I am that teacher who is always covered in chalk dust

Hungarian for the day: Kerek sor - Beer please!

My first week of being a Hungarian teacher is behind me and I'm feeling pretty good about the whole thing. Monday I showed up for the opening ceremonies, which seemed very nice although they were in Hungarian so I really have no idea what they were talking about. At one point I got elbowed in the side by one of the English teachers sitting next to me and I had to stand up and be recognized. The mayor was there and he came up to me and gave me a friendly handshake and bantered on in Hungarian for a while. After the ceremony I spent all day doing paperwork and sitting around while the other teachers in my school ran around like lunatics. I didn't have any classes, and I didn't realize that here if you don't have classes then you don't have any reason to be at school, so I pretty much sat around awkwardly all day. Tuesday was my first day in the classroom, and my very first class was one that I had been warned about as having behavioral problems. They were fine, a few of the boys were problematic but since it's a group of students who have already graduated and are there pretty much so they can pass an English business certification exam given by the EU, I told them I had no problem kicking them out if they didn't want to be there. So now we're all friends! For some reason I didn't have many classes last week, but I did have this one class twice every day so now I feel like I know them pretty well and we get along nicely.

My teaching load is very strange. They try and expose the native English speaker to as many students as possible, so I will meet most of my classes only once a week. I have 21 classes a week, with 16 different groups of students. At about 15 students per class, that makes somewhere in the vicinity of 240 different students. That is a terrifying number of Hungarian names to learn, but the good news is that there really aren't that many different Hungarian names. Some of them are pretty awesome, like Zoltan, an extremely common name which sounds to me like someone who should be wearing a helmet with horns coming out of it and is the Hungarian word for king. I still haven't met about half of my students because of random beginning of the year disorder like state placement exams and retreats for new students, but I'm feeling pretty good about the students I have met. Of course, when you're dealing with a couple hundred high school students there are bound to be some evil little turds. For the most part, however, my students seem good natured and willing to work with me. I have been very surprised by the huge number of Hungarian adolescents who seem to really go for that goth look, but then again we're pretty close to Transylvania here in Szentes. The only real problem I see with students is that, though most have been in English classes for 7 to 11 years, most of them have really weak English abilities. At the same time, they don't really seem to think of the native English speaker's conversation classes as real classes - they said last year they mostly watched Friends and Prison Break. I'm kind of torn with this, because many of these students really need a swift kick in the ass if they want to get anywhere with their English, which they obviously do not desire or think they need. Some of my favorite sentences I've received on the little index cards I had them write for me about themselves are along the lines of "I am been studying the English for 10 years ago 'cause it easy language." Is it, now? It would be way easier for me to just watch TV every class, but I'd really like to try and help these kids. So I'll try my best to give them so good practice for their English orals and then let them watch Ice Age or play hangman when they seem like they've reached a breaking point.

Other than lots of work as I meet throngs of students, life here is becoming more routine. I'm figuring little things out and my Hungarian language abilities, while still paltry, get me by in stores and the most common situations that occur around town. I have a really bling new cell phone, or "mobile" as they say here, and I figured out that my water is not toxic but from the thermal wells under the city and therefore smells and tastes like sulfur. Apparently it's good for the joints, which sounds all well and good but I'm still not drinking it because it tastes like what I'd imagine skunk spray tastes like. I got legitimate internet hooked up in my apartment and even appeared in the paper from the lecso festival. Unfortunately the paper doesn't publish many articles online so I can't show off my fame, but that's okay becuase it's not the most flattering picture anyway. Also, my school has started moving on the legal front, not that there's been any real progress yet. My boss relegated the task of getting my papers in order to the youngest faculty member, a very kind and pretty woman named Evelin who is definitely doing her best to be helpful but is as perplexed by the Hungarian bureaucracy as I am. Last Wednesday she took Taylor and I to Szeged, the nearest major city, to the immigration office to get our residence permits. Well, naturally we didn't have one of the forms stamped, and though the same exact stamp was already on two of our application forms and we had obviously visited the school official needed for said stamp, there was one form quite outrageously devoid of any official looking stampage. So we were sent back. Hungarian bureaucracy, you see, hasn't evolved all that much since five decades of communism, and stamps are very, very important. The good news is that said stamp was easily procured and that the woman said everything else looked in good order so things should fall into place when we go back there this Wednesday. The next hurdle will be my visa, which is going to be tough because nobody at my school thinks I need one. That will be a fun conversation "No, really you have got to drive me to Belgrade to apply for this so that I don't get stranded here/thrown into Hungarian jail." I'm really looking forward to that one, but for now it's one step at a time.

Well I've got a lot of lesson planning to do and eventually I'd like to even go forging for food. Sorry about the shortage of pics thus far, I really need to walk around town with a camera or, better yet, do something worth taking pictures of. More soon, viszlat!