to Phoenix, and ended up at LAX several hours later.

2. Didn't have a hostel booked for my last day in Spain because my flight was at 7 a.m. so I just stayed up til the metro opened. But my metro stop was closed or something, so I had to run to the next one and barely made it to the Barcelona airport on time.

3. Got robbed outside the Brussels north train station. Hence had to get another bus ticket, but there were no buses until the next day, thus I was stuck in Brussels for another night and missed some classes that Tuesday (we had Monday off).

4. Just missed my train from Amsterdam back home to Paris, actually ran to the station across town and got to my platform as the train was pulling out. Bought another ticket and went home a few hours later.

5. Heading home from Paris, my RER (to Charles de Gaulle airport) kept getting canceled and delayed, so I took a taxi to the airport. Then I barely made the check-in cutoff, but safely made it onto the plane. There were questionable issues with the engine, and we all had to get off the plane and get our luggage and go somewhere else. I ended up on AirFrance and spent my last two euros on a pay phone telling my parents when I'd be at LAX.

6. In Vietnam I kept on taking the wrong bus and ending up at the end of the line, then have to stay on the bus as it turned around and went the other way. That was pretty embarassing.

7. Lost my bus ticket to Prague and barely made it before the bus took off (it was impossible to find!). They let me on anyway, which was great.

8. Missed our train to Hortobagy so took another one, missed the transfer stop, had to pay extra to take another train back to the transfer stop and lost two hours.

Those are the major ones, but who knows how many times I've been late, delayed, or canceled because of my incompetence with buses, planes, trains, metros. I love public transportation, but it does not love me.

Oh and of course October 24 is a national Hungarian holiday in which riots and demonstrations break out across the city and everyone else leaves town. It commemorates the 1956 revolution. Shira, Dinah and I went to Dublin! We couchsurfed there with this guy named Eric, who's a fitness instructor with a degree from Trinity in economics. We had tea, climbed a big rock in Howth, ate a ton of fish n chips and pies, and watched three plays: Delirium, an adaptation of Brothers K, Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, and Waiting for Godot (in Korean). They were all absolutely fantastic, and it was a great trip with the girls and wandering a gorgeous city.

In two weeks I'm going to Berlin with Edward over the Thanksgiving break, while Shira and co. go to Turkey. Max still has no plans, but he can't come with us because he and Edward are like two positively charged magnets. We're going to the baths today because Emma and I were so depressed after our ORAL MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS MIDTERM yesterday. Any one of those words, I imagine, is terrifying to certain people out there. But all four together is pretty much the worst experience ever. The five of us in this class took from 2 to 5.30 yesterday of our MAP professor's time, each of us went in for about half an hour individually and proved some problems on the board to him and he asked us questions. It was terrifying. But also the idea is pretty cool, an oral math exam. It really pushes you to your mathematical limit. The analogy I made earlier this post, while ridiculously, does pretty aptly describe the way we here do math. A bunch of people are taking the math GRE this morning. This is a group of dedicated mathematicians, and it feels like athletics.

I had a great conversation with Edward about this the other day, how talent has some but not a lot to do with our abilities as mathematicians. If this discussion is too nerdy for you pretend that I'm an athlete, a musician, an actress, anything more understood than this particular niche that I fit into. Once you're past a certain point, there are Olympics-talented people and a whole lot of average for the above-average crowd. Ignoring the Olympics people, you're left with those for whom perseverence and enthusiasm for what we do alone will determine our success, independent of natural born talent. So the question is, how enthusiastic am I? After that oral exam I'm not sure.


Photos this time, many courtesy of Max: Hortobagy in the foggy morning, many people at our election sleepover around 2 a.m., me as SohCahToa with Big Dan in the background and paper folding numbers, a fresh fish market at Howth, me and Max's dinner at the Hortobagy Tavern, Max and I at the Hortobagy bridge, the view of Dublin etc. from Howth's Black Rock or something, Shira with a teacup, Shira and Dinah running through Irish woods.