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
Saturday, December 20, 2008 | Posted by Yen at 5:13 PM 0 comments
"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.
Sunday, December 14, 2008 | Posted by Yen at 5:47 PM 0 comments
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.
Saturday, November 8, 2008 | Posted by Yen at 10:53 AM 0 comments
OMG I'm in Budapest!
Thursday, October 9, 2008 | Posted by Yen at 11:22 AM 2 comments
Say my name say my name
On a lighter note from the last blog, and still in the personal range. I used to hate my name. I hated it hated it hated it. Yen is great. Nuh-gock is not. Nor is Dwong. But then I came here.
Everytime I say my full name to someone, they say it's a beautiful name. Duong Ngoc Yen. (Yu-ung Nghup Ee-en is the best I can to write it phonetically) The director of the national math institute told me that it's the name of a beautiful woman very skilled at martial arts and poetry in Chinese folklore. After seeing my grandfather's grave with Duong An engraved on the headstone and thinking about my dad, who was an only child, I realize that I haven't given Duong enough credit, because I'm so close to my mother's side of the family, the Hos. But I love and am proud of my name, and of being a Viet Kieu and having different ways of pronouncing it. I prefer the Vietnamese sound for my middle and last names.
Speaking of being a Viet Kieu, more on that. I have a definite advantage now because I know more Vietnamese, but even if you don't you're still welcomed back to the home country. People are generally very excited to meet me and talk with a Viet Kieu My (American overseas Vietnamese). We get the Vietnamese, not the tourist, pricing, and extra friendliness and real conversations because we're Viet Kieu. That also means that some tourists think we're Vietnamese from VN and treat us as such, which is... interesting. Especially when people speak louder and slower in hopes that I'll understand more e.g. "do you know LAKE? Hon Kim LAKE?" "Well actually it's called Hoan Kiem lake, named after the restored sword in the legend, and it's down this street and hang a left. Bye."
Then there are many other tourists who love talking with me because I've got an inner look at Vietnamese culture; I've been to houses and chatted with shopkeepers etc. And there are many Vietnamese who aren't as friendly to Viet Kieu too. We're in between: Vietnamese know we aren't Vietnamese from VN, and foreigners think we are. It is a home but not my home, it is a unique experience which is great, but then makes it harder because we relate with neither group but with ourselves alone.
Hungary in a week! I was definitely not expecting myself to keep blogging.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008 | Posted by Yen at 6:06 AM 1 comments
Heartwrenching homecoming
Sunday, August 3, 2008 | Posted by Yen at 3:40 PM 0 comments
"This is neither fun nor easy!"
I was in Saigon for three days. It was cool- more about that city when I go back there in three weeks. Vi and I got to our guesthouse on Sunday afternoon after taking a car and an unexpected ferry ride here- it took about four hours from HCMC. Our guesthouse, which we later nicknamed the Hell House, was essentially the worst possible lodging the university could have given its foreign volunteers. The plumbing kept breaking, we had no fridge (although we had a toaster oven and a sink of cockroaches), the fans worked intermittently (obviously no a/c), and we were missing some walls, as in Vi's bedroom had three walls and a scrim that didn't even cover the hole. Also no internet and holes in the walls (purposeful, for ventilation). It was pretty awesome. We also had a kitty and the university gave us two bicycles.
Thursday, July 17, 2008 | Posted by Yen at 3:44 PM 0 comments