1998 School Magazine

Girls Granimar ^, tbool alarmbane 1998

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Rebecca. . Hunge, :. ford

n hearing the name Hungary, most people think of flavour in Hungarian food and this is enhanced by the use of Coriumunism, Russia, poverty and many other maccu- a lot of capsicum and gherkin. They make wonderful salads,

and having been slightly anti-salad before I eat a lot of salads now. A special meal is getting rectangular prisms of pork fat, melting them over the fire and putting the melted fat on bread

rate things. Most people don't know a lot about the country After telling people where I was going, I was constantly asked 'Where is that?' (Central Eastern Europe) and 'What language do

and eating it with raw onion. SurprisingIy, this and many other strange foods are delicious. School is again coin- PIetely different. Classes sometimes start as early as 7a. in. and finish at around 2 pm. or 2.30 Between lessons pm there is a fifteen minute break, but no lunch or morning tea break. To get into a good second- ary school there is a proc- ess very similar to the way you get Into univer- sity in Australia. They don't get to choose very many of their subjects,

they speak there?' To this question I answered, Hungarian, followed by the bits of information I knew about the Ian- guage. it is the second or third hardest language in the world, Hungarians pride themselves on the fact that only native speakers can speak it properly, and it was de-

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scribed to me as fiend- I. E. g. g scri e to me as ' ien - A, ;= ~ ishly difficult'. All this is .?.,- with good reason, as the alphabet contains four teen vowels and various double and one triple ?.,, I-, .

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Rebecc@ with Budapest @"d the Dan"be behind her

letter) and suffixes are used (all 182 of them) instead of prepositions. The other confusing thing is the use of 'hello' as you leave because all greetings in Hungarian are also goodbyes. My favourite word in this language is 'patogatott kukorica' or popcorn! This is why it has taken me seven months to learn enough to be able to say what I want to say without too much trouble or too many people laughing at what I say. When I first arrived one of the hardest things to get used to apart from the light switches going the other way at seems small but it did get frustrating), was driving on the other side of the road. One of my most memorable experiences was the drive back from the airport. it was 5'C (a relatively warm day, I was told), I'd been flying for over 24 hours, my new twelve-year-old sister was speaking English as if it were her first language and informed me she was now learning Spanish, I wasn't wearing my seatbelt (when I went to put one on I was asked what I was doing as they don't really wear them here), I was in a little European car, driving very quickly in a crazy European fashion, and looking out the window at all these incredibly beautiful old buildings. After this I fell asleep for seventeen hours, not sure whether it was from exhaustion or jetlag. Since then I have been constantly adjusting and everything here is very different and has become wonderful and quaint The food is also interesting. Lunch is the main meal of the day which, even in the middle of a reasonably hot summer, consists of soup and a hot main course. The fat left in the pan after cooking is also used, whether it is mopped up with bread or poured over the meal for extra flavour. There is always a lot

they must study Hungarian literature and granrrnar and they remain in the same class from year eight to twelve and if you think school is a little boring in Australia, try it in Hungarian! Budapest (pronounced Budpesht) is truly one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Having been on a three week tour around Europe (which by the way was wonderful) I can honestly say this. it is a very old city which has been through many incidents and phases and so it is a wonderful mix of everything. it is a large city (2.1 million people) that contains a lot of diversity. I have lived out in the suburbs, in a large house with a garden. I have also lived downtown in one of the worst and most dangerous parts of the city (they write songs about this area!). There I lived in a flat, and my third house is also a flat, but in a little safer area. In the city there are basically no houses with gardens and the few parks are used so much (by dogs just as much as by people) that the grass is usually a bit thin. There is the Castle District, which contains a huge and incredibly beautiful church, parts of which are over 700 years old, the Castle itself which is now a National Gallery, many old houses, flats, cobbled streets, monuments, restaurants and a fantastic heritage-listed view of Pest (the city, is dived into two halves, Buda and Pest, by the River Danube which sadly, is now not very blue!) I have been to the Opera at the National Opera House <0nly about 200 years old!) which was fantastic. There is also a park which contains a lot of the statues that were pulled down after the fan of Communism. This is the only park of its kind in Europe and it is extremely difficult to imagine these statues where they used to be around the city