Thanksgiving!

Hey guys, I promise to send a proper update within a week, in the meantime here are some pictures of my 5th graders (total sweeties) and 6th graders (somewhat sweeties).

It's funny -- more than a few of the teachers in the Program agree that half of the battle is "putting on a show", i.e. being an entertainer to keep their attention. I swear that I could win probably any game of charades after acting out so many random things. The other day the local TV station, Körös TV came to school to film various classes, and they filmed my 7.b. class. There are about 29 kids in that class (only 6 are girls), so you can imagine. For the TV, we put on such a show. To begin with, over half of the class was sent somewhere else, and we re-did a chapter on golfing that we had done in September. Eva (the only other English teacher here and the one I was co-teaching with for the first weeks) and I taught the class together. One of my duties was to teach the kids 5 new golf-related words, using just my hands and voice (golf course, golf bag, golf club, competition, and hole). I was afraid that my "teacher hands" would become the next Elaine Benes dance on the streets of New York, but I seem to have escaped that fate!

Anyway, after a class goes really well, I am in a good mood and feel positive; I always imagine myself saying to the class. "Thanks, you guys have been great audience" ..so the point is we are comedians to a degree. The 5th and 6th grade love to laugh, not so for the 7th and 8th classes. It is hard to get them to speak and the kids don't know how to make sentences, especially for conversational purposes. So we have worked a lot on pronounciation and the crafting of sentences.

The other day I went to a conference of sorts put on by a publishing company trying to sell their line of English Language training materials. (At my school we use the Oxford "Project" series). Interestingly, they had a selection of Level 1 "abridged classics", including Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince (http://www.oscarwildecollection.com/). It is one of my all time favorite stories and a total tear-jerker. I was hoping to perform it as a play during my Monday English Club with ten 5th grade girls, but they claimed to be uninterested in reading books or having a play. So far we have just sung songs in English ("This Old Man", "Three Little Kittens" --ok so yes these are nursery rhymes, but everyone is a little younger when they are learning a foreign langauge and these are really catchy songs and the girls really enjoy it! We also do "hidden pictures" activities from Highlights magazines -- the goal is they have to find about 12 hidden objects and tell me the the words in English.

I hope this all made sense, I am in a bit of a rush and am making Thanksgiving stuffing tonight for 15 people for a 4-day Thanksgiving blowout in the east of the country, so I gots to get cookin'!

More to come soon!

Rebeka néni
(it means Auntie - this is what the kids call the teachers)

The Visa Journey to Kosice, The Über-hosts of Kolacsa, and the Vineyard Row of Eger

Last Tuesday morning got the call - be in Budapest tomorrow to get the visa! The school (http://benka-gyula.uw.hu/) gave me the rest of the week off in order to embark on the journey to Slovakia (and what a journey it was)! I left Wednesday morning and got to Budapest Wednesday afternoon. The program booked beds for me and two other teachers also going on the journey at Eötvös Kollegium, which is one of the best colleges in Hungary, but you wouldn't know it from the lack of funding; some buildings are a little dillapidated and so on. I met a French girl there who is teaching French at the college. She's been in Hungary just three weeks and has been repeatedly warned of the anti-French attitude here. The infamous Treaty of Trianon, which was signed in 1920, took place in Versailles and determined that Hungary would lose 2/3 of its territory to the neighboring lands and 1/3 of its Hungarian-speaking population. In particular, Transylvania became part of Romania. Please read here for more information on this devastating treaty: http://www.webenetics.com/hungary/trianon.htm. Has a lot to do with the pessimistic national character. Incidentally, the program (Central European Teaching Program) is taking us on a 6-day trip to Transylvania where we will stay with Hungarian families. The trip is open to any of our friends, so if seeing Vlad's castle on Oct. 31st sounds once-in-a-lifetime, let me know! Though it's worth mentioning that my mom recently remarked, "Everything is once in a lifetime with you".

So, that day was the 4th day of the riots and demontrations, the latter of which are still going on; its day 11 now. In case you haven't heard, the Prime Minister was kicking back with his colleagues one night and was caught on tape admitting that he had grossly lied about the economy to get votes. It's a huge deal - among other things, now that the true amount of the country's deficit has been revealed, it will indefinitely delay when Hungary can switch from its Forints currency to the Euro (scheduled for 2010).

On Thursday morning at 6 a.m. the program director, Hajnalki, met us outside the college and packed me, a girl named Jori, and an older Canadian man named Larry into her little car. Well, I could write pages about that day because it was one laugh after another. We were supposed to go to the Hungarian Embassy in Bratislava in Slovakia (in the west), but instead we went to a Hungarian Consulate in the Slovakian city of Kosice in the east. We only saw a bit of the town (main squares and the main shopping street), but it was gorgeous. We got there around 10 a.m. and after getting the paperwork done, had about half an hour to walk around. I went on a mad search to find walking shoes since I came here with nothing, but it was the usual fate of the tall girl - no shoes in my size. Is it a crime to wear American size 11 or 12 (European 42 - 44)? Apparently!

We left at noon and on the way back we wound up making a stop at a small town, Tiszauvaros, where a new teacher had recently arrived and was refusing to pay the program fee. So after killing two hours there, we got back in the car and arrived in Budapest around 6:30. Jori wound up taking me back to her town of Kolacsa where they were having a Paprika Days Festival that weekend. Kolocsa is the paprika capital of Hungary and there are fields of the stuff everywhere. Jori (22 and from Chicago) is actually rooming with another teacher from the program, though he is 52 and ran for Governor and a seat in the Senate of California a few years ago. Since I am known (affectionately, I hope!) as the first to get news and follow the goings-on, I had to see this for myself. So on Friday I visited her school and the next day the three of us were invited to attend a parade/festival about ten minutes away in a very small village called Homokegy and ride on a horse-drawn cart. That weekend we ran into two Über-hosts, one male and one female, in the sense that they were over the top. I will have all of the photos posted online later today I hope, but in the meantime here are three from the weekend. One is of a paprika field; one is of me and the female Über-host, Maria, who is Jon's contact person and fellow teacher; and the other is of me, Jori, Jon, a priest, and the male Über-host. The latter picked us up from Kolacsa at 8 on Saturday morning and took us all to his house where his wife and daughters were all in traditional dress and getting ready for the parade. This was at 9 a.m. and he wanted us all to drink Jagermeister, and his home-made red wine...mixed with Pepsi. Because you can't say no to an Über-host, we had to oblige. After a bit the parade began and all it entailed was about six horse-drawn carts pulling five loads of tradionally-dressed villagers, and then us, going through the village and stopping at various houses for home-made wine and snacks . It was supposed to just last the morning so that we could get back to Kolocsa for the Paprika festival, but that didn't happen. And I was the only sober the one the whole day. At one point during the day Maria mentioned that she had a former student who was home in Homokmegy for the weekend, but was attending a small college in Szarvas, and that he could probably give me a ride back on Sunday.

Finally 4:00 rolled around and we pulled up to the dinner site and after some more dancing, we sat down to a big table for a cabbage/pork/paprika stew. Well, poor Jori wound up sitting next to the male Über-host and made the mistake of requesting Palinka, a clear fruit brandy. They were speaking German and after a while the German was getting butchered and filled with a lot of giggles. By this point Jon was nearing the end of his story on his second failed marriage to a Russian woman, and how he wants to write a book on the experience called, The Rose in My Thorn. Long story short, it was around 7 by this time and very quickly Jori went to a very bad place for the next three hours and it was scary as hell. The Über-host's wife drove us back to Kolacsa but oddly she wouldn't fall asleep, just was stuck in this very bad place. Anyway, she finally did crash as everyone was out on the street partying for the paprika festival. The next morning the phone rang at 9 o'clock and it was Maria, giving me an update on whether I could get a quck ride back to Szarvas. All she said was, "I have talked to Gabor and please meet us at 11:30 by the fountain. And your bus leaves at 1". It was classic, I was like, "But why am I meeting Gabor if he can't give me a ride?". And the answer was, "You will see". Oh my God, does it ever end?! You can't say no to these people so I dragged everyone along with me for this blind date or whatever it was and luckily it was painless. Gabor is a big tall boy and 22 and wants to own a farm one day. Luckily, we found out that he was only in Szarvas on Tuesdays. Then after that ended Maria called up her nephew and asked him to come pick us up so that I could see the Danube about five miles away -- and it was lovely! Then she gave me water and a sandwich for the road. Maybe it was one of those things where you had to be there, but there was enough laughter between Budapest/Kosice/Kolacsa/Homokmegy) to keep me entertained for days.Got back to town on Sunday and it's back to work! It's still hard being alone here, but I am strategizing; am hoping to start some sort of tutoring but the people in the program haven't met with much success in their towns/cities. I finally found a good coffee (LavAzzo) and found the sleep timer on the tv (someone is suddenly afraid of the dark)!

A quick note about the weekend of September 14th - I met up with two friends in the program, Sara and Nicole, to go to Eger, a beautiful and very popular town in the north. Eger is one of the wine regions of Hungary, along with Villany, Balaton, and Tokaj. We met up on Friday night in Sara's town of Gyöngös, in the Northern Uplands part of Hungary (the other regions are Trans-Danubia and the Great Plains, where Szarvas is). Gyöngos has about 30,000 people and the only thing that puts it on the map is the fact that it has a museum with a baby wooly mammoth -- a one of a kind thing, apparently. Anyway, we left for Eger the next morning and oh my God, it is the most gorgeous town and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Eger is known for its wine, castle, minaret, stunning baroque town center, heavy Turkish history, not to mention spas. Click here for a virtual tour ( http://www.egeronline.com/guide/guide.php?show=sightseeing&lang=en). After wandering a little festival in one of the squares, we went to "The Valley" where exists what can only be described as Vineyard Row - roughly twenty-five vineyards back-to-back in the shape of a horseshoe. Eger is famous for its red wine and in particular a variety called Bikaver, or Bull's Blood. For the story behind the name, read this: http://www.citytour96.com/wine-region-article. I stuck to the Merlots and then it was straight to Bikaver. Since one is getting the wine right from the source, it is CHEAP. We had so much fun and I woke up the next morning feeling kinda confused, with purple lips and stained teeth. On a final note - yesterday the European Union decided to admit Romania and Bulgaria! Among other things, this means that Bucharest and Sofia will get cleaned up and will have to come up with a solution to the thousands of stray dogs that run around in packs on the streets.