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Marco's report April 28, 2005 |
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Its been a while since I have written,
many things have happened. Only two months and 9 days
have remained from my exchange year here. I really wish it
could be more time. I try to cheer myself up but I know
that even if I return here it will never be the same as it is
now, and I know that I will never see some of my friends again.
I am happy to say that now I also am a little hungarian too.
Well, easter was fun, we didn't eat meat
until saturday at six o' clock, then we ate a huge dinner with a
lot of meat! While my host family was cooking the food my host
sister and I worked on the easter eggs, it was pretty difficult,
you have to poke a hole in both sides, then one one hole you
blow as hard as you can so that it drips out on the other end...
after that, you get to paint them, I made three, one of florida,
another of the churches here in Pécs and one of the phantom
of the opera.
Then fun is not over yet, there
is an old pagan-Hungarian tradition called the
"locsolas" , on monday all the boys go out with their
friends and bring water in a spray can or also perfume and
they memorize a poem, then they go up to the girl's house's
front door and when she comes out they read out the verse and
douce her with water, it's really fun! and then they let you in
the house to eat and drink...
I went to visit my Ecuadorian friend in Gyõr
for a weekend, the time was really nice and at night we went to
a concert of one of the best hungarian rock bands "kis pal
és a borsz" which means: little paul and the skunk...
well the concert was good, it was the first one i had ever been
in and there was also a mash pit too, and that was really fun..
I have no idea how my camera still works.
Then we took a trip to "Pannonhalma"
which resides on the top of a hill, its an abbey built 1000
years ago by Hungary's first king "The Saint King
Steven" which built this abbey in order to introduce
catholicism in Hungary which at that time was pagan. There is a
little church there wich is extremely beautiful, its very narrow
and completely made out of gray stone, just like in the medieval
times, one like this I never saw. I didn't take a picture
because there was mass in procedure.
Last weekend all the rotary students met
for "the Hungarian language competition" in Miskolc,
on the other side of the country, near Slovakia in a town called
Agtelek. On the first day we all were tested to become
"wine knights" first they blind fold you and then they
give you a glass of wine which you then have to guess what it
is, it was really fun. On the second day the competition really
started, first there was the written test which was really easy,
and then the best (including me) would have to speak about
anything in front of everybody in the dining room. Later my
friends and I decided to go out into the border and have some
fun, it was great, I mean there was really no difference between
the hungarian woods and the slovakian woods but it was the
feeling that made the difference, plus I think we were there
illegaly, through out the weekend we went there at least three
more times, we created a dance team called "made in
Slovakia" which consists of nothing slovakian, we would
start with an argentinian tango then move onto the south african
tribal dance and then to the brasilians, then to the macarena
mexicana, to the hungarian folk dance, then the YMCA dance, to a
ecuadorian strike against the ex-president, because at the
moment there is no president there.. it was really fun,
then we should it to the rotarians, they seemed to have enjoyed
it. After lunch we all ventured into the cave, it was really
long, it stretched out into slovakia and really beautiful too.
Unfortunately I didn't win the competition but I was really
close. On the way back to Miskolc on a train, all the
latins were singing and some poor little gypsy kids came up to
us and were really curious and asked us who we were and what we
were doing, then we started to sing a hispanic song again and
then they would sing back to us a hungarian one and we would
sing back, it was really amazing how music could unite us like
that.
I'm just starting to really enjoy myself
now but I have such little time left, I love my school and
my school mates are really nice to me. I really love this place.
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