First Week in First Grade

I have spent most of my first week unpacking and settling in. The family that I'm staying with have done a wonderful job making me feel at home. The same can be said about the school where I will be teaching. There are fifteen first graders in my classroom and they are filled with smiles and stories. The students speak varying degrees of English, yet for the most part they understand everything that is said. I love the diversity of students in the class. There are several students from Hungary and the U.S., however there are also students from surrounding countries and one from Australia. Just as I am fascinated with learning everything I can about the culture and the school, the school is enjoying getting to know me. One of the high schoolers came over to the elementary side (the whole school shares one building)and interviewed me for an article in their school newspaper.

On another note, have you ever thought about what it is like to watch T.V. in another country? Almost everything is spoken in another language :) This has made watching the olympics very interesting. They do get a few channels that are in English, unfortunately the onlympics are only in Hungarian and Romanian. Good thing they are still fun to watch even if you can't understand what is being said.

A brief note from Budapest

As I type this note, I am sitting in my host home in Budapest. It is a bright sunny winter day and my body is still trying to figure out what time it is. Budapest is six hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. Currently it is 2:50 p.m. Sunday Feb. 21 while it is only 8:50 a.m. back in the U.S. The flights here were great. I flew out of Chicago and had a layover in Amsterdam. It was a very modern airport and I was relieved to find that almost everything was labeled in English. However as I flew out of Amsterdam, things changed. Predominately everything in Budapest including the safety speech on the plane is written and spoken in Hungarian. Fortunately for me the school that I am at is an English speaking school. As soon as I arrived, I met my host family and teacher and was taken to the school where they were finishing a basketball tournament.

FYIs that I have learned thus far include: orange roof tops, goulash is a favorite food and when you flush the toilette you have to press a stop button.