The First Few Weeks

Getting here
We arrived in Budapest on August 25th. If we had come from our home to Budapest, we might have felt more rested but... We moved out of our house on July 21st. Most of the family spent most of the next month (7/21-8/21) visiting our moms in the desert Southwest. We stayed between their homes (about 30 minutes apart) so lots of driving and driving and driving... We have no routine when we're there. The kids have no routine. It gets tiring.

During that month I spent a week back home and in DC for a conference. We also spent a family weekend in the mountains (annual summer trip). We left the desert on 8/21 and from there we spent one night at an airport hotel in Pittsburgh, one in a hotel in our hometown in WV and one in DC. We had a couple of play dates set up on our short time in WV for the kids, and hit the monuments in DC as well as DC cupcakes for the little baker. So, after that month & those three days in transit, we flew out of DC in the evening of the 24th, through Brussels in the morning of the 25th, then a short flight from Brussels to Budapest.

(at the Liszt Ferenc Airport waiting for our luggage)

SO- took a while to get over jetlag. We took lots of naps our first week here. It was also incredibly hot the first two weeks here so we spent a lot of time indoors because we're fortunate enough to have air conditioning. We arrived a week before we had to do anything, so it was time to get rested and settled into our flat.

Fulbright Orientation Week
The second week as Fulbright Orientation, so a few Hungarian lessons, some lectures on the political structure, economics, culture, history, higher education & music of the country we are calling home for the moment. We also ate a lot of very nice meals in town and had a couple of private bus tours - one of the city and one up the Danube bend to Szentendre & Visegrád. The Hungarian Fulbright Commission has taken very good care of us :)

School
We had originally wanted to enroll the kids in a public school, but had very little luck getting responses from the schools here while in the US. So, we decided to homeschool. Once we arrived and attended Fulbright orientation, the wonderful people there made some calls and all of a sudden all four kids have seats in a public bilingual school - the Kőrösi Csoma Sándor Kéttannyelvű Általános Iskola. (That'll be another post!) So, new plan - the kids are in school and we're making them do their homeschool curriculum during their Hungarian language classes, or read books. They aren't very happy about having to do BOTH school and homeschool. We'll take it week by week.

My work will pick up next week... we'll see how this goes!