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