So I haven’t posted for a few weeks and a lot is happening here in Budapest. I am starting to fill my schedule, which makes me happy because I feel that I am contributing more and building more relationships, but I also feel like I am having to start choosing where I should invest my time. There are so many opportunities and things to do around the city and so many people to meet. I am also back in language school now, which although it only meets for 3.5 hours a day, is a lot of work and often exhausting. I am super happy to be there though because my vocabulary is growing and I am starting to be able to string together a few awkward sentences!
A couple weeks ago I celebrated my 24th birthday here and my phenomenal roommates took me to the Budapest Zoo. It is supposed to be one of the oldest zoos in the world and it was delightful. Afterword we went out a cool Vietnamese restaurant, Funky Pho. I love international foods and it has been wonderful to find Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese and Turkish places to eat. It was a great birthday and certainly a memorable one. That same week a team from Chicago came for a few days to help with a fall camp for students who came to the summer camps this past summer and either committed their lives to Christ or are seeking. The camp went really well and we did end up carving pumpkins! The following weekend was the 1st of November, which is All Saint’s Day. A woman from English Club invited Robin and I to go with her to put flowers and candles on her relative’s graves. It was a special event and I feel very lucky that I was invited to partake.
Right now I think that both English Clubs are in a good place. I am busy starting to make plans for our Christmas celebrations and getting ideas for things I want to change when our next semester starts. The people who come to English Club really love it, but I want to do a better job advertising and make room for more community by hosting events outside of class. Other than that I in general just want to be more organized and do a better job with lesson planning.
One cool opportunity that I hope will work out, is a partnership with a local high school. Maybe 15 years ago the local government did not have funding to support all of the public schools and opened up the option for churches to “adopt” some schools. The churches are now somewhat involved in running those schools, but I am slightly confused to what extent as the government still has control over most of the curriculum and things like that. So although the school I want to partner with is a “Baptist” school, most of the teachers and students are not Christians. Currently there are efforts being made to reach the students with the gospel, but no one is reaching the parents or the teachers of these students. So our idea is to start a club similar to what I am doing here in Kelenfold for parents and teachers. In the long term, there is a vision to see a church plant happen from the school and I sit back and just say amazing. Before I can start an English club though, I need a couple of other native speakers to commit to coming and helping teach and a lot of planning to happen, so prayer for this in general would be great.
A prayer request that I mentioned in my last update was finding a church to call “home”. After checking out many different churches in Budapest I feel like I found one that I really like. People are friendly, the church is outward focused, it’s not too big, not too small and it’s all in Hungarian. I am so thankful for the friend that invited me to come (and has translated for me the past two weeks) and hope that I will connect there well. A big stressor for me in finding a good church was having somewhere to invite Hungarian friends too, and that’s already happening! This Sunday a girl I met at one of the concerts in the café is going to church with me! How neat. She is a Christian, but is searching for a good church.
So I guess that’s an update on life here. In silly news, I was able to experience a little part of a German tradition in Budapest this past weekend. It was St. Martin’s Day and my German friend invited me to go to the lantern parade and try (and mostly fail) to sing songs in German as we circled part of Castle Hill. After the parade was done we bough these goose shaped breads, because apparently goose is traditional for St. Martin’s Day, and they were delicious. I also bought a pair of boots semi cute semi practical so I am ready for snow to fly… Except it has been beautiful here, and Minnesota and Michigan are getting buried in white! I have to admit it does make me homesick to hear about all of the fluffy white stuff knowing that Tech is grooming with that much base and I probably wouldn’t even have to ski on rock skis! The enormity of the city, the lack of nature and the lack of snow so far have been the hardest things for me to cope with here.