Got a Case of the Hotel Blues

Cool museum complex. Not related to today.

Sziasztok! This is Aaron from room 453, delivering the FINAL student blogpost of St. Olaf Budapest Interim 2019. Thankfully I have word from Bruce that he will be writing the final entries, so I don't have the gruesome responsibility of wrapping everything up.

Today is a very special day for us because we're holed up in the hotel studying hard for the number theory final, which is tomorrow at 9:00 am! Stress levels were eased slightly when we learned that there won't be questions testing our Hungarian vocabulary (though Bruce, with his trademark deadpan wit, assured us that all the math questions would be written in Hungarian instead 😉). Nevertheless, the endless sea of review questions are keeping us plenty occupied--some of them forcing us to dig through our notes for theorems, others requiring a bit of creativity.

We're all so relaxed!

Some of us could not endure math-migranes forever, so we fled to the streets. Tor and some other people went to Central Market Hall for assorted snacks and stir-fry ingredients. I went to ALDI to grab from their huge selection of pastries that I've always been eyeing (I didn't need to be outside for long since I got my fix from going to the park and to an art exhibit yesterday). Brendan got KFC, but he's also studying abstract algebra in his free time (for Abstract II next spring), so he's definitely developed a tolerance for math. And Paul, in his all-consuming desire to be economical, didn't leave the hotel, instead warming up some frozen corn for lunch.

So yeah, not much action today. I know I said earlier that there are no pressure on me to wrap things up, but I still feel the desire to use this space to reflect a little on our whole Budapest adventure. Since this was my first time outside of the United States even, much less in Europe, being in Budapest was definitely a lot for me to take in. I loved the multi-era'd architecture, the cozy cobblestone streets, the beautiful flowing Danube River, and just the variety of sights, activities, and restaurants we could partake in (see: this blog). But it wasn't too overwhelming either; we had enough autonomy and breathing room to do what and as much as we wanted (a night in was never a bad thing!). While we certainly got a sense of Budapest's identity just by living there for a month, I greatly appreciate learning about the culture formally: the language itself, the monuments and neighborhoods, the turbulent history, the fraught politics (eerily similar to America's mess).

We've experienced quite a bit, but it's a little hard for me to point to one thing that sticks out to me (maybe because we've seen so much?). For me, it's more the sum of the experiences that affects me than any individual one--and a lot of it's subconscious even. It's weird, but I know that Budapest has made its mark on me. And of course, doing this trip with everyone in our little number theory class made it all the better.

Of course, this is just my experience. If any of the other students feel like I missed something, or if they just feel compelled to share their overall thoughts, feel free to drop a comment below!


With that, this is the students of Number Theory 2019, signing off!