One last leg left. I'm in the Ferihegy Airport in Budapest, Terminal 2, waiting for my flight to London Gatwick to board. I've got an odd nervousness in my stomach. Part of it was how sad it was saying goodbye to Max this morning at 6 a.m., and some saying goodbye to my very dear friends later about 3 p.m. And part of it is going to yet another new place for a short time and figuring out the logistics of that.
Side note, the woman who checked me in scolded me because the maximum is 20 kg for two check-in bags, and mine weighed 27 or so. We'll see how I do getting into the States; I don't think there's a strike at Heathrow that would let me get away with not paying the extra fees. How is my stuff this heavy? Also, how much luggage are we allowed to have? I don't know the answers to either of these questions.
So. I'll be in London doing who knows what for five days, then I'll head back to SoCal on Christmas, getting into LAX in the afternoon. I'll stay at my parent's house in Irvine for two weeks, then go up to Yale early on January 7th and Max will help me move into my new room with Shoshana. I bought motorcycle lessons for a Christmas present for myself!
It's been nearly a year of travel and adventures, and I'm tired. I thought I was a traveler, and I think I will always have a bit of wanderlust in me, but it's time for this girl to go home. I'll put up London photos or something soon. I have a picasa album of photos I show to my parents; lots of them have appeared in this blog over the past year as well: http://picasaweb.google.com/yenergy/MoreFall2008?feat=directlink and http://picasaweb.google.com/yenergy/Budapest?feat=directlink
goodbye to travel... almost
"Failure at blogging" is my middle name
After almost a year of blogging on a tri-, then bi-, then -, then semi-weekly basis, I have fallen to a once-a-month "this is what happened!" thing. Again, many of my adventures (at least, those shared with szivem Edward) are on edwardinhungary.blogspot.com. Notably our five-day ridiculous Berlin trip is well documented there. "Szivem" means "my heart" in Hungarian, colloquially they use it the same way Americans use "darling." So I call Edward szivem (though I guess I do use the word "darling" a lot).
So Berlin and midterms are the big thing that happened over the past month. Oh except that I went on a spontaneous weekend trip to Romania with Shira and Amelia. I'm a member of couchsurfing.org, an online website for frequent travelers to meet locals/get a free couch to stay on. I've surfed in Brussels, Pisa, Florence, Milan, Dublin, Berlin, and now Romania, technically. But once I got this apartment with Shira and discussed it with her, we thought it would be nice to return the favor. We've hosted two girls from Switzerland who hit on Max E. (not my Max), a couple from Germany who left their jackets here, an Australian dude and his girl from Romania, and a man from Alabama. So during this spontaneous weekend a week before Berlin, the three of us girls headed out to Cluj, Romania, and spent some time with our friend Lavinia and her flatmates. We ate, drank tea, watched a lot of chick flicks, and climbed through salt caves. It was a nice weekend.
Somehow caving has been a large part of my life lately, which is odd given my claustrophobia (our metro car stopped for a few minutes the other day between stations and I FREAKED OUT). Sometime after the last time I blogged my Hungarian class went to the Budapest drip caves (cseppborlang) and hiked through those for an hour, then got pastries at the place that Gabor had taken me and Shira at the beginning of the semester (I guess it's famous). Then we all went to Nagyi's Palacsinta, which translates to Grandma's Pancakes. It's delicious.
Another weird thing: Erika, our Hungarian teacher, is actually Max's host mom. This one day Max was sick so I went to his house to make him soup and be a compassionate nursemaid (I'm actually horrible and did the thing you do with babies, the whole airplane thing). Erika came home and I awkwardly bumped into her in her kitchen. Yeah... that's weird. It's like dating your teacher's son, but it's even weirder because it's her host son.
Boo I don't want to leave Budapest. Not that I do a lot of Hungary-specific things here. I speak a little bit of Hungarian and know a little bit about Hungarian culture, and I know a lot more math and feel much more confident about my math. I'm scared of going back to the "real world" of Yale (heh), and also of leaving Max (aww), and of coming back to my friends and them changing and me changing too in the past year, and of America generally. I won't be travelling anymore. Blows my mind.
It's finals time. My MAP final is going to be ridiculous. If you recall, our quantum logic midterm was oral, e.g. we had to solve problems on the board in front of the professor while he asked us questions. This time, he'll have eight slips of paper, and we'll each draw two. On each will be a topic. We have an hour and a half to write everything we know about that topic. Essentially, the four of us have to be able to teach the class by tomorrow afternoon. eek.
Photos: 15 of us for Thanksgiving dinner potluck before the break, Shira in Romania, me eating sausage in Berlin.
