Greetings from the land of great wines and paprika! I’m here to study, currently one month into the stay and getting to know Budapest better every day. I live on the Pest side, which is a tad bit more unpolished than the other side, but lively and well in all possible ways. My favorite pastime for a time now has been plunging into all the parks of the city, which are plenty and even more pretty now that the spring has come around. Can’t wait for the summer to come around! So far the best parks in my opinion are Margit Island and Népliget (People’s Park).
Even though Hungarian is related to Finnish via the link of an family tie (Finno-Ugric language family), it’s challenging to get the pronunciation right at times. Now that I have been here for almost two months, I can finally happily greet and and say sorry and be certain I got it right. I’ve noticed Hungarians are very polite and friendly, so I think it is of essence to learn the basic phrases here.
I chose Hungary for curiosity; I study Environmental Engineering and I wanted to see the situation and general atmosphere toward environmental protection in a big, central European country. My learning agreement, however, now consists of several different topics from welding to sociology – I was delighted to be able to choose from this abundance of variety! It was a surprise to me to find out that instead of few, there’s actually seven different campuses of my destination university Óbuda. This adds some commute time to my normal schedule, but all in all I now have lectures in only four different campuses and some of them are located quite near each other.
The education systems seems pretty familiar when one compares it to what we have back in Finland; grading is from 1-5 as is in my home University and e-materials are uploaded in a moodle environment. I have lectures every day, but still enough free time to enjoy the city and all of its’ perks.
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