Tour Bus

Last Friday was the beginning of a series of orientation events that lasted all weekend. On Friday night, all the students were assembled together for the first time for a social gathering. We went to a pub, and the school even bought some appetizers and a round of drinks for us. It's amazing how differently Hungarian and American schools view alcohol! We played an ice-breaker game and I struggled to remember all the new names.

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On Saturday, we went on a tour bus and explored Budapest. I took many pictures.

Our first stop was Hero Square. It was built roughly 1000 years after Hungarians settled in Hungary; they were originally from Asia, possibly explaining some of the parallels between Japanese and Hungarian grammar. It honors the most famous Hungarians in history.

The second stop was an old opera house. (I plan to go to one and will write a more detailed post then.) After the opera house we toured the gorgeous Basilica of St. Stephen. The Basilica actually houses the mummified hand of St. Stephen himself! The church is so beautiful I think I will have to attend the Mass before I leave Hungary. The inside had a titanic organ and a plethora of dazzling, golden decorations.

At the end of the bus tour, we stopped at the Fisherman's Bastion, so called because in the Middle Ages the area was defended by a fisherman's guild. It (and most of Budapest) was destroyed in World War II, but it has been restored.

A view of the castle

The castle has 7 towers like this one

On top of the hill of the Fisherman's Bastion lies another cathedral. We didn't go inside, but the architecture was beautiful.

I spotted a peculiar bird trainer, and couldn't resist taking a photo.

The infamous Trabant, one of the only cars allowed during Communism. Its anachronistic engine and flawed engineering were symbolic of the failures of government planning.

One of the best parts was the excellent view of Pest at the top.

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Sunday was academic orientation. Each professor did a short presentation on his or her class, and we made our final course selections at the end of the presentations. I'm going to be taking math (combinatorics), computational biology, algorithms for bioinformatics, data mining, and Hungarian cinema. The classes look interesting, and my schedule seems balanced. I will miss Japanese this semester, but I am doing some self-study to learn characters instead.