My surroundings...
5:59 PM
So it's quite hard to describe where I live, so I've taken a few pictures to show everyone. It's not the prettiest of neighbourhoods haha... one thing I've learnt after staying for the past week is that Budapest is continually under construction. Everywhere I go, there's always some building being built, or some renovation taking place. It's like the entire city feels that there is some massive renovation continuous undergoing and no one knows when it will end.
So this is my street name. Utca basically stands for street, so that's kind of like an important word to know especially when you're looking for directions. The number 8 in Roman letters stands for which district I'm in. So as mentioned in my previous post, I live in district 8, which has the distinction of being the shady district in the whole of budapest. In fact, I just read an article on Romas being killed in District 8. There's been a number of racial prejudice towards the Roma (gypsies) in Hungary partly because of the poor economic state of the country, so it was a little disconcerting to read that article as I complained to my flatmate Dan on the trials of living in such a shady district haha. The good news is that my apartment block is on the fringes of District 8 and just a 5 min walk to the tram station, so I'm just hovering on the edge supposedly. The bad news is that it is still district 8.
My street... it looks pretty gloomy doesn't it? I don't think I'll actually see sunshine till the end of march. That's also why I'm not too hyped up on travelling anywhere yet.
My apartment block from the outside. There's a very code to type in... and it gets dark early coz its winter, so when i came back in the evening and its dark, i'm often praying very hard that i type it fast enough in my freezing fingers haha...
My apartment: Kitchen
Bedroom: Check out my makeshift desk. It is actually this glass coffee table which was probably one of the unwanted furniture and just dumped in the room. At least now I got a lamp from IKEA, so there's some proper reading light for me coz the yellow lights just don't cut it at night. If you notice the other bed, so obviously, someone else can also move in, but for now I have the room to myself... I don't mind sharing, just dunno how the new girl would deal with having no table and having no sheets etc etc when she arrived. The heating is non-existent in the apartment. The heater works, but the heat doesn't spread kind of thing. But thankfully it's not too cold now and as long as I sleep with a sweater I'm usually warm enough.
The toliet: This is probably the best room in the house just because it's a nice sink, big mirrors, and yes I do get a decent hot shower. The only complaint I would have is that there's no shower curtain, so I have to shower carefully...
Small lounge area which no one ever uses. No dining area, so I mostly eat in my room.
So I met up with Hilda (pic) my hungarian buddy two days ago and got my budapest sim card and bank account set up. Was quite angry (PISSED) when I got home because I think that hungarian vodafone lady locked my phone so that I can now only use the budapest sim card on my phone. When I try to insert my singapore sim card in, I can't use it anymore because my phone is in offline mode... super frustrating, so i'll have to ask hilda to bring me back to the store to sort it out. URGGGGGGGGHHHHH...
On the bright side, I managed to try some Hungarian food: Tejzines Gombas Csirke. It's this chicken and mushroom stew which tasted fantastic (if only a bit on the salty side) with rice. It's quite hard to describe hungarian cuisine, but i have noticed that they are into stews... and their flavours were actually similar to indian curry but without the spices (chilli), or that's how the first impression of the taste of the stew was to me... Hilda was actually baffled as to what kind of Hungarian foods foreigners usually liked to try, and I showed her the tourist guide of foods to try haha... so she's got some idea now. One thing though is that they eat a lot of LIVER here, which I don't (Memories of Martina in UCLA and her perchant for liver as well pop up)... so that's one dish I'm not going to try.. sorry.. lol.
Sometimes I do wonder whether it's fate that Hilda was my buddy because she loves to read, and while shopping for my things the other day, she pulled me into the bookstore and said to me, "I really wanted to show you this book, it's called Eclipse and I..." before she could finish, I was like "Eclipse? You mean the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer?" And before she knew it, I was excitedly chatting on and on about how great it was, because I had actually just completed the series days before I flew off to Budapest, so the story was still fresh in my mind. And hey pesto, it's actually popular in Budapest as well... and they have in translated in Hungarian:
Haha funny right.
I'm going to end my post now... but I have a lot more pictures to post of corvinus university (that's another private joke of mine) and Justyna (another teacher) and I went hiking up castle hill yesterday in the cold... crazy crazy.... but later :)
i see u r settling well there =)
take care *hugs*