1 week down, 9 to go

The Hungarians call themselves Magyars, you can read up on it in wicki if you like!

I felt a bit strange writing the title to this blog, it doesn't feel like I've been here for a week! Not that it feel like it's been less that a week, if anything it feels like more; there's been so much new stuff to take in that my brain's been knocked out of normal time perception!


The flight here was normal, the taxi took me to the apartment block at a stupidly high speed but it was quite fun.
The non-English speak security scared the crap out of me when he managed to come out with, 'You not have key?' but was seemed to understand when I said the company name. I get handed a key and showed the the elevator (which is next to the cats bed; I'll post a picture up soon).

So my flat actually looks like and Ikea show room. EVERYTHING is from Ikea; floors, doors, cupboards, bed, sofa, cups, glasses, plates, knives, forks, spoons, towels, plants, art. Even the crappy chairs that obviously used to have covers but now just have suspiciously stained foam on, all from Ikea. It's slightly creepy if I'm honest; I have the feeling a family pushing a trolley are going to come though the door at any minute....

But over the last week I've made it home; clothes all over the place and only half the washing up done, even though there's a dish washer. I even watered the plant. I'm calling him Tubby.

Budapest is HOT in the summer. Hot in the day is OK, I can just about deal with that, but it's the hot nights that are the killer. By Friday when I went out I was so friggin tired I couldn't stay out past 2, which for any Hungarian standard is just plain rubbish. They really do start to go out at 10 o'clock at night; they can because everything is open till some ridiculous hour. It's brilliant. Oh look it's 3 in the morning, what should I do? Go food shopping, get a take away, sit in a coffee shop and read? Any of these things!

So what have I actually done so far? Not a whole lot really. Haven't wondered over to the Buda side of the city yet, but I want to do that next week. It's taking me a while to just get used to being here and don't like going places where I might have to speak to the locals unless I have Hungarian in tow. Mainly because the normal, average Budapestian has as much like for the English as we do for fat Americans. Their view of us is the larger drinking, football crazed stag party that just going to shout a lot and annoy people. The places in the touristy center bit are fine, but slightly further out I'm almost embarrassed to be English.
Especially as there's another guy from the UK that's come to work in the same office in Budapest and he's in full blown motor bike, gym going, 90's dance music mixing mid life crisis. Take him anywhere and he turns in to what the Hungarians expect of the English.

Still have been out most nights to one place or another, some bars have been nicer than others but not of them have been bad. The best one so far has been what the Hungarians call a 'ruin' bar, which is just a building that wasn't being used, turned in to a bar. So there's no permanent looking fixtures on anything, but they've decorated extremely well, it felt like I was on a movie set. I'll take some pics next time I'm there, I was a little tipsy and in awe of the place last time to think about passing the joy on. :)

Any way, the whole point of me coming to Budapest was to work, yes? And I was pretty sure that the Budapest office was going to be different to the St.Albans, but as they are both younger teams, both in age and experience, there's the same vibe. There's the same problems too; a few of the experienced people (who are very important as there aren't many of them) have decided to leave. Trouble is, it seems to have sparked a bit of an exodus from both locations. At the moment we've lost about 1 person a week for 2 months. Which frankly sucks. And we haven't felt the effect of these people leaving yet; most of them are still on notice periods. So I have that to look forward to.
I am now the longest serving member of the team because all the other original starters, all 9 of them, have left over the last 2 and a half years. Lets see how long I feel like keeping that title for!

I'll leave it at that for now, I'll update more often and see if I can squeeze in some pictures next time!


Jim