Where we left off...

So, there I was back in good ol' Houston again. With temperatures around 15-20C it was really pleasant to be back. My apartment (a.k.a. tiny little room) was still there, my stuff was still there and a friendly family was holding on to my valuables while I was gone, so essentially no problem there. I got back just before school started, even though I thought at the time a booked my flight back that I'd have at least a week before that. I didn't get that week. But first week of school is always a little slow and so was this particular one.

It also helped that I only had to take three classes for this semester and I'll still have just enough credits to graduate. Silly, isn't it? I'll get a curiously sounding Master of Laws degree with only 24 credits. Odd. I took 20 credits each semester in my old law school. Well, I did end up being called the doctor of law afterall but it still took me five damn years. Here, I'll be a Master (of the Universe? Wonder who my "Slaves" would be and after how many class hours.) after just 24 credits.

In any event, first thing I got my teeth into was starting to prepare for the great American tradition of Spring Break. In case you haven't heard of it, it's the time when all college students (and slightly older foreign students) get seriously out of their way. That is to say have as much fun as possible throughout one week with as much booze and little sleep as physically possible. I was supposed to have friends fly over from home but later on they had to cancel. They have no idea what they missed. (And they never will.)

In any event, I was sure that I wanted to do a roadtrip. I used to hear about Americans backpacking through Europe, so I thought I might do something similar over here. Since Europasses don't work in the U.S., I had to settle with renting a car instead of dashing through the courtry on trains or even airplanes. So, the original ideas was to drive to California. I've been there, nice place, haven't seen the Southern parts though. When I mapquested it (yes, that's a commonly used verb here derived from MapQuest.com), it turned out that it would be over 24 hours to drive there from Houston. (Note: my friends wanted to go all the way up to San Francisco, which would have been over 30 hours of driving, exclulsive of any stops and refueling.)

But then it hit me. Florida is much closer (17 hours of driving according to MapQuest), I've never seen it before and has at least as nice beaches as any part of California. In fact, we could stop in New Orleans on the way (see here for more teasing details). So, I got into kayaking (click for an explanation) and found two very nice hotels, one in NO the other on Miami Beach. But there was one other thing left. Renting a car and budgeting the gas costs. Having read through all the nitty-gritty details of the Terms and Conditions on each conceivable rental car agency's website, I thought Budget might be one idea. But I wanted to be absolutely sure, so I did a little test shopping.

So the idea was that I rent out a car for just one day just to see if I have all the paperwork to do it. Passport, driver's license, international driver's license, visa documentation, social security number and whatever I could think of was with me for the test drive. It turned out all they needed was a driver's license (they didn't care about the international one and even the fact they couldn't read Hungarian) and a credit card. Now, credit cards are a big deal here. If you have a checking account with a bank, they give you a debit card. There's a lot that you can't do with that but honestly I never got to understand why. It's your money, it's already there, but whatever, that's the system. So, since in Europe there is no difference between a credit card and a debit card as far as the vendor is concerned (the fact that you as cardholder see a HUGE difference should be irrelevant from the vendor's perspective), I decided that I'd use my Hungarian debit card as a credit card. I told them to try my American debit card first and their system didn't let it through, but had no trouble at all with my Hungarian debit card (linked to my good ol' OTP Bank account) posing as a credit card.

So there I was with a car and I wanted to take it for a spin. But where to go? I didn't want to stay in town because that would have been just lame. Instead, I decided to drive to San Antonio. I've never been there and friends told me it should be interesting. It's just (!) 3.5 hours away. Oops! Another problem. There's no way I can find my way around these extremely complex highways they have around here, so I absolutely had to get a GPS. Lucky me, they were on sale at BestBuy. Scored a nice TomTom with a lady passionately navigating me through all the traffic. "At the end of the road, turn left. Then stay on the right lane."

(Sidenote: I later found out that not only can I change the voice but that there are tons of other voices to download. Such as Uncle Hillbilly with a distinctly Southern accent and smartass comments, as well as an arrogant sounding British, who might just think he's the only one being able to read a map, just to name a few. But my favorite was Marika, the Hungarian robotic voice. She was astoundingly bored with travelling. So much that I had to switch back to the original American female voice. I nearly fell asleep listening to Marika.)

In any event, I drove to San Antonio, arrived a bit late and was quite pissed. Two reasons. One that Marika bored me to hell with her directions and two that I couldn't rent the Mustang I wanted from the rental agency. They said I'd have to wait for a few hours because the previous renter didn't return it. Great! So they gave me a big SUV until they got the Mustang back. After driving around for a few hours I decided to leave for San Antonio and called the agency that I'll keep this one, don't bother with the convertible sports car I paid for. They said the SUV would normally cost even more but they won't charge me extra for it. Yeey! That helped me a lot. They should keep more than one of the same car on stock. That's just unbelievable.

To cut a long story short, San Antonio was gorgeous, although I didn't see too much of it. The Riverwalk was great. It's essentially a tiny river flowing through the city center and it's surrounded by resaturants right on the banks. So much in fact that I saw one guy accidentally sweeping his silverware from his table right into the river while he was illustrating a point with a wide gesture. :) Also, you can rent out little boats for cruises. Some were turned into floating dinner tables and seated about 20 people having dinner right on the river.

Coming up: Spring Break. The real thing.

Since I've Been Gone...

It's been a while. And quite a few of you asked why this blog is not updated. Well, the obvious reason is that I had so many things going on I didn't have the time for it. But now, here's a brief summary of what has happened since the last snow fell on Houston.

A few days after the snow I took my final exams. Nothing out of the ordinary there, at least in American standards. But these standards can indeed be different from what you already know. For one thing, apparently there is no such thing as failing a class. Technically, of course, it's possible but that requires that one doesn't show up for the exam or turns his paper in blank. Otherwise, the worst grade you can get is a C (about 3 in Hungarian terms). But everyone is graded on what they call a curve: the distribution of the grades resembles a bell curve. (Feel free to Google is you need to.) Quite to my surprise, I've done really well on all my exams. I thought that not being from around here would put me into a disadvantage but, as it turned out, having a law degree, even if from elsewhere, was in fact a huge advantage over the JDs. Perhaps I already have a sense of legal reasoning, or I might have been that I've seen real live cases requiring the exact skills these test were supposed to gauge. I don't think I'll ever find out why I did well. (Maybe because I had studied? Nah, that never worked at home.)

Just days after my last exam on Dec 15, I had a flight leaving for Paris and then to Budapest. Yes, I decided that I want to spend the holidays with my family and friends at home and had bought the ticket early in October. But I still had a few days to kill in Houston, so I asked a friendly family who I had known since early September if I could stay with them for those few days. They live in a nice suburb just outside of Houston and have a huge garden. The latter was no help in December. Despite its relatively Southern location, Houston was somewhat cold in December, perhaps because of the Northern winds pushing down freezing cold from Minnesota.

Anyway, during my stay, this family took me to a lot of gorgeous places, really good restaurants (Mexican, Italian etc.) and to a gathering of their friends at one of their houses. At this gathering I met E, a girl who, as I later leaned, goes to the same law school. Later when I was already on my way to Budapest, I got an e-mail from her telling me she planned to visit her cousin in Cambridge (England, not in Massachusetts) and asked for tips about other cities in Europe to visit. As you may have guessed, Budapest just knocked out Prague after I wrote about it. :) The funny part was that most of this e-mail exchange took place at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport during my 5-hour layover.

So, on Dec 22 I boarded the Air France plane flying from Houston to Paris. You may or may not know that there are two majro airports in Houston: Hobby Airport, which is quite close to my place, and George W. H. Bush Intercontinental Airport Houston. (if I got the name right). It must be odd for then president Bush to fly to an airport named after his dad. Or just imagine if G. W. H. Bush flew commerical and he went to the check-in counter showing his ID and his ticket with his name both at the holder of the ticket and the destination. (Would anyone care to name an airport after me sometime?) Once we took off from Bush airport, which the locals simply call the intercontinental airport, it was 4.30pm. The flight took around 9-10 hours to Paris, so I arrived the next day and was supposed to sleep on the plane. That didn't happen. I, apparently, can't sleep on a plane. This made me really tired by the time we landed and it was morning already in Paris (around 9.00am). To top that I had 5 hours until my plane left for Budapest. At the time I bought my ticket, I though I'd go out to the city and do something. Now that I hadn't slept that was out. I dragged myself and my bags to the check-in counter for the next flight and sat down. I still coudn't sleep. Luckily, I had Armadeggon (the movie from the 90s) on my iPod, which I though would be boring enough to put me to sleep. Didn't help. But at least I saw the movie after who knows how many years. It took 2.5 hours away from my idle time and I also managed to do a few e-mails. I have to say I was really angry not to find a free wifi hotspot throughout the whole Paris airport. I had no choice but to pay a few euros for half an hour. Then finally, they called for the passengers of the Budapest flight. We took off. Still couldn't sleep. Another 2.5 hours have passed and we landed at Ferihegy. You can't even start imagining how tired I was. Got my bags, hurried through customs and met a colleague who asked me to bring her an iPod (it was half the price here at the time). Then I finally ran into my dad and sister. An hour-long drive followed from the airport to home. Then: Project Hit the Sack. Big Time.

The holidays went by with the usual festivities. I met tons of friends in both Budapest and my hometown. I was busier than if I had worked. :) Truth is I had to get some work done too. I save y'all from having to read through my stay at home, most of you were there anyway. In fact, most of you met E when she in fact came to Budapest just three days before I had to go back. We rushed through Budapest's sites and she gave an English class in a high school in my hometown, which she seemed to have enjoyed. My English teacher friend was also really excited about it. Poor students, half of them had no idea what was going on but luckily E prepared a picturesque presentation about Texas (armadillos, cacti, cowboys and oil rigs) so that saved the day for the beginners' class. (Sometimes I had the impression that the other English teachers have lost her, too.)

In mid-January, I again had to face the horror of long haul flight. Not that I don't like flying, indeed I love it, especially take-offs. But sitting in one place (two places actually) for over 16 hours? That's just cruel. But I landed safely at beforesaid Bush airport. It was pretty warm compared to home, which did make me feel glad after so many hours of flying in the over-aircontitioned plane.

I'll continue to fill you in with the rest of the semester so far, including a brief trip to San Antonio, Galveston and my plans for spring break.

It IS Snowing!!!

A bunch of us just agreed that we'd meet in a couple of hours to play actual, real, live, ruthless SNOWBALL!!!

Some additional pictures @ http://picasaweb.google.com/akovi2/SnowInSouthTexas#

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow...

Though I haven't asked them about this, I'd suspect that my Russian friends here are feeling more comfortable these days. Especially today. No, it's not snowing yet, but the National Weather Service predicts some light snow or a combination of light rain and snow for tonight.

And here I was thinking I wouldn't need a winter coat. This is supposed to a subtropical area afterall. I've seen the tropical part: excess temperatures (mostly close to or over 100 F [approx. 40 C]), choking humidity and even hurricanes. Apparently, now comes the "sub" part of subtropical. But noone warned me that this would mean "sub"zero temperatures! Today afternoon the highest was 39 F [about 7 C], while earlier this week (!) it was close to 85 F [about 30 C]. Talk about global warming! It closer to global freezing right now.

Lucky for me I developed sort of an obsession for school logoed hooded sweatshirts and not baseball caps or whatever. I have quite a collection by now and they sure come in handy.

Thanks!

Yesterday was Thanksgiving day. So, thanks to y'all!

A family I got to know here in Houston invited me over for their family feast. I went there around noon and we all started out by watching the Tenessee Titans beat the c**p out of the Detroit Lions. Experts, that is to say my hosts and their football fan friends, said that this should come as no surprise: the beast team in the league was playing the worst.

So, after a while we thought that this meaningless pounding was not worth watching and went down to the kitchen to help out with whatever. Lucky for us, the kitchen was already crammed with family members eager to get close to the turkey, the two different types of stuffings, the countless number of pies and of course the cranberry souce. As I've come to learn, this specific dinner was an excellent sampler for different gastronomic ways and traditions associated with Thanksgiving throughout the country. The two different stuffings were representing Northern (Michigan) and Southern (Texas) traditions.

Since the turkey wasn't ready at the time, I thought I better not tease myself with just smelling the food I so looked forward to taste. I went upstairs again to see what's on TV and check my mail. I returned to watching football (the American version). The Dallas Cowboys were having the Seattle Seahawks over for what later turned out to be an equally unbalanced game as the other one was. Dallas has been known for its superb football team for decades and this time was no exception. The Seahawks were eating grass through the whole game and were punched out 9-34.

As I was watching the game, one of my hosts' grandchildren, Eleanor, who was about 3-4 years old, popped up right beside me in the armchair I was sitting in. This armchair was designed for one person, so this essentially meant that the kid somehow climbed into my lap without me noticing. We've never met before and she still thought she should show me a picture from last Christmas where she and her brother were climbing all over grandma and grandpa. I don't think I've ever seen such a friendly kid. Anyway, this friendship didn't last too long once her brother appeared with a wooden logtruck and some sort of loading vehicle. :)

I guess I owe a big thanks to my hosts, so this Thanksgiving, being my first, was truly a good reason to be grateful. Well, the coming exams and assignments will probably be less pleasant, but let's hope for the best. For now.

Live from Houston: Tulane gets crushed!

A couple of minutes ago the University of Tulane football team (yes, the American version) suffered a staggering defeat by the University of Houston Cougars 42-14.

But let's back up for a second.

Like a number of people, I always found travel to space something really mysterious, something breathtaking, a tremendous enterprise undertaken in support of the human kind's endless curiosity. Today I finally managed to get a closer look, if not at space itself, at least the stuff they use up there. Who do the astronauts call if they have a problem? Yes, its the Lyndon Johnson Space Center's Mission Control Room down here in Houston. As you'd expect, it was truly fascinating. And it certainly reminds me of questions I had and what I think most people have when on a quiet summer night their mind goes on hiking (after a few, or not so few drinks) while watching a gorgeous sunset but I'm not going to burden you with those. Sure, reality is not always so cheesy, but show me one person who has never started wondering about whether there is something else, something more out there. Clearly, seeing the stuff made for and used in space does not give you an answer. Still, their magnitude and of course the magnitude of the efforts they represent can easily become overwhelming. Especially, if the "space industry" itself adds some Hollywood sappiness to it like showing movies about how one can become an astronaut starting with the first phone call delivering the good news of acceptance to the moment the shuttle lifts off from Florida. Interestingly, the facilities were built during the cold war and thus were designed to appear as if they were a regular college campus on enemy satellite pictures. Unfortunately, the designers did not pick Harvard as the standard. Instead the buildings look like as if those were in the Soviet Union in the seventies. Although the exteriors are rather disappointing, the projects going on inside these buildings are out of this world. At least the planet. See pictures here.

Also, today was Homecoming. In fact, this whole week was about Homecoming. I still don't get it. But it meant a series of great programs, most of which I could not attend because of a final exam I had this Friday. The peak of the week was the Homecoming football game against arch rival Tulane from New Orleans. They sure got pondered tonight by the ever great Coogs. This game did have all the features you can see in a cheesy Hollywood movie but without the drama. There were gorgeous cheerleaders (and to my surprise some guys were also part of the cheerleader squad but they only lifted the girls to their shoulders every once in a while and lead the yelling of the audience). The university presented this years homecomig duke and duchess (instead of king and queen for reasons beyond my comprehension) and of course there was a huge tailgating party (basically a thousand people barbacue right outside the stadium). Sorry, I forgot to take my camera but I'll try to hunt down some pictures for y'all who are interested.

GO COOGS!

Live from Houston: History!

Both CNN and Fox News called the 2008 presidential election for Barack Obama. Although in recent days the news was all over with this election being historical no matter the result. When Fox News reported John McCain's defeat, I became absolutely certain.

Well, apparently this will not be like 2006 back at home. Even a couple of hours ago, while constantly watching CNN.com for updates through my late night class, I cautioned people about what has happened in Hungary in 2006. Tables can turn in an instant. They didn't here despite many people's hope down here in Texas. What actually came as a surprise (at least to me) was that the county Houston is in turned undoubtedly blue.

You have no clue how many people asked me if I voted. I constantly told them: had I voted, I'd be deported the next day for election fraud. I CAN vote. Just not in this country. :)

Btw, residents of Houston start going into a frenzy: constant honking and fireworks stir up the night. (Side note: the neighborhood I live in is mostly populated by African-Americans.)

What Politics Should Be About

If the campaign had been like this all the way long, maybe I wouldn't have been so fed up with it. Note to politicians of the world: you should replace your advisers with these folks. :D

Touché

... or how to hit the nail on the head.

http://www.pointsincase.com/articles/we-drunk-chick-united-states-america

Only 4 days to go...

... until they finally close the polls for the elections. Believe me, I've had it with them. No matter what I do I somehow get tangled up with this matter I so desperately tried to avoid. Not that I wasn't interested at first, but enough is enough. The law school has a number of big screen TVs scattered around its premises, which should be a good thing (especially if they had some Xbox 360s hooked up to them with "The Force Unleashed"). The fact that they always have CNN on them may also be a good thing, normally. But not in an election year. No matter when I take a glimpse on these monitors I always see Wolf Blitzer on trying to shove some insignificant little piece of political news down my throat. [Note: not that Fox News would be any different.] You could say I always have the option of not watching (and believe me, I try not to), but they have all the vending machines and the in-house Subway deli right there. Going starving is simply not my style so instead of engaging in a hunger strike I simply snivel about it online.

The other thing people seem to have stopped bearing in mind (or they never realized it at all?) is that with the elections coming to a close voters no longer respond to sensible arguments. They've already picked their "star" and will under no circumstances reconsider their choice. Even if a candidate would admit to something like foreign policy should be decided upon how many Russians you can see outside your window or that neither of them were born in the United States, it simply wouldn't change a thing. What does all that remind me of? How about 2006. How about partisanship at its peak. How about the distorting effect of mass media. How about people simply being stupid. [Oh wait, its their constitutional right! But at least they should know when to stop arguing with each other.]

Bottom line: I've had it. Luckily, one of our professors was smart (?) enough to put a final exam 3 days after Election Day. This way I can easily get out of invitations saying I need to study. Which I really do. Even though constitutional law is a huge part of the exam, the U.S. election system is so complicated that they don't dare teaching it even to law students. So at least I don't have to study that. Not that I haven't heard enough of it already.

One of my professors said this in a class a couple of weeks ago about a specific legal principle (and it was of course intended as a joke):

There's no divestment here but we still call it a divestment. But isn't that dishonest? NO! Consider it a polticial matter.