Day Egy (Day One)

I'm in Hungary! All off the IIHF officials are staying in a beautiful hotel in the center of Miskolc. My roommate is a girl who is also from Hungary. All of the other girls seem really nice but I can't for the life of me remember all of their names, let alone pronounce them. Luckily, our supervisor is from Canada and I can't tell you how nice it is to hear another person speak English. It really gets tiring trying to communicate with a language barrier, although all of the girls speak English to one extent or another.
I feel like the dumb American - I'm not even sure I can point out all of the countries everyone is from: Finland, Netherlands, Japan, Croatia, Estonia, Slovakia, Czech Republic...and some others that I haven't even figured out yet.

Rewind to yesterday - my flight was canceled from Philly to JFK but after freaking out all morning I arrived to JFK in plenty of time. As luck would have it, while waiting for 3 hours in JFK an older couple sat next to me and the woman starting asking where I am from, what I do etc. "Oh really?! You're a vet student? Wow! That's great. You'll love this story. We used to own this horse once...." Needless to say I tried to look impressed and amazed when she told me that her horse must have sensed she was trying to help it when it was down on a pile of logs and they had to pull each and every log out from under the horse so that it could rise again. I told her it was a heartwarming story.

Back to Hungary...It's terrible that I understand about zero of what is being said here. I can find goulash and paprikash on the menu, but that's about it. If anyone needs me to count to 10 though, I will surely impress them. The money here is called Forint. I have a 10,000 forint bill. Unfortunately, it's not worth very much. But it looks cool to carry around.

The televisions here all play a weird variety of American music. I watched the Thriller video at breakfast this morning (an all time favorite) and heard YMCA in Hungarian yesterday in the car.

On a more sentimental note, it feels really amazing to know that I am in the country where my mom is from. I look at little kids speaking Hungarian and picture my mom. I saw a woman on the plane yesterday that looked like every Hungarian family friend we have. She had dark hair, slightly curly, was wearing one of those silk shirts that my grandma always used to wear, and the wrinkles on her face looked JUST like Grandma and Maca's (my grandma's sister). To me, in my head, it's kind of what I imagined every Hungarian to look like. I keep waiting to see an old man with a furry hat and a long trench coat so I can think of my grandfather. I think I came during the wrong season for that.


So far, it's great to be here. I have a game today at 7:30pm. Hungary vs. Croatia. I'll keep you posted.

Oh yeah! I almost forgot -
DAY OF THE WORD: Focah (Foo-cuh). It means "sea lion"(We get animal planet in Hungarian).