Budapest, Hungary - Summer of 1997
I arrived about two weeks before my TESOL course began (TESOL = Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). Budapest and Eastern Europe was going to be a very different experience compared to South Korea, and one I was very much looking forward to. I arrived two weeks early and explored quite a bit of the city. I was able to find a pretty good housing situation at roughly $150 for a month. Everything was significantly cheaper here as well. For example, I found a large number of movie theaters throughout Budapest, generally around $2 at the time for a movie. Reading the local newspaper, I found there to be nearly 90 different English-speaking movies throughout all of the theaters in one given week of time. This was probably one of the more impressive aspects to me being in Budapest, as I was able to catch up on watching alot of old-style Robert DeNiro music and everything else you can imagine.
The TESOL course itself was a 4-week program. I can't remember the exact hours, but it was basically a 40-hour a week program of all classes, then most of the off-hours consisted of non-stop studying just to try to keep on top of things for the next day. I remember I had a great apartment flat, with great windows and a really nice apartment. But unfortunately I couldn't really socialize or enjoy myself as much as I wanted to as we were so busy with the classes.
For background information, anyone who is considering taking a TESOL course, it was great for learning how to teach English. Mainly we studied how to lead into a lesson. Many of us who taught English in Korea were basically thrown into a classroom and just blindly figured out how to teach by trial and error. Through a TESOL course I was able to learn how to properly and adequately lead the classroom in the way a class lesson should be taught. Interestingly enough, there were about 16 students in the class, and maybe 5-6 had already had experience teaching in Korea and now trying to figure out how to teach properly as well as giving Eastern Europe a try. Maybe another 5-6 students were directly from the UK and had never taught before, but Budapest was one of the cheapest programs at the time (1997) at around $1000 for the course, compared to studying in places like London or San Francisco at around $2500 at the time.
I was predominately in Hungary during the summer hours, and unfortunately one of the biggest drawbacks was a combination of my own summer allergies - something I had hardly experienced in years since I was a kid. This region of Europe was a very tough place for allergy sufferers for whatever reason. The other one that got me was the pollution. I have never been very sensitive to pollution at all, despite that many of my foreigner friends in Korea had complained about it constantly. For myself, I had never had a problem with pollution and car fumes until arriving in this city. But more than likely, it was a combination of the summer heat, my allergies, and the pollution all rolled up into one which had me sneezing and wheezing for most of the month that I was there.
Before arriving in Budapest, it was my intention to stay there long-term, perhaps a year or so. I looked around at different schools, went out to the bars, and met other English teachers in this city, but I came to one conclusion. That was that I decided I'd leave shortly after my TESOL course. The main reason being that nowhere seemed to pay much more than $350/month. This was kind of manageable, and Budapest was cheap enough to perhaps make it work, but I'd decided I just didn't want to do that. After some research and thinking about it I decided Turkey would be the place as I found they'd pay around $700/month, and oddly I found I really missed the Asian environment much more. I didn't quite want to go back to Asia, but perhaps Turkey would be a nice switch due to its closer proximity and its Asian-ness. The other thing I found I didn't like nearly as much as I thought, was that being in a European country and being European-like looking wasn't nearly as much fun as being different looking. Even though I hated the attention I got in Asia just for being white, once I didn't get this attention, I found it too boring. Generally I found people would be kind of uninterested in talking to me when they discovered I wasn't able to converse or communicate in Hungarian or German (as some of the locals were able to speak). I also heard that alot of people knew Russian as well, but it wasn't a popular language to speak even if you knew it. It didn't really matter much anyhow as I didn't know that language either.
One of the highlights of Budapest was this place called the Marxist Cafe. Supposedly it had been a local institution for years and years throughout the Cold War era, and it was basically a mockerly to Communism. There were drawings/paintings on the walls of Marx and Lennin and such, with their pants down and well a little more than just that, it was pretty bad.. you can imagine the rest, if not, just email me, and i'll fill in the rest. I was actually pretty surprised as I'd always assumed that anyone questioning and particularly mocking the institutions had serious problems. But apparently, people told me that Budapest had always been on the western fringe of things, and things were significantly more relaxed here than most other cities of the former Eastern Bloc countries.
One last thing about Hungary I should mention is the food. Extremely heavy and lots of sugars and cakes and sweet things. Another thing in abundance was paprika which is very famous in this part of the world. Since legendary Transylvania and such was in Budapest, I began to re-read some excerpts from Dracula, and it was interesting to see all the references to paprika and quite a few other very Hungarian things that I might not have noticed otherwise if I hadn't been living there at the time.
One last thing about Hungary and in particular the Hungarian language. It is probably one of the world's most difficult languages to learn. Apparently this was a very isolating factor for Hungary and Hungarians as it wasn't so easy for others or for them to learn other languages. Quite a contrast to places like Romania which had the Latin language similarities, or the entire region of Slavic people surroundings Hungary which also shared a similar language type. Oddly, the Hungarian language has no close relative at all, and only a few extremely distant language group similarities with Finland, Mongolia, Turkey, and somehow Korean. Although they were all extremely distantly related, not really even close. The other odd thing I learned was that the Hungarian and Finnish people most likely came from the Ural Mountains of Central Asia, and had brought the language which evolutionized to what it is today. Somehow this same similarity is common with Koreans and Mongolians somehow as well. But they are all extremely distantly related. The odd thing which I think was definetely not entirely true. But one Korean I met in Korea told me of a friend of his who moved to Hungary and apparently he was able to understand Hungarian much more than other people because of this extremely distant relationship between the languages. I think that is a little too fetched though, but it is true that Hungarian really isn't related to anything else at all.
Ultimately my time in Budapest eventually came to and end as all things tend to do at some point, and I found myself packing my things and bordering a plane to Istanbul.
Trying to teach English in Turkey
You can email me at:
Wintermoon2@yahoo.com