Pictures from around the city

Hey everybody,
I'm not actually even in Budapest right now (spent last night in Croatia for work), but I thought it would be nice to throw up a couple of pictures I've taken around Budapest the past week and a half.  It really is a gorgeous city, great for walking around.  Enjoy!

Saint Istvan's (the first King of Hungary's) Basillica:

The Szechenyi Bridge (usually called the chain bridge)

According to the story, Count Szechenyi was on one side of the river when he got word that his father was dying on the other side.  However, a raging storm prevented him from crossing for an entire week, and by the time he got back his father had already passed.  He commissioned the construction of this, the first bridge over the river

Sorry I didn't get a picture at night, it's apparently gorgeous.  Well, another time

I don't even know what this building is, but it looked cool:

There are statues everywhere.  I strongly approve:

Huh, I thought I had more than that kicking around.  Well, enjoy these, and hopefully I'll get back with some more soon!

Noah out

A week already???

Alternate title:  "Only a week???"
You know what I'm talking about?  In many ways, this week went by incredibly quickly.  In others . . . good lord has it really been only a week?  (to be fair, it may only count as 6 days, because much of Thursday was spent in Croatia--more on that later).  And, what's really unbelievable, only 5 days of work!  (although again, adjustment may be necessary.  Calculating by total hours worked, it's about 6.6)  I feel like I've done so much already . . .
[note: yes it's been 8 days now, but I wrote up most of this post last night and just didn't have a chance to post it]

Anyways, I'm sorry it's taken me so long to write an update.  But long story short, I'm keeping incredibly busy at work--I usually get home at about 8pm every night, and I try to go to bed by 10pm.  That being said, busy is great!  I've been put onto a bunch of different projects--only one out of ostensibile (holy crap did you see that alliteration?  Awesome!) training purposes . . . the other two out of "oh wow, we have a ton of work still to do.  Hey Noah, are you busy?" "Well actually . . ." "Ok great, we need you to help on this")
Sadly . . . I can't really tell you too much about what I'm doing at work.  I'm not sure how much of our method is proprietary, the client names are considered private until the deal is closed, and I *know* most of the stuff we talk about with clients is strictly confidential.  So yeah . . . I go to companies I cannot name, receive information I cannot disclose, and then take proprietary actions with it.  But trust me, it's a ton of fun, I promise :)
The other awesome thing is that it's looking like I'm going to be travelling a *lot* with this job.  I spent all day Thursday in Croatia (about a 3-hour car ride, we came home at like 10:30 that night).  Probably going back on Wednesday and maybe staying the night.  Then, next week I'll be taking a company car down to Romania to pick some stuff up (road trip wooooo).  Oh, and the other day I was asked, in all seriousness, "hey Noah, would you be ok going to Kenya?"  So cool

But anyways, as they will be showing up repeatedly in this blog, I thought it might be nice to include a Dramatis Personae:
-Mike, Associate Director (my immediate boss).  American (Texan, to be precise).  Been with EP for 4.5 years (started as an intern himself!)
-Fabrice, PSD intern.  French, but worked for a while in China.  He actually has only one week left, though, which means we really quickly need to bring on another French speaker
-Ulugbek "Bek", M&A intern.  Uzbek, but then educated and worked in Italy.  He started the week before me, so we'll be overlapping each other for almost my entire time
-Alessandro, M&A intern.  Costa Rican but moved to Italy at age 12.  I'm not sure how long he's been here--he's actually temporarily located in the Zagreb office, but he'll be coming back to Budapest in a week or two
-Attila, M&A intern.  "The only normal one here!  I was born in Budapest, I went to school in Budapest, and now I work in Budapest.  I have no idea what the rest of you are doing here."  He's been here since January, but with some departures he's actually been taking lead on a few projects--which is really cool, because maybe I'll have opportunities to do that in a few months!

Anyways, the five of us (soon to lose Fabrice but regain Alessandro) all work in the same big room at the Budapest office.  We're also the ones that always seem to be staying late--everyone in the other room clocks out right at 5!  Sheesh
Everyone is really cool . . . hopefully I'll get opportunities to hang out with them on weekends.  Because man, job's keeping me pretty busy . . . don't know if I'll have time to make friends outside of work ;)

So that's how my work has been.  I have explored the city and have a number of stories and pictures to put up, but that will have to wait for another post

Notable quotes:
Attila:  "Dude, what is up with the Croatian alphabet?  Who needs 3 different kinds of 'c'?"
Noah:  "Hahaha--wait a minute, how can you possibly say that?  You're Hungarian!  Your language has how many vowels?"
Attila:  "That's different.  You need 14 vowels.  But 3 'c's is ridiculous"

Noah out

First day of work!

Hey guys,

First day of work today.  For those of you that don't know, I work here [edit: removed website, I don't really want this blog turning up on a google search of the company name], which is a firm that primarily does this, but I will be on the team doing this, and let's be honest because of my background I'll be doing a lot of this, which is much to my dismay because it is of course the bastard child of this, my great archenemy.  So that should be fun!

Actually, I'm really excited.  My boss, Mike, is a really cool guy (I had a great time talking to him over coffee yesterday, and a fun time working with him today), and all of the other analysts and interns seem really cool.  I actually didn't do much of "my" work today . . . I came in at a really busy time, so basically the attitude was, "you already know how to read, how to write, how to think, so here are a bunch of tasks that only require those skills, you can do other stuff once we get free time to train you".  I know phrased like that it sounds like they're neglecting me, but it felt like the complete opposite--from the very first hour I was able to do helpful, meaningful things.
To steal a funny anecdote that I already posted on facebook, I got more or less used as a bargaining chip mid-morning:
Mike, my boss [to Attila, one of the analysts.  Yes his name is Attila]:  "Hey, can you help me on Burkina Faso?"
Attila:  "Not really, no"
M:  "This needs to be delivered this afternoon"
A:  "Ok, then Noah needs to do some work on Croatia"
M:  "That's not really his job"
A:  "Sorry, that's my deal"
M:  "Ok, that's fair"
Thus commenced a lot of time with Google translate, as the particular work to be done consisted largely of translating documents from Croatian and then rewording them to be presentable.  And my Croatian is even worse than my Hungarian

Oh, and by the way, our office building is really cool.  It's actually a former apartment (until recently there just weren't any offices on the Buda side of the river)--as evidenced by the tub in the bathroom XD . . . don't think that gets a lot of use anymore.  But this means that instead of the whole sterile office feel, it's much warmer and more welcoming--arched windows, hardwood floors, non-fluorescent lighting . . . makes a big difference
And the office is in pretty much the best location ever.  First of all, it's a half a block away from the metro station, which doesn't hurt.  Second, it's in a great neighborhood--tons of nice, cheap restaurants (crepes for like $1.50 each!).  Oh and third, it's right across the river from here:

This is, needless to say, awesome

Oh, and finally, as will not surprise anyone who knows me, after but a single day my nice shiny leather shoes are already pretty scuffed.  Good thing I brought polish ;)

Anyways, I'm going to head to bed fairly soon.  Trying to stay on an early schedule for as long as possible--just like Ma5 attendance (9am abstract math lecture guuuuuuh), if I let my standards slide just once they're never going to come back

Noah out

The Szalay Residence

Hi everyone,

So as I said, I got here yesterday and took a cab up to where I am staying.  For those of you who haven't heard, I'm staying Tamas's (my college roommate's) parents' house!  They both emigrated from Hungary like 2 decades ago, but they keep a house here for when they want to come visit family
It's super convenient to the city.  It's in District XII, which sounds like a ways out, except that the Budapest districts go out in a spiral, meaning that XII is part of the second "ring" of districts--adjacent to District I, where I work.  In fact, my commute is going to be less than 20 minutes--a 9 minute bus ride to the major station Moskva Ter (I have no idea how to do all the accents and dots, so Hungarian is just going to have to deal with only 5 vowels just like the rest of us), and then only one stop on the metro to my work.  Add in the fact that my work is less than a block from the station and the house is like 100 feet from the bus stop, and I'll probably do less walking getting to work than I did getting to class at Tech =/

Also staying at the house with me is Magdi, Tamas's cousin.  Sadly I don't have any pictures of her--I didn't think about taking pictures until today, and last night she left to go stay with her mother for the weekend.  However, thank god she was here when I got in.  First of all, she let me into the house . . . the gate out front is very complicated.  Well not complicated, you just have to push/lift/whatever it the right way.  To be honest, I still haven't figured it out--when I left today, I tried for like 2 minutes, then gave up and hopped the fence.  I should probably make an effort to figure it out before I have to go to work on Monday . . .
Furthermore, she took me down to Moskva Ter and helped me get a monthly pass--lets me ride any of the public transit in the city, for about $50 . . . pretty reasonable, I suppose

Anyways, here are pictures of the house:

Front view:

The main floor consists of the foyer and then a single big communal room, divided up into sections

Kitchen and Dining Rooms:

Living Room:

The stairs up to the loft:

I live on the second floor, halfway between floor and loft

My room.  Those of you who are perceptive/my mother will  note that it took a mere 24 hours to turn it into a mess:

Balcony!  I cannot wait until it's warmer weather out:

Well that's all for right now.  I'm heading to bed early, trying to get myself on a work schedule.  Tomorrow I'm going to explore the inner city some, as I'm meeting my boss for coffee downtown tomorrow afternoon.  (Incidentally, what do I wear for "meeting future boss for coffee"??  Is it business casual? Is business casual something I should wear? I don't even know what it is)

Later!

Noah out

I have arrived!

Hi everybody, welcome to my blog!  Instead of writing individual emails to all the people that have asked to be kept abreast, I figure this will save us all (well, mostly me) time.  I'll try to put up at least 2 posts per week--once for the work week and once for the weekend.  That being said, I can't promise I'll have anything interesting to write about--for the most part I'll be doing a lot of working
Cleo manged 9 posts in 11 months, so I guess all I have to write is 5 in order to beat her.  Doable, but by no means guaranteed

Anyways, I got in last night.  I was visiting Cleo in Vermont, so my flight went Burlington -> JFK -> Amsterdam -> Budapest . . . a total of 15 hours of travel time, not counting time spent going to and from the airport (factor that in and it's like 18).  For the most part it was uneventful and as pleasant as air travel ever is--I managed to get a window exit row seat on the plane, right by one of the main exit doors, so I had unlimited leg room, the ability to get up and walk around, and plus I got to rest my feet on the emergency exit when the flight attendants weren't looking!

The only real stress came from the Amsterdam -> Budapest leg.  See, when I checked in at Burlington, they told me that since that leg of my trip was conducted by a different airline I would need to pick up my boarding pass for that flight when I got to Amsterdam.  It didn't occur to me until I was already on the plane from JFK that I hadn't printed out exactly which flight to Budapest I was supposed to be on, or what time it left, or what airline was conducting it . . . oops.  However, I figured that I could just swipe my passport and things would be taken care of.  Tried that . . . "sorry, your reservation was not found"

. . . well crap

Thus commenced a thoroughly awkward moment when I went up to the desk (thank god she spoke English): "How can I help you?" "Hi, I'm supposed to be going to Budapest" "Well what's your flight number?" "No idea" "Ok, when does it depart?" "No idea" "Ok . . ."
Finally I realized I could boot up my computer, get online, and check the receipt in my gmail.  This got me the number of the flight I was supposed to be on . . . except I still wasn't in the computer.  There were records of my BTV -> JFK flight, records of the JFK -> Amsterdam flight, then nothing.  We were both pretty stumped.  Finally it dawned on me to show her my luggage claim--my bags had been checked through all the way to Budapest, thus proving that at least some computer somewhere knew I was going to Budapest. That was good enough for her, so she entered me on the flight.

After all that, you can imagine my trepidation waiting to claim my luggage.  I'd had a hard time making it all the way to Budapest, and I'm a sentient, somewhat intelligent, patient but incredibly persistent being . . . my bags are none of these things (seriously, they can be so impatient at times).  However, in a complete anticlimax to this story, my bags came out early in the load and in fact adjacent to each other on the conveyor belt (!) . . . and one short, uneventful, reasonably priced taxi ride later, I was settled in.  Disappointing, huh?

Anyways, I figure that's enough for one post.  I'll write more about the place I'm staying and all that later.  Thanks for reading!

Noah out