Perspective

 I might have called this post novelties had I written it a week ago when these events were somewhat new. Instead, I'll save that title for another and call this perspective.  I'll begin by looking at Texas from a Hungarian perspective. Last week, I ate a street food restaurant called Zero not far from my office. The food was a little pricier that my usual lunch fare (around 1400 forints, which is just under $5).  They had a Texas tortilla on the menu for 2190 forints, so I thought I would try it. They offered jalepeno, but I declined. It was a tortilla rolled up with gyro chicken*, tomato, lettuce, corn, kidney beans, baked beans, and red onion chutney inside.  As you can see from my photo, it was served with fries and red cabbage coleslaw. It was quite delicious.

*In Lebanon, gyro chicken is used for schwarma, you can see pictures of the countertop rotissary of pressed chicken if you google Doner Kabob.

I've been tutoring a student in algebra lately and was creating some exercises with coordinate planes when I had an idea to superimpose a map of Texas and a map of Europe in which the x-axis and y-axis crossed in Athens, Texas and Athens, Greece. Szeged is the red square. As near as I can figure, In distance and direction, Athens Greece to Szeged Hungary is roughly the same as Athens, Texas to North Platt, Nebraska.














Last week, I started a course in Survival Hungarian. Yesterday, I went for the second time. My class has three Indonesian students, whom I have already engaged in conversation (both in English and Indonesian and a little Hungarian).  There are also two American students, including one that I met at church last month, a Tunisian, an Algerian, a Mexican, a Korean, and Ethiopian, and one who was British last week and French this week. We have vocabulary quizzes every week. Last week, having no preparation at all, I scored 2 of 10. This week I got 7 or 8 of 10.  For next week, I need to study the days of the week, months of the year (which are very similar), personal pronouns, and the conjugation of the verb to be. 

On my weekly real life Hungarian quiz at the market, I understood the price of potatos, tomatos, and bananas on the first try.  Only the peach vendor had to resort to showing me the price on his calculator. I got to the market too late to meet the spinach and other leafy greens vendor, so I went to the supermarket, where I found a very large head of lettuce.



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