And I know that the foam on the breaking waves is as white as household bleach.

As of the day after tomorrow, I will have been vacated from the United States for a month. A MONTH. It feels like I can't have been here that long, but I feel like I already know the city so well that I must have been here for months.

I've had three days of class now, and have experienced at least one class period of every class I'm planning on taking. I now provide you with a detailed account of my first impressions of these classes.

• Introduction to Abstract Algebra: This class is only going to meet for two hours and fifteen minutes a week. This sounds short, but it's pretty usual*. The difference between this class and others is that this one doesn't have scheduled "office time" for us to ask questions. So far all we've really done is go over set notation, which I learned back in Discrete. That's okay, a review is always good. The prof of this class is Jewish, so we have today off because it's Rosh Hashanah. I'll know more about this class once we meet again, since we really didn't cover any new material on the first day of class.

• Number Theory: This class has met twice now and I'm still not quite sure what's going on. More review of Discrete here, proving the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic was the big activity of yesterday morning's class. That seems to be how most of these classes are going, honestly. I'm guessing there'll be this one or two day review of what I learned in Discrete or whatever, and then things will pick up after that. There are two sections of Number Theory being taught here, at the same time, with identical syllabi. (Blogger doesn't like the word "syllabi". It says it's misspelled. No. It just looks funny, Blogger.) Of the two professors teaching it, one is a well known, well loved man named Csaba Szábo. The other professor is "That Other Guy", in a matter of speaking. On the first day of class, everyone went to Csaba's classroom, and no one went into "That Other Guy"'s classroom. There were about 20 of us sitting there when Csaba and a dejected looking TOG came into the room and said that half of us had to go with TOG into his room because there were enough of us to have two sections of the course. (If there had been 15 or less of us, they would have condensed it into one section). A few of us felt so sorry for TOG that we joined him, all the while being assured by Csaba and TOG that we could always switch classes later. Despite being sort of shy and not nearly as dynamic as Csaba, TOG seems like a nice professor, who writes notes on the board and knows his stuff. (His handwriting is illegible, but I think I'll be able to decipher it fully in another week).

• Combinatorics 2: I think I'm definitely going to like this course. Of all the classes I've seen this week, I think this is the only one I've learned something new in. We started talking about hypergraphs, which we're going to be learning about in Graph Theory later on. This is also the only class I've been assigned homework in. The professor is going to be assigning one or two problems and extra credit problems a day, then collecting them every few weeks. The extra problem he assigned on Tuesday definitely had me thinking: There are 70 students. For any two students A and B, how many languages must there be so that A knows a language that B does not? Should be a fun class.

• Graph Theory: More Discrete review here. And a packed class. Half of the people from my language class are in this class. The prof's kind of confusing, but his accent's pretty easy to understand. I might end up auditing this class, so who knows. The prof kind of freaked us out when he told us we really didn't need the textbook, that we'd only be using about 15% of it for class, but he was trying to require us to buy it just because it was a "good book to have on our shelves for later". Whatevers. I'll probably end up buying it anyways, just because I have a feeling it will help me.

• Intermediate Hungarian: There are two sections of this class being taught, one on Monday afternoons and one on Tuesday afternoons. The one on Monday is taught by Erika, the woman who taught my intro class at Babilon, and Tuesday's is taught by her son, Ádám. I decided to try taking Tuesday's class, for a change of pace.. and I'm not sure that was a change of pace I really needed. The class seemed too informal, not enough emphasis being placed on learning, just on doing. Does that make sense? Probably not. I'm going to check out Erika's class on Monday and see how that goes. That might be the class I end up in, but that would mean buying another textbook (Ádám wasn't going to require us to buy the book). We'll see on that one.

Yesterday after classes got out Mihály, Voula and I walked up to the Citadel. We crossed the bridge you can see in the picture and then walked up the stairs that zigzag their way up that hill. The Citadel is up by that statue you can see just left of center. The walk was quite wonderful, and much quicker than I would have expected. It would have been even more wonderful had I been wearing sneakers, not my DMs. We spent about 15 minutes walking around up there, enjoying the view and lamenting the fact that none of us had brought a camera, then walked back down and went back to Mihály's. We'll go back, I'll bring my camera and I will post all kinds of pictures, just you wait!

Today I came to school, but I'm not sure why, since I didn't have class. I wanted to use the internet and buy books, but no one's online at noon my time (it's three in the morning PST, for god's sake!) and the office that's selling the books isn't open today. Well... poo. I guess I'll just sit here updating my blog for a couple hours. And then... who knows what the rest of the day will bring? Who am I kidding, I'll probably end up at Mihály and Bruce's until nine or so, then go home and go to bed. Maybe somewhere in there I'll go to a café and sit and read the Unbearable Lightness of Being for a while (I just started on Sunday and I'm over halfway through... what a fantastic book so far!), make a formal copy of the Combinatorics problems I've done so far, and fill out my temporary residence permit form. And I should call my dad once 5 or 6 pm rolls around. And of course I will talk to Rob!






*A quick explanation of the classes here: classes tend to start at 15 minutes after the hour and go until the next hour, get a 15 minute break, then end at the next hour. So they are in a 2 hour block, but we are only in class for an hour and a half of it. Classes tend to meet twice a week, and the second 45 minute period on second day there is "office time" instead of instruction where students can ask questions.