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.