Hungarian

I enrolled in a Beginning Hungarian Course at CEU in February as a part of my residence permit agreement (where I begged saliently argued my case to allow me to stay due to my love of Hungarian culture and language).

Before I started the course, a random German guy told me that George Lucas actually based Yoda's speech off of Hungarian O_O! I actually had a random phase in my life (okay, this past winter) where I talked like Yoda nonstop and even had my family catching on ha :)
So, I excitedly went online to look up the details of this amazing fact, but sadly, he was just a bloke spinning a tale to impress.

However, there are some similarities where the subject goes before the verb in certain instances:
Ishita vagyok--[Ishita I am] would be how you introduce yourself.

But this does not hold for everything--
Beszélek angolul--[I speak English] reverts back to subject following the verb.
It's quite puzzling how Hungarian evolved into such a distinct language. While there are some similarities with Slavic languages, it really is a creature on its own. One aspect that really sets it apart from any other language I have encountered is the concept of vowel harmony.
The endings in different grammatical structures depend on whether the vowels fall in one of the two vowel grouping categories. This applies to endings for nouns as well as for verb conjugation!

Conjugations (the notebook is a present from my lil sis's travels to China ha)

Pronunciation is also tricky and different.
"s"="sh"
"sz"="s"
"cs"="ch"

And Hungarians always emphasize the beginning syllables and have strong inflection in their phrases, making it difficult to understand when they're speaking at their normal fast pace.

Today was the last day of class. Overall, it was a good introduction to the basic present-tense grammar structures and basic vocabulary of numbers, foods, verbs, etc. I can now at least pronounce the words I see on the signs and buy things at the farmer's market without a convoluted game of charades! We'll see if I continue...

Universal Magic

Partial solar eclipse!

Joyce and I wandered outside about 10 minutes till the "peak" of the solar eclipse, in search of the sun. Walking along Andrassy, we just had to find the street where we could spot the sun between the buildings. After wandering for about 8 minutes, questioning the void "Where is the sun?!", we finally spotted it in a side street.

Now, the tricky part of a solar eclipse is you're not supposed to actually stare into it. We knew there was some trick with getting the reflection on a blank sheet of paper, but after a few minutes of foolishly holding the paper up to the sun without really considering the science of shadows behind it, we had a moment of fuck it--let's stare for just a sec. So we both took turns with sunglasses to look straight into the sun and saw it! It was an incredible crescent sun and hard to look away. But we did reluctantly and had spots in our vision for a few hours moments afterwards (worth it though hehe).

Luckily, there was also a group of the most altruistic, mysterious "nerds" (aka highly intelligent Big Bang Theory vibe superstars) who set up a contraption with a cardboard box and telescope so the solar eclipse was reflected in the box.

baby eclipse :)

After reveling in the wonder of how wonderful universal phenomena are, we went to a flower market in a nearby square. Joyce had a lovely thought to surprise a friend with daffodils--random act to brighten someone's day. Later, we found out she had actually had some bad news earlier in the day and the daffodil surprise had cosmically "eclipsed" :-P her sadness. So wonderful when things align that way.

Holidaze

Last weekend was full of random holiday celebrations amidst the busy times of shooting interviews and B-roll footage for our documentary.

First up--the most epic Pi Day! I started Pi Day celebrations back in middle school when my favorite math teacher would have a pizza party and have everyone sing a "traditional" Pi Day song--

Oh Number Pi – Song (to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree”)

Oh, number Pi
Your digits are unending,
Oh, number Pi
No pattern are you sending.
And even more if we had time,
Oh, number Pi
Oh, number Pi
For circle lengths unbending.
Oh, number Pi
You are a number very sweet,

Oh, number Pi
Oh, number Pi
Your uses are so very neat.

There’s 2 Pi r and Pi r squared,
A half a circle and you’re there,
Oh, number Pi
Oh, number Pi
We know that Pi’s a tasty treat.
--------------

And this year, it was a once in a lifetime Pi Day--Pi to the ninth decimal place! So at 3/14/15 at 9:26:53, we celebrated with a classic pizza pi :)

Vegan Hungarian pizza from our favorite Napfenyes Etterem

The following day was a Hungarian national holiday commemorating the 1848 revolution against Habsburg rule. Many of the festivities centered around the National Museum, where a famous poet, Petofi, had delivered a National Song. 

National Museum

Love the "secret service" men. Cheers for PM Viktor Orban's speech--quite a controversial figure right now with his conservative agenda and hob-nobbing with Putin

After, admission to all the museums was free so perfect time to check out the National Museum.  

Liszt Ferenc's (Hungarian composer) broadwood piano that originally belonged to Beethoven

Stalin's right hand--remnant from a statue overturned in Hungary's October revolution against the Soviet Union

Gömböc--first known convex, homogeneous object to have just one stable & unstable equilibrium point so it always self-rights itself to its single stable position without added weight. Explains the mystery of the tortoise! :)

Overall, the curation was a bit of a mish-mash from WWI and beyond, but a cool collection of artifacts and a good outline of national history.