FAQs About Hungary

Below are some of the questions I encountered (or had myself) before leaving the US and after the first week of arriving to Hungary.

Q: Don't they drive on the wrong side of the road over there?

A: Apparently only Great Britain does that. Hungarians drive on the same side of the road. Not like I can drive though. Automatics are hard to rent over here and my company already had a manual rented for Jason. My company's solution was that I would learn stick. In a snowy, foreign country. I'll get to that in Week One.

Q: Did you have to get your shots?

A: Not when you go to Europe. Maybe if I were going somewhere tropical or destitute. Maybe I was supposed to, and am now vulnerable to or a vector of some terrible disease that could have been easily prevented.

Q: Isn't Hungary a communist country?

A: Not since 1989, when I was 7 and couldn't drive but could speak in complete sentences. But now it's 2013, and I cannot drive and speak in complete sentences. Hungary is in the EU, and we are trying to make money over here.

Q: What's the exchange rate over there?

A: The Hungarian currency is the Forint. As I write this, 1 USD equals about 230 Forints. Things are cheaper here.

Q: How's the food?

A: I like it so far! I'll try to write about food as I encounter it. They are always worried about whether I like the food or not, but if they saw me eat a Cheeto that had just fallen out of a comic book that had been in the trunk of my car for 2 months, they would no be concerned about the food they have here. Food can be as old school or as new school as you prefer--duck neck soup, pepperoni pizza, sausage and rustic bread, Chips Ahoy. Food's fine, I try to eat new stuff. They don't have a lot of beef here though.

Q: Why no beef?

A: We have an entire state for raising beef, which is four times the size of Hungary. So if you grow a cow here, you milk it, literally and figuratively.

Q: Lol except for horses right?

A: Right now Europe is in the grips of a scandal where horse meat was found in products that were supposed to contain only beef. I'm not gonna joke about that here I don't know how sensitive they are to it.

Q: How cold is it?

A: Sweater weather so far. It was warmer when I got off the plane than when I left from Philly, and there was no snow on the ground. I'm looking forward to spring here. It did snow on 3/16 here, that blew. Hopefully that's the last of it.

Q: Is the language hard to learn?

A: Yes. I am trying to learn, but I should make a better effort. My coworkers and the people at the hotel make every effort to speak to me in English, and are perfectly understandable. English is not really spoken a lot around here.

The language is nice though, I feel. It's not harsh on the ears, and pleasant sounding. I am using google translate, a kindle app, and have signed up for online lessons, which caused me to have to warn my company that an Internet history rife with visits to sites  like hungteacher.com, hunglessons.com, and hunginstruction.com are not in this instance, a fireable offence. People have been very patient so far, and every word I learn makes life easier. 

Hiccups On Departure

Saturday at noon I woke up with sensitivity in my tooth. This tooth had been capped months before, but that afternoon I could feel the chill of the soda that probably lead to this issue in the first place. I wanted to get this checked out before getting on the plane Monday afternoon, so luckily my dentist's office penciled me in for a Monday morning appointment.

It turns out that the capped tooth had abscessed, and I was a couple weeks away from having dollops of butter yellow pus dripping from my premolar. Time for a root canal. 

Q: What's best about having a root canal the day of a 6 hour overseas flight with a 6 hour layover? 

A: Well with my mouth numbed up, I have the ability to dilate my left nostril while the other one remains normal:

Women love this. Just like Lil' Wayne says, "One nostril be flarin', and bitches be starin'"

Q: What's worst about having a root canal the day of a 6 hour overseas flight with a 6 hour layover? 

A: Everything else. 

The procedure was painless though, shout out to Dr. Eisenbrock and his team. I hope it holds out during my trip though. Just like everything in life, I try to make up for months of neglect with one afternoon of intense attention. They gave me a choice of either strong Tylenol or Percocet for the pain, but since I had never had anything stronger than Tylenol before, and didn't want my first plane ride in 20 years ending with me being detained by an air marshall for intoxication, I went for the Tylenol. 

Q: Your first plane ride in 20 years?!

A: Whoa! Be easy Mister International. Yes, as far as I can remember, my last plane ride was to Disney World. Mom says this counts as me knowing my way around air travel. I tell her that yes, as long as I have someone twice my size holding my hand the entire time, I am an accomplished air traveler. 

Liftoff

I was taking British Airways to Heathrow Airport. Plane ride was fine, I slept most of the way. I liked British Airways because when the flight attendants ask if I have any trash they ask "Rubbish?" and that just seems like a classier way to do things. Chicken curry was good. 

Expectation vs. Actual--View from the Plane at Heathrow

Throughout this travel log you'll see instances where my unreasonably high or naive expectations of international travel were met with something underwhelming. You may be experiencing these same feelings of expectation and disappointment yourself, particularly if you choose to read another post, or meet me in person. My first disconnect in what I expect and what I experience is the view flying into Heathrow. I had envisioned seeing all of London laid out for me, like Big Ben slammed right into downtown Coruscant. 

Expected view from plane at Heathrow:

Artist's Rendering

In reality, Heathrow is much too far away from London for this view this layout. Or it might not be, I wouldn't know. The entire airport was shrouded in London's famous fog:

Actual view from plane at Heathrow:

This is not an exaggeration, I could not even see the outlines of buildings until we were on the ground. 

My time at Heathrow was nice. A bunch of bustling people, bathrooms as clean as possible considering the unending crashing of wave after wave of tired travelers. I sat on the benches and nodded off during most of my six hour layover. Why so long? Well it was either a six hour layover in Heathrow or a two hour layover in Frankfurt. My company figured I needed the most time to get oriented in the most English speaking country, and for that I thank them. Any considerations that you would make for a lost, unaccompanied 8 year old child, please make for me. I was worried when I looked at the departure board and saw a plane already boarding for Budapest. I couldn't see any other flights leaving for Budapest and thought because of the time difference, there had been some confusion and that would miss this flight. It turns out that this flight was so far in the future that the board didn't even show it yet. I had plenty of time to make it to Budapest. 

Expectation vs. Actual--Passport Stamp

I have an unreasonable fascination with passport stamps. I wanted one so bad, a brightly colored, delicately filigreed decree that I had arrived on the international stage. Having never actually seen one before, I think I had placed a little too much emphasis on how cool it would look:

Expected Passport Stamp:

Badass.

Actual Passport Stamp:

A black square? Not even a triangle or something? Or at least a blue square, anything. 

I was in now in Hungary, land of a billion things I don't have a clue about. Jason, the person I was taking over for, met me at the airport with his fiancee Caroline (more about these Samaritans in the next update), and drove me to Szolnok, Hungary, where our European division (9 dudes in a single office suite) does their work.