All In The Mind [The Verve]

[31 August 2009]

Hungarian for the Day: No!

Nem!

[nem]

Again, just a very basic word for today, but an important one nonetheless! And I wish I could have said it to a lot of the meetings today. I get that they're important and that we need to go to them, but some of them needed only a 10 minute introduction, not a half hour discussion. Oh well, it'll be over before I know it, might as well get cozy in these meetings and enjoy the fact that I am not yet working my butt off :)

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Happy first day of school to me! Well, kind of first day of school! Today I got up at 7am (which was a feat after staying out later than expected last night as well as because of the sleeping in nature of my time in Budapest thus far) and got ready for school. What to wear!? What do people wear to their first day of grad school? What do people wear to school in Budapest? Big decisions to be made! I settled on jeans and a dressy-ish shirt, nothing too fancy or exciting. And then I met a group of people from last night in the lobby at 8 to head on our way to the city center.

We gave ourselves the hour to get there, just to be safe, but it really only took about 30 minutes. Which meant we were able to stop for a Princess pastry (a chain that operates near subway stops - they make delicious croissants and other pastries stuffed with chocolate, fruit, meat, cheese, etc). I got a delicious apple pastry and we made our way to the building. It’s really strange going from such a huge campus like Carolina to a campus that’s essentially contained in 3 buildings that all connect. So once there we made our way up to the Gellner room and waited for the meetings to start. Since it wasn’t that exciting of a day of meetings I’ll just lit them for you:

• IT Orientation (here’s a paper with your logins and passwords - please change your passwords the first time you log in)
• Welcome Meeting with Department Heads (pretty much the same as last night, just with some more teachers present)
• LUNCH
• Finance Orientation (Sign your life away to open a Hungarian Bank Account)
• Computer Orientation (listen to a very long winded man discuss things about computers we already know)
• Lecture B (about how to use our email. This had become a huge joke all day because all it says on our schedules is “Lecture B” so we had been cracking jokes about ‘where’s lecture A?’ and what’s so important about B? It was rather anticlimactic by the time the lecture actually came around).

After this we had a few errands to run around the city and groceries to get so by the time we got home it was about 8pm and we were ready for dinner. We made our way into the cafeteria in the dorm and ate some decent, but unremarkable food. Then I realized I needed to do a little research on Columbus & Isabella - so I found the computer lab, looked them up on Wikipedia (good thing this skit isn’t importnat or for a grade!) and printed out a small sheet on the pair. And then, after chatting until about 10pm we decided it was best to go to bed - since tomorrow is going to be an early morning!