Gyor, Hungary

This is not a story about me being on the "around the world diet." This is about a beautiful country in eastern Europe. Hungary! My college friend Sarah Cusson is teaching English here at a wonderful school filled with really cool students. The Hungarians are super friendly and Sarah gets invitations to do things almost every weekend. So on Sunday after church, a few students from the 10th grade and their families invited Sarah and I to go on a hike. Of course we took them up on it and we found ourselves outside of Gyor next to this old castle hiking around in the woods, climbing over rocks, walking across a fallen log from one side of the valley to another, and having a great time! We hiked for 5 and a half hours and covered 16 km of hills and valleys. We also stopped for a lunch break and a few water breaks. The scenery was gorgeous, the hike was wonderful, and the Hungarian people were really cool! Most of the time I didn't have a clue what they were saying, but they were laughing and carrying on with each other and I enjoyed just being around. It was fabulous. Sarah and I walked into town for dinner and ate at a really cute restaurant with super friendly service. We ate a ton of food and both had drinks (one of us even had a beer. I won't say who Miss Sarah...) :-) and the final bill was only about $19 for the both of us! I finally made it to a country where I am getting a good deal with my money! Yay!!! We were way too tired to do anything else so we just crashed in Sarah's super cute little flat. We did tune in online for a church service broadcast live on the web from Illinois because church this morning was all in Hungarian and I didn't understand a word. I did figure out, just by cadence, when we were reciting the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer, but that was pretty much it.

I spent the mornings and afternoons this week with Sarah at school. She is teaching English, so she had her students come up with questions and interview me in class and then they had a quiz on what my responses were. :-) It was really fun and I enjoyed the Hungarian students very much. They are very sweet and they seem to really enjoy having Sarah as a teacher. And who wouldn't because she's super fun and a great teacher. The older kids especially are great because their English is wonderful and they are all genuinely pleasant people so we had some great conversations. (That was the worst run-on sentence ever so I hope the Hungarian students who read this don't base their English skills on it.)