September 13, 2010: another day at school

September 13, 2010: After my breakfast I leisurely walked to the bus 196 stop, a ten minute walk from my apartment. Shortly a bus arrived and in a few blocks it was obvious that rush hour traffic was in full force. Fortunately I was on a bus which has a special lane which allowed us to bypass the congestion. Still, it took twenty minutes to arrive at Ujpest Center, the stop from which I walk to school. I arrived at school with plenty of time to spare. I first checked in with Fekete Kati to give her the list of my wish items for the apartment. She had told me to prepare such a list of things I need to start house. I explained to her that I had written down everything I need and that there might perhaps be some items that she and the school feel are not appropriate for them to buy for me and that I would be happy to purchase those items myself. After all, I am a guest and don't want to be presumptuous on asking the school to buy me things that I should probably be purchasing myself. She immediately told me that the principal had told her unequivocally that he would get everything on my list. (If only I had known this before, I would have put Waterford crystal and Royal Doulton, and maybe a maid on the list!) At any rate, Kati told me that she had sent an e-mail to all the teachers in the English department asking them to contribute things to me. Since she had copied the principal on this e-mail, it wasn't long that she heard from him telling her that she shouldn't have done that – that the school would see to my wish list. Meanwhile, I arrived in my office to find three huge bags of towels, kitchen towels, sheets, etc. Kati also told me that she had given me a knife, but according to Hungarian superstition, I had to buy it from her for 5 forints (= 2 ½ cents) since it's bad luck to give anyone a knife. (I told her that we have the same superstition in the US.) Later Maria gave me an iron. I asked her if she would come to my apartment and demonstrate it for me and told her that I'm really a slow learner so she may have to show me how to iron shirts about twenty times, the number of shirts I happen to have that need ironing. (She didn't buy that!) At any rate, I was/am overwhelmed by the generosity and concern of all the teachers. They really care a lot about the image of their school toward me. The school is still planning to deliver more furniture for me later this week, so hopefully I should be in my real home by week's end.

I returned to my office and checked on my e-mail and sent messages to those I've been out of touch with over the weekend. And would you believe that with all this "extra" time, I was late for class because I somehow had it in my mind that class started at 9:45 instead of the correct 9:35. I raced to class at 9:40, only five minutes late. The students of 9C pre-intermediate were definitely prepared for class. Their English was spoken very fluently!

Meanwhile, when I went to turn in my key after class, the lady in charge of the keys presented me with an envelope filled with all the keys I need for all of my classes (except one which she'll prepare tomorrow)! No more racing to return and retrieve keys from her between classes!

Figure 34 Ujpest High School "key" lady - note badge reader and video screen of school

After returning to my office, I went to the library to check to see if my JPL DVD about space could be played on the video system. After some experimentation, it finally was projected on the pull down screen. I'm all set.

After a nice break and a leisurely lunch with Gabor and Laci (pronounced "Lotsy"), I went to teach my remaining two classes for the day. The 9B intermediate class was a little more rowdy than before. I finally confessed to them that I enjoyed teaching them, but that I was not happy when they talked while I orally tested other students in class. That shut them up. One of the students from this class stayed behind to ask if I had heard of UConn. When I said "yes", he said his brother was a student there. We discussed this a while and I learned that he has aspirations to study EE in the US some day.

Then I met my 9D pre-intermediate class which was also very prepared. Somehow, I ended up with some extra time at the end of class, so I decided to see if they had any questions they wanted to ask about me. Wouldn't you know that they used questions from the dialogs I had recently taught them, but they used them without any hesitation as if it were a real discussion. I guess they are really internalizing English.

Since my day was over, I grabbed two of the four bags (another bag surfaced during lunch) of stuff the teachers gave me and walked to the bus stop. On the way, I decided that it was ridiculous buying tickets ten at a time when it would be cheaper in the long run to buy a monthly pass. Only problem is that the monthly pass is around $45 which used up a considerable amount of what I have to live on for the rest of this month. Oh well, it'll be ramen for me for a couple of weeks. But with a transportation ticket, I won't have to walk so much – so much for my receding paunch. I'll be able to go wherever I want whenever I want. Very convenient. The ticket is good for any form of transportation: bus, subway, tram, train, metro. Pretty nice this Hungarian transportation system.