tent bottom new place

i went to a place called "tent bottom new place" (Sátoraljaújhely in hungarian) with tara yesterday. we heard that there was a chairlift or something that we had to go on. we walked around, found the tour inform place, got a map and some info and were on our way.

we took a bus to a roundabout that was said to be near the chairlift. we saw this sign and knew we were close.
we walked some more, tara said it was like a kilometer (she's canadian so that means something to her) and happened upon this sign. so we were headed in the right direction!

we arrived!

and we got on

and ascended into the fog (oh, it was the first foggy day in hungary this year. we were told we would see a great panorama...)

fall was happening all around us. unique as that is to me, i had to snap some shots of it.

pretty pretty

at the top we wanted to get out and look around but there was construction so the guy told us no. we turned around and headed down for the second half of our 38 minute journey.

on the way up and down we were taunted by the bobsled station and the track

we could see people having fun and going faster than we were

since "if you can't beat 'em you should join 'em" we marched our little selves right over there when we got off the (otherwise cool) chairlift. we jumped in a bobsled and were ticking up the track like that!

some guy told us how to use the hand breaks - in hungarian. we smiled and just passed him.

i may have screamed and laughed the whole way down.it was so fun! we could control how fast or slow we went, so it wasn't like anything we had done before in a theme park. there was a photo op at one point and tara reminded me to smile. here's the result:

ummmm, great picture! we really did have that much fun. don't believe me? click below and watch the video!

name day celebration

in hungary we celebrate name days, as you may recall. under communism there was a government approved list of names hungarians could name their children, so i think to make it seem like that wasn't as sucky as it actually was, hungarians (and other countries) celebrated the names by assigning one (or sometimes up to 5) name a day of the year. it's a bigger deal than birthdays since name days are public - even printed on calendars - while birthdays are usually just a family affair.

anyway, at school we celebrated all the name days from september and october with one common party. the staff members who had their name days during those months brought in goodies and drinks for the other teachers.

before we ate the food, we (and by 'we' i mean 'they') sang a little song which was new to me. apparently it's a catholic thing... well, that's my guess.

the guy who started the song is a priest. he began by listing the names of the honorees, then led us into the song.


then cheek kissing ensued, which i expected...


and then we dug in! there were pastries and fruit and homemade dishes and candy and cakes galore, not to mention tea, soda, sparkling water, fruit juices, and coffee.

gotta love teacher parties in the staff room :)

halloween

i did a halloween lesson this week with most of my kids. some good classes got to have races to make mummies.

some were pretty proud of their work...

some were not so happy to be the mummy...

some had way too much fun...

and some kind of sucked at it...

after talking about halloween (15 minutes), and mummy wrapping (5 minutes) i gave the class the remainder of the time (25 minutes) to do a halloween word search. [hungarian kids equate cheating with helping so when they take a test there is ALWAYS cheating and no one feels bad unless they get caught. teachers have even congratulated students on cheating without getting caught, sort of encouraging them to beat the system however they can. i'm not making this up.}

when i told the students that the winner would get a candy bar, all conversations stopped. i told them they could help each other and they all refused. i had never heard such silence. even the most rambunctious kids (like the boy pictured below) concentrated and tried their best for the prize. i was really quite impressed, if not stunned.

so far, after two days of halloween, i'm willing to call it a success. the kids learned some new vocab, made mummies, and had a howling good time.... and so did i.

szent imre - the good school

szent imre is the catholic school i teach in on tuesdays and thursdays. the teachers are great and always talk to and help me. we eat lunch together, talk about lessons, and shoot the breeze in our planning periods. they make me like my job even more than the kids do.

that's not to say that the kids aren't good, because they are. most of the time the students there are interested in english and learning and so interested in my lessons. they are cooperative even when they don't fully understand what i'm saying.

since it's a catholic school, it's a bit more strict than other schools. the students don't greet teachers with the normal "csokalom" (i kiss you[r hand]) but with a latin greeting of 'may you be blessed by jesus christ'... or something like that. (no need to correct my latin, people. i'm working on hungarian right now.) i am supposed to respond with the latin for "may it be so forever."


if i see kids in the hall, they are supposed to say this phrase and i am supposed to respond accordingly. it's so long and strange to me, though, that i usually just say hi to them. oh, well.

here is one of my favorite classes at that school. i wanted to take a picture of them but forgot my camera. i ran downstairs to get it and told them to get in position. when i came back, they were ready and had surprised me with a different word than "cheese."
maybe a video will make you feel like you were there. :)



another favorite class of mine is the beginners. this is their first year learning english and they haven't lost their motivation for school yet. we do very elementary things in there (and i use as much hungarian as english!) but we all like it. this week we sang some songs: Old McDonald Had a Farm, Father Abraham, the Hokey Pokey, B-I-N-G-O, and the jazz chant that goes 'hi, my name is Joe and I work in a button factory.' when i took their picture they wanted to sing partof one of the songs. so here they are:

the lock thing

in my town there is a ... structure (for lack of the actual word) with a lot of padlocks on it. the tradition surrounding it is that couples attach a lock when they're in love and seriously committed. it's quite a sight, actually, because people decorate their locks with their names, dates, pictures, or inside jokes.

i think it's a fun idea... uncharacteristically so for the hungarians ;)

went to tata

another teacher, carla, invited other CETP people to her town to exchange lesson plans and have a get-together. i was excited to go because a)i'd never been there, b)i like carla, and c)i need some lesson plans that will work with my *lovely* kids.

stan (some sweet CETP guy) and carla, the hostess
who even let xander come along AND sleep on her bed for a while
then she took us on a little sight-seeing tour
and we saw the sights: the lake, the castle, the stuff around the lake and the castle
after the tour and the lesson stuff we went to dinner at some pirate restaurant - yum!
thanks again for your hospitality and lessons, carla!

xander

this little dog of mine...

last week xander had some back and hip problems. he couldn't jump up on the (low) bed, sit down anywhere, or let me pet his back without whimpering and yelping. it was so scary and sad for me. i was frustrated because i didn't know what the problem was and the silly dog can't tell me! i noticed it when i came home one evening and decided if he wasn't better by morning i would take him to the vet.
i was in the middle of a series of phone calls (trying to find an english-speaking vet) and getting fed up and scared when a former colleague (from the best school ever, zrinyi) called. she asked how i was and through tears i said ok. she said, ok, that means not ok. i told her the problem and she came over right then to escort us to the vet. we took a taxi (driven by my private student, taxi-driver gabor) to the animal hospital.
the vet who saw us was a nice lady, but didn't speak english. i couldn't understand all (or even half) of what she said, but i could figure out a lot from her gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, and the words i knew. gabi, my colleague, translated periodically but not throughout.
it seems his hips were buckling or something under the pressure of his extra weight. the vet was sure to explain to me several times that xander is overweight. later she said he was old, too. (i, of course, googled it when i got home and my nearly 7 year old dog is about middle aged for his breed... so not old.)
we were given two medicines: a pain killer and a joint lubricant (or something). i understood the regimen and agreed to administer the meds to him accordingly. i am also supposed to watch his diet, give him more exercise, and keep him from walking up/down stairs and jumping on furniture until he's back to normal.

as of this week, i'm happy to report, he's back to his jumpy, stair-walking self. he has been spared a few scrapes of people food and doesn't like that, but otherwise he's happy. thankfully it wasn't anything more serious. i can't tell you how many times i've said out loud to him, "please don't die in hungary." i know i would be just devastated. anyway, all is well again.

i love me some xander-pants!

apple pie

this little thing, a piece of hungarian apple pie, inspired me to bake (something i don't do too often, but when i do, i really enjoy it). this hungarian treat is good, believe me, i just had to have a slice of america.

i mentioned it to lisa (another american in this town) and soon we planned to bake the pie at her workplace because it has a good kitchen.

she made the dough

then we peeled and sliced some granny smiths

and added the good stuff
(some little kid was there and kept coming over
to ask if she could have one more piece of sugar apple)

it smelled so good even before it was cooked!

we had a weird idea to also make some kind of apple turnover... for no real reason, either. we whipped up some dough, eyeballed the amounts of sugar and spices, then wished it luck

um, yum

i made that lattice top! my first one ever :)

all in all, it was a good idea and a great dessert!

the real truth is i'm american, not hungarian... in fact, as american as apple pie :)

wine time

this weekend i went to tokaj (the white wine region of hungary) with 3 french girls, 3 american guys, and a canadian.

we went to a nice winery and sat outside for a while, sampling the edes szamorodni (mmm, mm, good sweet wine) with some bits of cheese and bread.

behold!

later we hiked up the 'mountain/hill' to see what we could see from the lookout. it's not really a mountain, but it passes for one around these parts. there are two paths up the mountain: the red (hard) one and the green (easy) one. we went up the hard one (fun, fun, fun) and down the easy one - maybe the reverse of the plan i would have suggested.

THE mountain/hill (see? it's not really either, but something in between)

i didn't take any real pictures of the hard path up the mountain (not something i'm dying to remember) but here is something kind of like it. imagine it being a bit darker, a bit steeper, no leaves - but just dirt, and ten billion more trees to the right.

tokaj is the most famous wine region in hungary. they make sweet, dry, and dessert wines there...all white or rose. here are some of the great grapes... which we may or may not have sampled illegally on the way down the mountain. :D

a vineyard on the way down the mountain (the easy path)

a view from the easy path

some frenchies in a vineyard
there are two main rivers in hungary (the danube in budapest and the tisza in the eastern part of the country... where i live). here is one of them - the mighty tisza (tee-suh)

we had some wine in a wine cellar or two - kind of like this one (those barrels are the signature look of hungarian cellars...red rimmed and full of delicious wine!)

there are also restaurants in many cellars there. so you and your party can have a hollowed out cave room all to yourselves for your own private wine tasting extravaganza. i'm game!

P.S. readers: this has been the 100th post! thank you for your continued readership and commentship. if it weren't for you, i wouldn't be blogging at all. thanks for giving me a reason!