Hungary, my first impression (written 5 months later...)

Writing this feels kind of outdated, because the point of saying your first impressions about a country which you have never been to, and which will be your home for quite a long time, its to being able to express in a fresh way the feeling of amazement, confusion, happiness and even fear that you experienced during your first days (I assure you that the degree of all those feelings may differ from time to time)

Anyway, I will do my best effort to take myself back in time, to visualize the Matthew from  5 months and half ago,and getting himself into this adventure called Magyarorszag by the locals, but which to everyone else in the world its Hungary

Hungary : The Final Frontier

I arrived here on September 26th, in theory around the middle of autumn. But in reality this didnt make so much difference for me since around this time I felt that I was already cold. I realized two months later how wrong I was...

Firs thing that I did its to go to the place I was suppose to live with the person in charge of helping me those first weeks (in the AIESEC slang its called trainee buddy) . Thankfully I was with him at the moment I arrived, because everything was in Hungarian which is known to be as one of the easiest languages ever. After 30 mins by train, and another 20 by tram (kind of close where I started to live in the beggining, and Im starting to abuse of sarcasm as well, so I will control it from now on) , we met with the land lady, how didnt speak any english, but for sure spoke a lot of hungarian (and I mean a LOT of hungarian).

These first 2 days felt kind of overwhelming for me, first because I was living far away from the civilization, and noone seemed to speak anything remotely similar to english, and second because it was the first time feeling that I was starting to live alone for the first time on my life . The good thing was that those feelings were being replaced little by little for what I called the surviving feelings. Which are these?, well, the feelings that you get when you realize that you cannot cook, clean, or wash, but you have to learn how to do all these in order to not starve, get sick, or stink.

Anyway, to continue to different subjects (even for me its boring to tell how did I "learn" to do all those things). In the next days I started to do so called tourism in the city which was going to be my home for at least a year.

 Pictured: Tourism.

Budapest its a city who can express quite well the transition from a comunist to a capital system. It still keeps some traces from the communist times, but at the same time you can notice modern construction, big malls, and buildings related to modern and contemporary cities. Most of the buildings in Budapest are from the beginnings of the 20th century mostly, and in the inside they are renovated. This means that these buildings have the big roofs, large windows, and nice cold currents of air that can get into the house from time to time.

I must be honest and tell that I for sure dont like to live in these kind of buildings for several reasons . Firstly because I'm kind of used to "modern" buildings (i.e built from the 60s onwards) , and I feel kind of akward to sleep on a roof that is so inmensely high , or to live on a building with high balconies. I think its more of getting used to this idea, but still its a nice part of hungarian history, that reflects everything that this country went trough the past century.

Another thing that I really like about this city are the lights at night. On my particular opinion these lights gives a vibe of mistery and romanticism that I wasnt able to see on so many cities here in Europe (but dont take my word for granted, its not like I am the Lonely Planet guy). Sometimes its just nice to walk around the river at night and just contemplate the beauty of the night, of course when the temperature allows it, which for me its more than 12 degrees.

This leads me to the next point: I came to an important realization here in Hungary. Something really eye-opener and life-changing. Something that sets a past and a future on Matthew's life:

That is the following one :

I hate cold weather...
No, really, I fucking really hate it....

I realized that my tolerance to the weather its decreased exponentially the more cold this weather gets. I just find it annoying to be cold, and not to be able to take out that feeling no matter how hard I tried. Right now, just visualizing myself 3 months ago, I feel cold. The first month wasnt so bad, because it was autumn, and luckily I had bought before arriving to Hungary several pullovers and a jacket. But things got worse the moment that all of this wasnt enough to contain the fury of the frozen hell of winter, which took me between his cold hands and beat the crap out of me from the middle of november until the new year.The funny thing about all of this its that the day after I finally bought some decent winter clothers and I was fully prepared, I got sick, and eventually ended up in the hospital...

What you can see?. Winter trough the hospital´s window. What you cannot see?. My anger towards cold weather

The only good thing about cold?. Well it can be a nice conversation starter. Even you can say its an "ice breaker" (did you notice how good that analogy went???, it was awesome )

Luckily, this nightmare seems to be over (at least until the end of the year ), and now I can start to feel the warm and embracing breeze of spring. Warm times will come indeed

And also more posts

Adios, Bye, Szia!