Hello all,

And yet another beautiful day in Budapest! Although the weather would've made for another great day exploring the outdoors, our intensive learning day didn't fail us. 

We began our day as usual: A continental breakfast in the early AM, a bus ride to class at 9:30, and a chocolate from Emese (our teacher) upon arrival at our 10AM class. After reviewing our limited Hungarian vocabulary, our language abilities were put to the test when 4 Hungarian teenagers came to talk with us. As pictured below, our class split into groups of 5, and had brief conversations with each one of the students. After merely a few seconds of conversation, it became clear that 13 year olds were better at our language than we were at theirs…

Sadly, this was the end of our brief time learning Hungarian in a classroom setting, we learned a bit and struggled a bit, but we made it through, the rest of our learning will be on our own.

After our Hungarian class, our class diverged to their chosen restaurants, and met again at 12:45 to start our math lesson. After today's lesson I am proud to say that Diophantine's equation, is indeed correct. However, I think the most important lesson that we learned was from Bela's experience at the bank: who knew that bank teller's oftentimes pay you the number of dollars as cents, and the number of cents as dollars? (this was a scenario was on our in-class assignment, a question that puzzled us all).

After Math class, we had a drama class where we did a number of group bonding activities. We started by playing games where we moved across the circle after making eye contact with someone, in some variants, we simply moved across but in another, we would try to do it when someone in the center of the circle wasn’t paying attention. Another game we played was secret lovers where two people were randomly selected as “lovers” unbeknownst to the other players or each other and would try to find out who the other lover is and hug them before the other players found out who they both were. The game felt a lot like werewolf, with different players having information and subtly trying to exchange information without others finding out (except for one player who just started hugging everyone). Of special note among the activities we did was a quick round of speed dating with a minute to answer different questions, at the end of which, we had one partner with whom we held eye contact for four minutes without speaking. People tried a number of different things to alleviate the awkwardness (most of which I couldn’t see, being locked into eye contact with my own partner). It was pretty intense… and funny. To round out the activities, we performed trust exercises with the group forming a circle around one person in the center. The person in the center closed their eyes and walked until reaching the borders of the circle where someone would turn them around and send them off to another corner of the circle (Yes, I know circles don’t have corners but I can’t think of any other way to say this). This wasn’t super complicated until we started having two people in the center at a time so the people around the circle would need to send the person off so that they didn’t accidentally run into the other walker. Fortunately, there were no accidents of this sort. 

(Pictures of prolonged eye contact after two minutes)

The last thing of every day is naturally, dinner. Today’s dinner with the Professors featured, as per usual, traditional hungarian food such as Goulash Soup, which everyone enjoyed, Roast Beef Cheek with root vegetable sauce(below, left)and more. We had an enjoyable conversation and dinner with the professors. There was also a very interesting, traditional hungarian band playing at the restaurant(below, right).

Finally, at the end of our dinner came dessert, which included a traditional hungarian pancake, which shortly after being served, was covered with a bit of some kind of alcohol before being lit on fire. This was very entertaining, and very fun. It was a privilege to eat a meal with Prof Hanson!

Best, 

Room 361 (Michael, Eric, and Aaron)