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After a week as Kat’s house-guest, I finally have a room of my own! It’s in the heart of imperial Budapest, a block off of ornate Andrassy Ut and the Yellow Line buried below it. The stately 6th district. Two metro stops to the northeast? Heroes’ Square and the gateway to City Park. Two metro stops to the southwest? The eight-sided heart of pedestrian Budapest: Oktogon.

3 Szinyei Ut I.6

I’ll have my own little neighborhood stores and restaurants to patronize for the first time. The OSI offices are just four stops, a five minute commute on the first underground metro on continental Europe. A dark and soothing inner courtyard, ivy creeping up the far building under the shade of a sprawling tree that must have been planted as the building was built seventy or eighty years ago.

Eva was the connection. Dezso, a PhD-holding retired Colonel of the Hungarian army, had a room to let. His aunt, a nicely old lady, judging from the pictures of three generations of moustachioed Hungarians hanging on the wall, left last month, off to the nursing home. So I sleep now in a bed, crunchy with springs, that smells a little like old lady.

And down the hall? My new best friend Janos. He’s 40. A salt-and-peppered marketing manager of a local Metra store. Metro’s a magyarized Sam’s Club. It turns out that Janos and I are going to be talking mostly in German, as his English is more limited than his limited German. Luckily, conversational language is all we’ll likely be needing for the next month.

After June, I’m moving toward Nyugati Station. One of Noemi’s friends is renting an apartment to teacher Matt. It’ll help everyone out that I can stay there in July and August, and Matt doesn’t come back from his summer in America until three days after I leave. Moving won’t be hard, as I own three garbage bags full of things in this country, and it’ll be nicer to live by myself, not to belittle Janos’ company, of course.

First meal at the restaurant at the corner of Kodaly Korond? I was feeling daring in my first taste of my Magyar independence, I went with a milanoi dish I’d never heard of. I wasn’t impressed at all, but it was easier to choke down knowing that it was a part of the adventure of finding myself smack dab in the middle of a Hungarian neighborhood.

A scrawled message to Janos in the morning, auf Deutsch, of course, and it was off to the office then Lake Balaton!