Becoming a Millionaire

You would think scoring a 98 out of 100 on my Hungarian final exam would be the highlight of my week. Don't let me fail to mention that carrying on a dialogue in class and actually having a real conversation in a restaurant in Budapest are two completely separate issues, of course.

Or perhaps at the top of my list would be going to the famous thermal baths at Szechenyi, cited by the Lonely Planet as the largest medicinal bath extant in Europe (my impressions: the buildings which house the baths are extremely old, and by that I mean that they are decaying).

I also got internet in my room this week- definitely a close runner-up to our winner. In order for my host dad to get up early in the morning, he goes to bed between 8 and 9pm. The internet is in his room... so... after 8 or so I was being cut off each night. You can imagine how disturbing this was to me :) No... but in all seriousness, with school starting just around the corner and lots of papers and whatnot to be written, I needed to get the internet in my room so I could get late-night work done. Very happy.

But no, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Drum-roll please.... the highlight of my week was... BECOMING A MILLIONAIRE! Yes, that is correct. My Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship is dispersed in two payments. Calm yourself down, my scholarship is NOT worth a million dollars. Keep reading! Miraculously, when I arrived in Budapest in August my host counselor had my first payment waiting for me, in the form of a check from the Rotary office in Zurich. Wonderful... except that no bank in this ENTIRE CITY (!) would cash it. Apparently checks are like... no good in Hungary. So I had to send the check back and have Rotary wire the money. I withdrew money from my U.S. bank account when I first arrived, in order to pay for my language school. I was hit with a hefty 10 USD ATM fee (!)- so I decided NOT to do that again and just wait for the wire. So for two weeks I lived on a small loan from my host parents. As of Friday, I was down to my last 1800 forints (about 9 U.S. dollars!). Trust me, desperate times. Anyway, so the point of this story is that the wire finally came through and as of this afternoon, my bank account showed a balance of more than 1,000,000 forints... which officially makes me a millionaire.