Arrivals

It seemed like we just kept arriving to places on our way here. We arrived at the airport. (After a long flight) we arrived in London. (After another long wait) we arrived in Budapest. Finally, after a very speedy drive from Budapest, we arrived in Szeged.

I'm happy to report that the flights were all unremarkable. Driving from Budapest to Szeged was much more interesting. The countryside reminded me a lot of driving through western Oregon - lots of farmland and trees, rolling hills. It was very green. We saw a lot of fields of sunflowers (and corn), and I asked our driver what the word was for sunflower in Hungarian. It's napraforgo. (With an accent mark on the last o - I just can't figure out how to type it in here.) There were a lot of trees that I recognized: piles of locust; quite a few aspen and willow. Orchards of fruit or nut trees.

One interesting difference in our drive from Budapest to Szeged was that the freeway never actually went through any cities. We skirted the sides, of course, but I never really saw anything that looked like "city" surrounding the road. Can you imagine what Seattle would be like if they'd thought ahead and said, "You know -- situating this freeway through the center of town might not be the best idea..."

Our apartment in Szeged is really great! It's right in the middle of the city, so it looks like it'll be walking distance to pretty much everything (or easy access via tram.) The building is old and beautiful, and the ceilings inside are probably 15 feet high. It's been refinished so it has air conditioning and modern accessories, but maintains the feel of the original. I'm super excited about air conditioning. All we have at home is a little window unit upstairs that mostly keeps the bedrooms cool enough so that we can sleep in them, except occasionally when we get a string of really hot days where it doesn't cool off much at night. Of course this probably deserves a #firstworldproblems kind of tag, if I were into hash tagging things. Anyway, our apartment is in this amazing building:

We were pretty exhausted yesterday, so it was a bit of a chore to do much of anything, but we got a short tour from my colleague at the university, including a trip through the chemistry buildings. That's right: not science buildings, but chemistry buildings. First clue that the University of Szeged (SZTE) is just a little bit bigger than Saint Martin's University (SMU)? For context, at SMU we have around 75-80 tenure-track faculty members (or so); at SZTE they have around 2000.

The plan for today is to explore a bit more, and start to learn how to find our way around the city.