This is what I heard.  Hungarian students are extremely stressed.  The average college student takes anywhere between 18 to 32 credits per semester.  They must complete 180 credits within 5 years (as compared to 116 credits in 4 years at my own institution, Providence College). Each course meets once a week for 100 minutes.  Although…

I don’t miss the car.  We have learned to use trams, metro & buses in 3 cities now.  And we walk.  This morning we walked to the Farmer’s Market.  We have our folding microfiber totes  (thanks again, Irene) and it was easy to carry our groceries home.  This is commonplace for Europeans.  So on the…

Yesterday was our last day of orientation.  We met at the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy, founded by the great composer himself 130 years ago. The building alone takes your breath away.  The concert hall has perfect acoustics and is the site for a regular series of concerts and recitals.  Hungarian musicians,  composers and conductors are…

If the technology worked, you just listened to Mr. Tamas Bardos, a conductor and composer, sing a comic little ditty–a song from early Hungarian folk history.  He sang it to us…and we were enchanted.  We began by laughing with him and ended with tears.  You may have noticed a melancholy tone in some of the…

Everyone has heard of the “Iron Curtain.”  Most associate Hungary with the Soviet-inspired dictatorship.  What few know is that being behind the veil of steel that cut Hungary off from the West, curtains also fell within Hungary.  If I had been teaching American history at a Hungarian university after the communist coup, my department would…

The orientation for Fulbright Scholars began today in Budapest. It was organized by the Hungarian-American Commission for Educational Exchange. Senator J. William Fulbright was the guiding light in the establishment of the program designed to promote people-to-people diplomacy, and Hungary has been a participant since 1978. My grant is co-sponsored by the US State Department…

Before we leave Budapest,  we intend to visit the House of Terror (real life monsters – namely the AVH or Hungarian Secret Police) and Statue Park (a field on the outskirts of the city where the monuments to Stalin and his successors have been discarded).  We will go not just because it’s history and interesting…

We have settled into our new apartment in downtown Debrecen. The tram stops a few steps from our building and runs in a loop between the train station and the University.  You can see it in the photo (the Nagy Templom – Great Church is in the background). Recently, large areas of the downtown (belvaros)…

If you were going to a different country for five months (and spanning at least two seasons), what would you pack? You will also need clothes for both work as well as for travel and sightseeing. I agree—there’s no easy answer. We decided that we would each take 2 medium-sized suitcases. In order to save…

The cat lives.