... in which i more eloquently reflect on the term

So I feel as though I’m now tasked with remembering everything. Every image, every nuance of life here: walking around, taking the tram or the trolley bus, ordering food in Hungarian and the little smile I get sometimes from people who weren’t expecting it out of me, an obviously foreign-looking guy. The s’s and sz’s and ly’s and ny’s and the (still unpronounceable) gy’s. The way everyone dresses, the way almost everyone looks unmistakably Hungarian, passing people on the street on cell phones saying “Komolyan?” or lilting “Sziasztok!” to a group of friends or “Tessék?”… I’ll definitely miss tessék. Having and using my mental map of the city, including three metro lines and most major tram, bus, and trolleybus routes, surprisingly many street names, and the locations of numerous coffee and gyros places. Being surrounded by buildings that are about as old as my home state, interacting every day with people who lived through a government I know only as “a historical narrative”… I can return to BP, but it would take a lot to reproduce the experience of actually living here.

I know that I’ll come out of this with endless anecdotes of history, linguistics, tourism, but I feel like I need to act to preserve the little things, the way it was to live here instead of visiting. The happiness when you time running to the tram just right, the worry when there’s an ambulance pulling up a block over and police talking to one of the homeless people you pass every night on the way home, the comfort of going to Kadar for lunch and ordering everyone a malna without having to check first or explain or anything. Being so comfortable with the forint that the dollars I stashed away “just in case” with my passport look strange and stupid and definitely not the right shape, not like money at all.

I don’t have a digital camera, and sometimes I feel like it would come in handy (although not when traveling—our trip to Romania included six people and five cameras), but how can you hope to photograph or digitize an experience? Kelly talked earlier in the semester about how she planned to photograph the things that now seem mundane, precisely because they were part of everyday life, and how can friends back home really get how it was living here without the little things? I don’t think having a camera or pictures of Harom Testvér Török Etterem will be enough, though. Although I think that writing some stuff down over the course of the semester has given me a chance to record some lowlights as well as highlights, the vast majority of my semester is still unaccounted for.

Thus I’m left with an exam in less than an hour, followed by trying to do everything I’ve been meaning to do all semester (including some Christmas shopping, which I’ve been meaning to do all month) by 8:15 Thursday morning, when I begin the long, exhausting day of travel that lands me at home at 6:43 Thursday night (remember, I gain eight hours). We’ll see how much I can get done.

Since I won’t have Internet access between now and then, see everyone later. Except Hungary, which, I promise, I’ll come back to. And I’ll practice my Hungarian first, too.

Egesegetekre és Viszontlátásra!