"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.