Deeper into the rabbit hole

As the blog description suggests, this won't just be about Vietnam anymore. I'll keep the URL, but expand my coverage area to infinity and beyond. I think that gives it a Stars Hollow kind of charm, like using a female doll to play baby Jesus in the Christmas play. To make things less confusing, I think I'll tag every post with the city location. In this latest reincarnation, I'll write about my time studying in Hungary, but that's not all: my new friends and I are already looking at tickets to the rest of Europe (Budapest to Rome for $20?!), and it's only the first night.

Like any good traveler, I'm wide awake at 2 a.m. because I slept most of the day. Not sure why I couldn't sleep on the plane, which is usually so easy. Instead I spent most of the flight (five hours from San Francisco to New York, then 8 hours to Budapest) trying to watch La Science des Reves and read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (not simultaneously). In general, you probably shouldn't mix Gael Garcia Bernal with James Joyce, especially when crossing time zones - alone, any of the three can mess up your consciousness, but together? Together they're probably something like one of the recipes from the alter ego of Stephane Miroux.

I realize that tells you little about Budapest, but I find air travel fascinating, and relevant. For example, when I got to SFO for my international flight, I looped a few times because (I eventually learned) the layover at JFK meant I had to check in in the domestic terminal. When I reached my final destination, I got a quick stamp and that was it. No search. No machines. No customs. The first girls I met here said it just depends on the host country. One girl told me that during a trip with her Bangladeshi boyfriend, she was searched and her ticket labeled 'security concern' because of her boyfriend's name. We diverged into the story about the nine Muslim passengers that AirTran booted for sounding like terrorists. Including three children, age seven, four, and two. And my biggest concern was getting my over-sized carry-on past the flight attendants.

The girls I mentioned are other students in the study abroad program here at Central European University. They came to my dorm room, where I was dropped off with no instructions and where I slept for the afternoon, to give me my welcome packet. That they came in place of people from the university, combined with the fact that we haven't registered for courses (this was the first day of classes) and are just starting to look for apartments (the dorm is temporary), led us to believe our program is a little disorganized. But who ever studies abroad to study?