Big wins today (Warning: perhaps anticlimactic)

To begin: I really, truly appreciate the comments and the emails you guys have been sending me. Can't begin to tell you how much it means to me. So, thanks! :) Now, onto business--

There was a major victory today. Here's some background:
1. There are only 1.5 English-speaking TV stations in Hungary
2. You can't play US DVDs on European systems because DVDs are "regionalized"
3. It takes about 1.5 hours to download a movie on iTunes with my internet connection (I tested that out last night with "The Bourne Supremacy.")

Win #1: I'd been wondering about this, but the tiny DVD shop two doors down actually has a SLEW of English options! Most of the DVD jackets are completely in Hungarian, but all had English viewing options. This is also excellent, because having watched Bournes #1 and #2, I now get to wrap it up with #3 right away (#3 is unavailable on iTunes).

Perhaps this was a pretty obvious outcome - most DVDs have language options, and most of the films I'd want to see were initially filmed in English. However, a few things made me wary:

• The instruction manuals in my apartment are written in Hungarian, Finnish, Czech, German, Icelandic, Russian, Polish, Swedish, etc. but not English or Romance languages. (Win #2: Discovering that my dishwasher comes with a French instruction manual. Yes!!!)
• English can be somewhat limited in the city. Budapest's major English newspaper is only published once a week.
• You have to search movie listings to learn whether they're dubbed in Hungarian or only subtitled in Hungarian. Dubbed is more frequently available than subtitled.

Win #3: Hungarian is hard, but I'm making progress. (Example of "hardness": You're supposed to change around the order of the words in a sentence in order to emphasize your point, but you can only rearrange them in certain ways, and these correct ways rarely map to an English-/French-speaker's idea of normal sentence structure!) The woman at the DVD shop could only speak Hungarian, and I was able to successfully fill out paperwork, discuss the price and due date and answer her questions that "yes, I do live in Budapest" and "I am not a student, I am a businesswoman." Finally, the guys at hockey taught me how to say "good game" yesterday (and they all laughed when I tried it, but that just made it more fun).

Finally, an enjoyable sign from earlier. It is either describing perilous scaffolding or reminding you to stay true to yourself.