I was going to write an entry about teaching and living in Budapest but honestly there’s not much to report. I really like where I’m working and of course it’s challenging and I’m still settling into life in Budapest but theres only so many times I can write about mispronouncing Sziastok before I start sounding like a broken record. For this post, I want to write about my first experience traveling out of Budapest. I decided to go to Vienna last weekend because 1). It’s a quick three hour train ride and 2). I wanted to see how traveling via train would be with Covid. It was extremely easy. Everyone wore a mask while on the train and I felt super safe. I was asked to show my vaccination card at a few different cafes in Vienna and when checking in to the hotel which I happily did.

The last time I was in Vienna I was 16 and maybe a bit too spoiled to really appreciate where I was. I was on a bus tour with other American students doing community service and learning about other cultures through a program called People to People. The only thing I remember about my last trip almost 15 years ago is that we rode bikes past a statue of Mozart and going to the Starbucks to get a frappucino meant I was at the peak of cosmopolitan living. 

With my return to Vienna I knew I wanted to take in the climate completely and make up for lost time. I have a really bad habit of impulsively booking trips and not taking into consideration that I should maybe check the city’s calendar before doing so. Like when I went to Dijon to do a wine tasting on a weekend that is marked by absolutely nothing open. Or when I booked a trip to Iceland the week that Iceland was playing in the World Cup. This trip was no exception. I decided to go to Vienna on the weekend of the Vienna marathon. This wasn’t really a problem except the majority of public transport was shut down. 

Vienna is massive. As a New Yorker, I am convinced I can walk everywhere but it quickly became obvious that in a standoff between me and the vienna public transport system, vienna public transport would win. 

I arrived in Vienna Saturday morning and walked 20 minutes from the bus station to my hotel to leave my stuff with the front desk and quickly headed out to get a coffee and some breakfast and by breakfast I mean a piece of cheesecake. I ate about half (I unfortunately was still getting over a tiny bit of a stomach bug undoubtedly caught from one of my kindergartners the weekend I went but I’ve never let the possibility of shitting myself stop me before). 

I set off from the coffee shop with a general direction in mind but no specific destination. Aimless wandering is sometimes my favorite part of exploring a city- following the winding  cobblestone streets and letting them spit me out somewhere completely unplanned is super freeing but at a certain point, I always start to crave a bit more guidance. I stopped for lunch at an outdoor cafe and made a plan for the afternoon. I was near Hofburg Palace- which was so massive I didn’t even realize how close I was. I was looking for one singular palace but Hofburg Palace is a small city in and of itself. You can’t tour the whole palace on one ticket- or honestly in one day so I ended up touring one part of the castle. I walked around and bought tickets for a musical performance that night. Then went to one of the castle’s greenhouses that had been transformed into a butterfly garden. I went back to the hotel to change and check into my room. I charged my phone for a bit then headed back out to dinner and the show. I stopped at a small pub and despite not feeling that hungry I got a wienerschnitzel and a gruner veltliner which was perfectly complemented by the lemon on the schnitzel. I was disappointed in myself that I couldn’t finish it but if turning 30 has taught me anything it’s that if you don’t have tums, don’t eat anything that has slight taste or spice. I’m old! 

Afterwards I headed to the performance which I was fully expecting to be a scam but tickets were $40 and it promised a nondescript hour and a half of dance opera and orchestra. As I walked up to the venue I exchanged nervous glances with a fellow English speaking girl who also had tickets. We had to enter through the lobby of a museum that seemed closed and take the elevator up to the final floor where we were let into a small room with about 30 to 40 other people sitting in folding chairs. I briefly thought I should probably text my parents cause I think I’m about to be trafficked but four musicians took the stage and for the next hour and a half I enjoyed one of the best curated musical shows I’ve ever seen. It was in German so I couldn’t understand a lot but it started when Mozart was 6 and they played small sections from well-known pieces all the way up to the 1910s with opera singers and ballet dancers accompanying in certain areas. 

Sunday morning I woke up practically vibrating. I had to check out, leave my stuff at the front desk, and rush to The Vienna Opera House where I had bought tickets for a ballet. Going to the ballet is one of my favorite things to do. Actually going to see any type of live theater is my favorite thing. Due to COVID I hadn’t been able to see live theater in a while but I was seeing a ballet at the Vienna Opera House and I was so excited. Unfortunately, it turns out I also have a bad habit of not being able to read German either. I booked a lecture about the ballet instead of a performance of the ballet. Suddenly the reason I only paid 9 euros became glaringly obvious. After about a half hour I decided this was a great opportunity to explore the Vienna Opera House. Which I did, until I got kicked out. I wandered through an antique market convincing myself I DID NOT need an antique compact and decided I would treat myself to lunch. Normally when I travel in Europe I pick one or 2 meals to treat myself and the rest of the meals consist of bread and fruit I take from the hotel or 2 euro croissants with sandwich meat purchased from a grocery store. 

The avenue leading up to the opera house is littered with hotels with room prices that made me dry-heave but they all had fancy restaurants with tables on the sidewalk. I chose the cafe imperial attached to the hotel imperial. I sat and watched the marathon runners pass as I enjoyed gazpacho and fresh tomato and mozzarella salad. It was the perfect reset I needed. 

I had planned to go to the Schonbrunn Palace but because of the lack of trams, the journey was going to take an hour so I decided to go to a closer palace- Belvedere. I’m so glad I did. It was actually this huge sprawling estate located right next to my hotel. When I first passed it, I thought it was just a fenced in park because the grounds were so massive. 

When I say everything in Vienna looks like a palace I think it’s because everything in Vienna is a palace? The Belvedere Palace consists of two buildings ( called Upper and Lower Belvedere) with a beautiful garden and maze that’s a little over half a mile long separating them. A ticket to freely wander both buildings as well as the multiple manicured gardens was 15 euros. The top two floors of the Upper palace are an art museum as well as a well-preserved Chandelier and room of marble. I walked through the entire Upper palace which took up way more time than I thought it would. I honestly could have walked around more. I really only explored about half of the grounds and didn’t even get to the lower palace but my feet were aching. I was wearing high heels from the opera still and needed to sit. I found a beer garden and sat down, pecking at some streusel before it was time to get my bag and head to the train station. 

I will absolutely go back to Vienna before my time here is through and hopefully I’ll actually see a performance at the opera house this time instead of a lecture where I have to nod thoughtfully to myself for a half hour pretending I know German.

Living in New York forced me to be ok with being alone. But it also taught me there’s a difference between being alone and feeling lonely. I used to think I couldn’t do anything by myself. I would look like a loser. I would get bored and stare at my phone all night. But then I realized I am actually great company. 

At the beginning of quarantine, I started keeping a journal. Some days the entry simply said “Woke Up. Made a smoothie. Still waiting”. Around the time I started applying to teach overseas I finished the journal. Filled it up completely. Some pages warped from tears. Some pages with only a few words mapping out a to do list for the day. For some reason I had delayed starting a new journal. Maybe because when I start journaling I can’t stop. I know I can’t just write for 15 minutes. I know it will turn into a cathartic hour of self realization and sometimes I just don’t have the energy to delve into my psyche for an hour. 

I go back and read the entries from time to time to remind myself that even though it doesn’t feel like I’m moving forward with my life, I am. August 18th, 2020 I wrote about feeling like I was standing on the edge of a swimming pool wanting to jump in but feeling an immense amount of uncertainty. I ended the entry saying I was going to start taking a TEFL course if anything just to propel me forward. I didn’t know if it was the right step but it was A step. Off the solid concrete and into the swimming pool. Now to sink or swim or just float. 

All of this to say – timing is weird. It’s so circular and we fail to see the repeating patterns often writing off so much as coincidence or chance. I have moments of clarity every now and then when I step back and look at the bigger picture. I always realize I’m where I need to be and everything I’ve done- even things I thought were mistakes at the time- brought me to where I am now. Despite this insight, I tend to judge myself based on other people’s timelines. Which on the surface I know is the opposite of useful but I can’t help it. It’s a knee jerk reaction to any announcement post I see on social media. I felt self-conscious, a bit, going to teach English overseas because that’s what you do when you’re young. In your early 20’s when you can use age and lack of responsibilities or experience as an excuse to drop everything and move overseas.

Around the time I was finalizing my applications, I met someone and we started dating and I really liked him. I still really like him! And we’re trying to make it work long distance.I’m here less than a year. He can visit. And why can’t I have my cake and eat it too? Why can’t I get to fulfill a dream of living abroad and also have this relationship that means alot to me. But of course its not that simple. 

I’m alone here. But I’m not lonely (yet). The first few days I couldn’t make myself go into any restaurants or cafes. I was worried I would open my mouth to try and order a coffee or a beer and a record would scratch and the restaurant would fall silent while I mumbled my order in English or tried to stumble through the little Hungarian I’ve learned. Everyone would look at me and think ‘what the he hell is she doing here’. But yesterday, after an outing to buy sheets and shampoo that gave me a confidence boost, I walked to a restaurant and awkwardly asked if I could sit ( for some reason my exact words  were “Hi .. um Szia! Allo! Can I sit here? I’m ordering. Beer and food! I’m hungry. I’m by myself. Just me!”)

I decided to try and ask for the check in Hungarian. Kerem a számlát! The waiter looked at me blankly. 

I tried again, speaking even slower this time. 

Finally he said “Can you just speak in English?”.

I did and once I was paid I asked him how to correctly pronounce what I was trying to say. 

“Don’t worry. No one will understand you trying to speak Hungarian here. Just speak English.”

Surprisingly this did not deter me. When I studied abroad in France I was met with the same attitude. I knew slightly more French then but the determination is the same. 10 years later I still have a very intermediate grasp of the French language so just you wait, Hungarian waiter. I’ll see you in 10 years and PROVE how much I’ve retained.

About 2 years ago, in the summer of 2019, I woke up one day and realized I was really fucking over living in this city. For 4 years I had woken up with the undeserved superiority of someone who left their small hometown and thought there was no greater place in the world. I mean everything I needed was at my fingertips. I could get food from a different country every night of the week. I had a cool job that allowed me to brush elbows with wealthy people from all walks of life. I even loved my apartment which was in my dream neighborhood. Nevermind that my credit card debt was slowly growing due to my spending habits. Nevermind that I felt like all the wealthy elite people I was throwing events for could see right through me and knew I would never be one of them. Nevermind the fact that I had to move into my dream apartment because I went through the worst friend break up I’d ever experienced and would continue to mourn for the next year.

None of the inconveniences of New York mattered to me. Until one day when they did. I moved to New York with $700 in my bank account and the sheer survival strategy of a cockroach. Survive. Don’t die. Pretty simple. I had accepted a job living in the dorms with some international students over the course of a language workshop they were to take in Midtown Manhattan. Housing for 6 weeks provided. I only ate with the students in the food court. On my 1 day off a week I took the J train to Bed Stuy to look at apartments as cheap as I could find them. By the end of the six weeks ( and a very well timed tax refund) I was able to sign a lease, buy a bed with a little left over to buy a real winter jacket. And so my life in New York began. 

The first six weeks I barely slept. What if I ran out of money and had to go crawling back to my parents who would have gleefully shouted I told you so. Why were apartments so expensive? Why was a coffee $8?! I was so terrified of failing I took on 3 separate jobs. I existed in survival mode for a while until one day a friend, a new friend, asked if I wanted to go get drinks. I was used to turning people down. I barely had enough money to buy groceries. I couldn’t afford anything more than a happy hour beer paid for in cash because it didn’t even meet the credit card minimum. But I looked at my bank account. Wait. I actually could allow myself to have some fun. 

New York was fun! And when it wasn’t- when the subway made you an hour late for work, when your grocery bag splits and you’re still 5 blocks from home, when you look at some strung out dude on the street wrong and he follows you home- well that was part of the charm! It hardened you. Gave you bragging rights. You take the bad with the good. As long as the good outweighs the bad it’s worth it. But something about waking up drenched in sweat because I hadn’t bought an AC unit yet at the beginning of the Summer of 2019 was my breaking point. I tried to tell myself it was simply a phase I needed to shake myself out of. I went to the Rockaways or Brighton almost every weekend to swim. I went upstate to hike. I put fun brunch bills on my credit card and surrounded myself with my friends constantly, never letting my mind rest for a minute so as not to think about how sad I was in this city. I did everything I knew would make me happy but when my weekend adventures were over and I knew it was time to get on the train or prepare for the week of meetings and happy hours and general New York City life, my heart would drop and I would feel a sense of dread. A sense of fight or flight. My own stubbornness always chose to fight. ‘You worked so hard to get here’ you’re not giving up now. But I finally had to ask myself what was I giving up? You’re unhappy! Who cares what you’re giving up! 

I won’t go into the absolute shitstorm of an emotional journey I went on during the pandemic. I will say that no one being able to relate to anyone else’s pain because we were all suffering in such unique ways was extremely isolating in and of itself . I isolated at my parents house for the first 3 months and quickly realized not using my brain for something was causing me to spiral so I signed up to take a TEFL ( Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course. That was in July 2020. Now a little over a year later I’m moving to Budapest to teach English. 

I think the reason I’m feeling extra sentimental about moving out of New York even though I’ve moved away from other cities before is I actually have a lot more to say goodbye to this time. 

I’m still finding that I’m holding on tightly- white knuckles tightly- to the life I built for myself in New York. But I know- I’ve known for a while- that it’s time to let go. And do something else. 

I have a tendency to do something whether it’s accept a job or move somewhere, build my life around that thing, then pivot and change who I am completely without properly acknowledging who I was in different stages of my life. And I was scared that that was what I would do again. I would feel so sad about leaving that I would just let go of everything and make a new version of me and make myself forget about all the good times here because I didn’t want to feel any sentimentality or nostalgia towards it. But with adulthood comes therapy. And with therapy comes growth. So I am choosing to document this change in my life and celebrate the milestones that I hit while in New York. I am choosing to celebrate the people I met and loved and the person who I became while living here. 

In an effort to combat homesickness and culture shock I’ve decided to write about my experiences. I hope whoever finds this will follow along with me. And I’ll be back. I mean… all my stuff is in storage so I’ll at least have to come back for that.