Got a trophy!

This week was both busy and entertaining:

• Our office signed two teams up for today's 4th Annual Ablon Business Run through City Park. It was a 10km race, with the first person running 5km and the other two splitting the difference. I came down with an awful bug yesterday, but ran the 5km leg for our women's team anyway. I PR'd (~22:30!! 7:15 miles!!) and our team got 2nd place in the "Finance, Business Services and Real Estate" women's category (and 8th out of 130 women's teams overall). We got to stand on a podium to accept our trophies and little spa packages. Our entrance also got us two free hot dogs and a beer after the race. Naturally, I took this perfect opportunity to tell my co-workers about my visit to the Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest on July 4, 2006.
• I got involved helping Hungary for Obama plan a big music event that took place this Thursday. Turn out was great, and we registered a lot of people to vote. One of the organizers bought me a palinka shot afterward for manning the ticket booth for so long. :) The coolest part for me was that the Obama campaign sent a special letter for the event (thanks Samir!).
• I'm signed up for the US Embassy's email listserv and there's been a fair amount of activity recently. There were multiple demonstrations today in Budapest, representing minority groups and very right political parties. All of these demonstrations were marching to almost the same location - right outside the Parliament Building. The email warned that there might be violence, and I heard walking out of the race that the protestors were fighting with the police.
• If you have an apartment in Budapest, you pay your utility bills at the post office. You bring in a little slip of paper each month and they take care of the rest. I went before work a few days ago, and had been somewhat concerned beforehand. Could there be a worse place to be a foreigner? People at the post office are in a big hurry and don't want to be there in the first place - any hold-up could really tick them off. But luckily enough, I paid my bills and mailed my absentee ballot request without a hitch - phew! I really haven't had any bad experiences being a foreigner since coming here.
• Went to my first ice hockey practice in a little bit and my teammates were impressed at my Hungarian. I started learning some slang - "kiraly" means "cool" (I had known that it meant "king"). At one point, my coach asked me how to say "flip over on the ground" in English - I then realized that "somersault" makes absolutely no sense as a word.
• Clinch the division, Cubs!!!

Hungarian karaoke

This past weekend, I went on a retreat with my office to Lake Balaton, Central Europe's largest lake (45 x 10 miles). During the summer, that's where you can find the entire city of Budapest - the highways are jammed both to and from. About 30/50 people went, so it was a fun group.

We kicked things off with a GPS sailing treasure hunt game in five groups. We had to answer questions about people in the office on our blackberries, and once we got a certain number of questions right we were given GPS coordinates to run or sail to.

At lunch, we conveniently ended up at a winery across the lake. We had gulyash in a big stewpot and sampled a lot of the local wine. People picked and ate fruit directly from the trees (figs, grapes, etc). Back home, we're so worried about pesticides and concerned that we need to wash things off that we might not even have thought of doing so. Wine is really big in Hungary - we were missing a person or two on the trip because they had to help their relatives with the grape harvest for their homemade wine!

We'd special ordered 40 streudels to the winery and finished them quickly. Then, we decided that they simply weren't enough - so we ordered 40 more and stayed another hour drinking more wine while we waited for them to be cooked. The streudel shop was apparently quite small, and we cleaned out their entire streudel supply. In typical fashion, the filling options were cottage cheese, poppy seed/squash, apple or cherry. (Cottage cheese is big here.)

We sailed back to the hotel (the sun set and NU beat Southern Illinois in the process) where the fun began. My teammate on my project is friends with an illusionist (yes!) and picked up some cool lanterns that you could light that would float up into the sky. We did that and then it was time for karaoke. One thing led to another and the head of our office insisted that I begin the show with Eminem. As you may know, this challenge was right up my alley. So, I rapped "Lose Yourself" for my new colleagues.

The karaoke was part English and part Hungarian. Every time a Hungarian song came on, at least two colleagues came up to tell me what it was about. ("Jenny, this is about how much he loves his Porsche!") Most songs were about friendship or driving fast cars. I could make out some of the words (like the song "Szerelem Vonat" is "Love Train"), but didn't get fully involved until someone approached me and remarked, "Hey! You may not know what the words mean, but you know how to read them, right? C'mon!!" That comment put me on a path to sing myself hoarse doing Hungarian karaoke. The whole office stayed up til 4am, and I had a great time.

After coming back to Budapest Sunday morning, I met up with co-workers that evening for a run around Margaret Island. We've entered two teams in a business 10km relay race this weekend, and I'll be doing the 5km leg for the women's team.

I also met with a threat that hasn't been followed through on yet.... people have been able to goad me into trying pretty much anything simply by saying, "But Jenny! This is typical Hungarian! You have to try it!" One thing that came up at the retreat was that I had yet to try fried fat or chicken feet. I will let you know how that goes once that comes to pass!

Salon Concert

On Thursday, I attended a "Salon-Concert to benefit talented young musicians." It was in a 100+ year-old, very European flat with classy drapes and chandeliers and multiple candelabras. A Finnish entrepreneur began the monthly philanthropic series 9 years ago, and I was invited to it by some folks in the Hash club. It was a classy, well-to-do affair. It struck me that I did not rub elbows with the Chicago circles that would put on such events.

This month's installment was a tribute to Georgia. First, the 40-member crowd listened to a 16-year-old Georgian prodigy/pianist play works by Beethoven, Liszt and a Hungarian composer (Ligeti). Mid-way through the performance, a woman in an apartment across the street turned on her light and started busying herself before realizing 40 people had a clear shot of her. She hurriedly closed the curtains. We then retired to a Georgian painter's "working gallery" for complimentary wine and Hungarian snacks. (These snacks included cheesy biscuits and cookies. Mmm.) I spent most of the time talking with people from the Hash and had a lot of fun. One of them promised to loan me his copy of "Slap Shot." :)

The whole thing seemed like a very neat, very European thing to have done. It was also quite cool to get in on a semi-private classical music concert. There are a ton of classical performances going on all the time in the city - Budapest is very big on classical music. Franz Liszt is from Hungary, and I live directly across the street from a square named after him. There is a pretty famous classical music school named after him on that square, and I'll often stop in my tracks while walking by it because the sound of people practicing inside is so amazing.

The rest of the week, I stayed busy with lunches with senior people in the office, language lessons, office dinners, Hungarian tapas/wine dinners, rocking and rolling on Hungarian natural gas regulations for my project and running around with folks to the expat hot spots on Friday night. One takeaway is that I do not care much for goose liver, but perhaps it is an acquired taste.

Group run through a wine festival

It was an excellent weekend. Let's do some bullet points:

• There's one theater playing Tropic Thunder in English in the city. It involved a bit of an adventure to the Buda side, but it was hilarious and well worth it.
• I haven't ridden a bicycle in over three years (and as my father pointed out, I did so rather poorly at that time). On that fateful day in 2005, my younger brother nearly killed me on a moped in Bermuda. If Danny reads this, rest assured he will refute that statement. Anyways, I took my bike out for a spin in my new city of 1.8M people, through the major intersection I live next to, and up to Heroes Square to the Museum of Fine Arts. They've got a few Monets, a Renoir and a sweet Rodin so it was well worth it. I survived, and so it was a great success.
• On Saturday, I woke up to a 40-person concert band playing loud, moving, patriotic music about 50 diagonal meters from my balcony. The Renaissance Festival lasted all day, and it was hilarious to pop into my apartment in between errands and watch puppeteers, traditional dancers and very happy children from my third-floor vantage point.
• The ACC broadcasted the NU-Duke game online at 7pm Eastern. I managed to stay up for the first half, and was thrilled we avenged last year's loss to the Blue Devils.

Now, on Sunday I had lots of big plans to do something productive with my afternoon. I was going to head to a meeting of Budapest's Hash House Harriers in the morning, and carry on from there. I should have known it was a lost cause.

The world's first "hash club" was founded in the 1930's in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It's essentially a group of expats that meets to run and socialize. (Otherwise known as a "drinking club with a running problem.") The course is pre-set by a "hare," who marks out a route with flour the day before. The hare lays fake trails as well, which can make for a rather circuitous route. The hare may designate a beer stop along the way, but at the end of the track there's a big meeting where the group gathers, gets some drinks and the hash's "religious advisor" leads the group in a recounting of the hash's events and passes out punishments (drinks) for transgressions. It's similar to marching band in that there are wacky traditions - there are group songs and nicknames and all manner of funny things.

So, I went to the Hash club's meeting and was told that it was not quite typical. We had our first beer stop after 10 minutes of running, and then proceeded to run through a wine festival (2 stops along the way) before ending at a winery (final stop) for the circle. I got singled out as a newcomer, which was all in good fun. It was a preposterous way to spend a Sunday, but was a wonderful way to meet some fun, new people. I knew I was in the right place when during a conversation at beer stop #1, at least three other people mentioned that they'd had monkeys attempt to grab their belongings during their travels.

An anecdote

Many silly things occur every day. I've come to the teahouse downstairs from my building to write b-school apps. I, rather predictably, ordered tea. I have been given a teapot and a bowl. I am thinking I am supposed to slurp the tea out of the bowl, so I will just go ahead and hope for the best. There's some saying about not messing things up too close to your home. I hope I don't embarrass myself to the point where I am not allowed back into my downstairs teahouse. Typically, I just giggle when things like this happen. As such, I have been giggling a lot.

I've also been learning interesting things about how much power governments have in regulated economies. The industry I'm working on for my project is becoming fully open next July, so it makes for some pretty cool, strategic stuff.

Finally, I've also been playing quite competitive foosball - there's an office rule that you have to crawl under the table if you lose 10-0. Thankfully I've been playing with a quite good teammate. :)

Gainfully employed

I resolve that the beginning of work will not mark the end of fun things to post to this blog. I promise I'll be vigilant on this front. Actually, I probably won't talk much about work here, but wanted to give you an initial sense of how I'll be spending ~1/3 of my hours in Hungary!

Funnily enough, I began work on Labor Day. Most everyone was back from August vacation, so I think I've met nearly the entire office. Everyone's been incredibly friendly and approachable - most people eat lunch together in the kitchen, and people just as readily stop by each other's offices as pick up the phone. The office is smaller than what I was used to in Chicago (~30 consultants vs. 200): everyone knows one another, and some of the processes differ slightly as a result. It's been interesting to see!

I got off to a quick start and began my first project today. The client is a large energy company, and my first task is to benchmark relevant regulatory policies of different European countries. I'm pretty excited about it - energy is a geopolitical hot topic and the industry is in a state of flux as it's deregulating at different rates across the continent. This is exactly the different type of case material that I was hoping I'd be exposed to when I applied for my transfer (and I suspect the fact that it is a quintessential Budapest office case is one of the reasons I was staffed on it). I'll have a lot of responsibility/independence, which should make for a good challenge.

Beyond that:

• Get on skype, folks! It'll be the easiest way for us to chat live (for free!) these next few months. Email is fantastic, but it'd be good to hear your voices every now and then. Just go to http://www.skype.com/ and download away.
• I have learned enough Hungarian that I was able to (potentially?) decipher the sign posted on the front of the door to my building. It seems a theater will be co-opting my square on Saturday night for a Renaissance festival. I will need to spectate from my balcony.
• Hungarian has a lot of accents, so I invested a little time figuring out how to quickly toggle to the Hungarian setting on my keyboard and type them all. (I want to get client's names right, etc.) I stumbled across something interesting:
  "I think all Hungarian organizations (in fact all ethnic organizations) should nominate Bill Gates of Microsoft for their organization's highest award for doing the most of anyone in the world to preserve the Hungarian language and culture outside of Hungary by having made language support standard on every single PC in the world.
  In fact, since you can support as many languages and keyboards at the same time as you want, Microsoft is doing the same to preserve all of the minority languages of the world.
  Whether we realize it or not right now, language support in Windows is the greatest single thing ever done to save the world's smaller languages from an extinction due to the use of computers, since now it is the computer that makes it just as easy to write and communicate in any language as in English." --Hungarian Alliance

A Hungarian wedding!

Today, I went to a Hungarian wedding! It was held in St. Stephen's Basilica, Budapest's largest. I knew both members of the couple - the bride is the senior administrator in our office, and she helped organize my entire move to Budapest. The groom rented me my temporary flat and has been taking me to play pick-up hockey with his team. They've both been absolutely wonderful to me and it was so cool I got to celebrate their big day.

The service was Catholic and all in Hungarian - I positioned myself next to some co-workers so I could follow along. (Due to the language barrier, much of my life is contingent upon positioning: for instance, not being first in the line for hockey drills so I can watch what to do first. It's something akin to using your other senses to compensate for the lack of a lost one.)

The interior of the cathedral was gorgeous, and there were tourists watching quietly from the sides. It was hard to believe I was a part of it all, having just gotten here three weeks ago.

The reception was at a well-known pub in Budapest that the groom co-owns. I spent most of the time with co-workers, which was nice in advance of starting work tomorrow. (No Labor Day in Hungary!) The groom told me that I could stop by the bar tomorrow evening to pick up the bike he'd found for me. Unless Jason picks a good name for my bike (see post 8/13), I'm going with Leslie's "Bessie Two" option.

So, play time's over! I stop not working tomorrow, but also stop not getting paid. :) This has been in the works since February, and I'm looking forward to it.

Other things:

• Couldn't find anyplace in town that carries ESPN2 for the NU game. So, I refreshed my blackberry every 30 seconds!
• My wrists have not fallen off after playing 8 hours of hockey in 3 days. The women's team had an exhibition game Friday, and I started... at wing! (I've played defense for the past 7 years, but have been having a blast at offense here.)
• Got my residence permit. The process wasn't 100% smooth, but it was much, much easier than it's been for my hockey teammates to get American visas.
• I never want to go to IKEA again. I was able to express that thought in a conversation with my cab driver tonight on the way back. Best Hungarian conversation to date!