Ballet and Street Food

Today was my first experience with ballet in central Europe! I went to a matinee at the Opera House to see the Hungarian National Ballet perform Troy Game and La Sylphide. There was also a big festival today on the same street as the Opera House!

The Opera House
The Operaház is gorgeous, and I was sitting in a box. In the theater at home, all the boxes are on the sides, so I think they don't tend to be terribly good seats, but the boxes here go all the way around the circle, and I was near the center.

The Opera House! The screen outside was for a festival going on today.

Inside the theater

Some of the boxes on the Dress Circle level

Non-Mathy Fun!

I've spent a lot of time in class over the first two weeks of school, but there's still been a lot going on outside of class! Here are some non-academic highlights from the past couple of weeks.

Welcome Party
At the end of the first day of classes, there was a BSM welcome party! Lots of the professors and almost all of the students came. This was when I met a lot of the people who had arrived at the end of the last week. I also talked to a couple of professors. The most important thing I had to do was meet with Miklos Abert, the Inquiry Based Spectral Theory professor, and the other students interested in taking the course in order to schedule it. (Scheduling that class is a problem we're still working on...) I also ate a lot of what I think are sajtos pogácsa, a cheesy bread puff.

Supper at Hannah's
Vivienne, a student from Texas whom I met at the welcome party, and I had supper at Hannah's one night last week. Our plans for who would bring what food didn't end up working super well for various reasons, so we had to throw together supper from what Grace had. The final result was pasta with Hungarian white peppers (which are fantastic), peas, spinach, and "pesto" (olive oil and basil), along with some really good garlic bread. It turned out pretty well! Cooking and talking with Vivienne and Hannah for a few hours was a lot of fun!

Evensong
Last weekend the Anglican-Lutheran Society had a conference at Lake Balaton, so the night before the conference started, a Budapest Lutheran church and the Anglican church I've been attending hosted an Evensong service. I'd never been to Evensong before, and I really enjoyed the service. It was almost entirely sung, mostly by the Gabrieli Choir, which specializes in Anglican sacred music. There were a couple of hymns as well, and while I didn't know either one, they were both very singable. One was very fitting for an evening prayer service, and the other was about unity, which made sense in the context of the conference.

Graphs, Open Sets, and Vector Spaces: The First Week of Class

This was my first week of classes at Budapest Semesters in Math!

The first three weeks are a shopping period, which means I could attend as many classes as I wanted in order to decide which four or five to take. Registration will happen during the third week. While math classes started this week, most of the humanities courses don't start until next week, so the past few days were all math for me. I attended seven classes this week: Spectral Theory, Extremal Combinatorics, Complex Analysis, Topology, Galois Theory, Functional Analysis, and Real Functions and Measures. Here are descriptions and my thoughts on each!

Last Week of Summer

Tomorrow is the first day of classes, and I'm very excited! This week, students who weren't here for the language course arrived, the language course ended, and in general things were pretty relaxed. Here are some highlights:

1. Potluck brunch with nine other BSMers at Hannah's apartment today. Hannah is a BSM student who has an apartment to herself about ten minutes from where I live, and she was at a summer program this year with one of my roommates, Sandrine. Everyone brought something, so we ended up with eggs, muffins, multiple kinds of pancakes, fruit salad, nutella, and some other snacks. I think we were all there for about three hours, and it was a lot of fun!

2. Dinner cruise on the Danube on Tuesday. BSM shares a building with McDaniel College, and their convocation was Tuesday and included this dinner cruise. BSMers were invited, and while the convocation was a little awkward, getting to go on the boat was really cool. The food was good, I got to meet a few of the people who hadn't come for the language school, and the views of both sides of the city were excellent. Here are some photos:

3. Supper on Friday night. The game theory professor had planned an event that would involve going to John von Neumann's birthplace and then going to a restaurant with traditional Hungarian food. We never did find the plaque about von Neumann, but we did talk about his work in several different fields. I really enjoyed the restaurant; the food was excellent, and I sat and talked with Hannah and Sandrine as well as Lilian, who had arrived that day. There were several others who had just arrived, so meeting them was exciting!

4. The schedule for the first few weeks came out on Friday! We had all had to fill out a pre-registration survey about which classes we were intending to take, and based on that BSM put together a schedule. We have a shopping period, so for the first three weeks we can take as many classes as we'd like, and then we'll register for classes during the third week. During this next week, I'll definitely be going to Inquiry Based Spectral Theory, Extremal Combinatorics, Galois Theory, Functional Analysis, and Complex Functions. I might shop one or two other classes, but I'm not sure. Humanities courses don't start this week, but once they do, I'm planning on taking Intermediate Hungarian Language and Hungarian Art & Culture.

Magyaróra! (Hungarian Language School)

Today was the last day of intensive Hungarian language school,. It was advertised as being 80 hours, but that seems to include a lot of the break time. I think we had more like 60 class hours.

There were about 40 BSM students who arrived early to take the language class, and they split us into three groups. I was in a class of 11 students, and over the course of three weeks we had three different teachers. The first week we had one teacher, who was fantastic. I thought class was a little slow, but it felt organized, and we did a variety of activities, learned a lot of songs, and spent time practicing pronunciation. The last two weeks of the class, we kept going back and forth somewhat unpredictably between two teachers who didn't seem to communicate with each other as much as would have been optimal, and the course didn't feel well-organized anymore.

The style of the course was pretty similar to that of the Azerbaijani courses I took last summer. The language school has its own textbook, and in Azerbaijan one of my teachers had written the text we used. The textbook was almost entirely in Hungarian; new vocab was mostly illustrated with pictures instead of translations. A lot of the exercises were drill-like, and later on in the course we spent a lot of time doing role-plays based off of learned dialogues. The biggest difference between this class and my Azerbaijani classes was that this wasn't an immersion experience at all. The teachers almost always spoke English to us.

For the last day, we didn't really have class. In the morning, we took a test and filled out feedback forms, and then each group wrote and practiced a play. We performed the plays for each other after lunch. All three groups chose to write plays based on the continuing story in our textbook, which was about an American student named Kevin, his Hungarian friend Peter, and Peter's sister Csilla. The story was told mostly through dialogues at the end of each unit, and we were always excited to read the next dialogue. The story was much better than similar ones in other textbooks I've used.

A Week and a Half in Budapest!

Sziasztok!

I've been in Budapest for about a week and a half now. Math classes don't start until September 8th, but I'm here early to take an intensive language course. About half of this semester's Budapest Semesters in Math students are already here, including both of my roommates. I live in District VII, so I'm within walking distance of most things in Pest in addition to being near a couple of metro stations and several bus and trolley lines.

St. Stephen's Day
August 20th was St. Stephen's Day, which is a national holiday. I went out for the afternoon with a group of BSMers. We ate street food (lángos and ice cream) near Deák Tér, then walked over to Parliament. We didn't go inside, but we watched the changing of the guard at the flag and the a short ceremony on the building steps. After going over to the Buda side, we walked a bit until we ended up at Matthias Church and the Fisherman's Bastion, where we watched part of another ceremony and listened to music. Then we went to Clark Adam Tér and listened to more music!

Parliament!

The Parliament decorated for St. Stephen's Day

Going back into Parliament after a ceremony.

Matthias Church by the castle in Buda.

Celebration outside Matthias Church

Concert in Clark Adam Ter

Food Adventures
I feel like I've been going to the store every other day! There are lots of small convenience-ish stores that sell fresh produce as well as markets and chain grocery stores, so I go to different places for different foods. The apartment came with an odd assortment of kitchen utensils, and using the oven takes a bit of guesswork, so cooking can be a bit of an experiment. So far I've made pesto chicken, lots of pasta, scrambled eggs, cinnamon toast, and pancakes.

The produce here is fantastic, and that also means there's good fruit juice and jam. So far I've had apricot, peach, and cherry-plum-apple juices and strawberry and apricot jams.

There are a lot of restaurants, especially bakeries and gyro stands, near the language school. My favorite lunch place so far is a sausage restaurant. The school is also next door to Fragola, one of many wonderful gelato places in Budapest.

Exploring Budapest
I've walked around Pest a lot, especially in Districts VII and V. I walk to language school most days, though there's a tram that would cut about ten minutes off the trip. I like seeing the city, and the weather has been good for walking.

The Anglican church I've attended for the past two Sundays is in District VII, so I can easily walk from my apartment.

I live near Városliget, or City Park. For the first few days that I was here, my grandsibb Marguerite was also here for Sziget Festival, so we met up a couple of times, and once we walked around the park. It's huge; we spent more than an hour making a circuit that only went around about half of the park. The zoo is also part of Városliget, and inside the zoo is Hungary's one roller coaster, Hullámvasút.

Hungary's one roller coaster is a 92-year-old woodie. It's lots of fun. I heard a little girl get off behind me and tell her parents, "Nagyon jol! Nagyon jol!" (Very good! Very good!), and I agree.

Last Sunday, I went on a free walking tour of Budapest that focused on Hungary under communism and what has and hasn't changed in the past 25 years. It was really interesting to think about the similarities and differences to Soviet and post-Soviet Azerbaijan.

Picture of everyone on the Communism Tour in front of the one remaining Soviet monument in the city center.
Photo by Free Walking Tours Budapest.

Language Class
I've only had six days of language class (about thirty hours in the classroom), but it feels like a lot more. Hungarian isn't related to any other language I've learned, but structurally it has a lot in common with Azerbaijani, which has been helpful in picking up grammar. I go back and forth between feeling like I can still barely communicate anything and being surprised at how many words I recognize when I walk around. At the zoo, I spent a lot of time looking at signs, and even though I couldn't read most of them, I could pick out a lot of words and reason out a few others, which was exciting!

Summer Research

This summer I've been in Singapore, doing chemical engineering research, and I've been enjoying it a lot!

 I'm working on clathrate hydrate research at the National University of Singapore. Clathrate or gas hydrates are crystalline solids formed from water and a gas. The water forms cages that enclose the gas molecules. Different guest gas molecules result in different hydrate structure, the most common of which are structure I (sI), structure II (sII), and structure H (sH) hydrates. For example, carbon dioxide generally forms structure I hydrates, which have six small dodecahedral cages and two large tetradodecahedral cages. Hydrate formation tends to occur at low temperatures and high pressures, the kinds of conditions that you would find in permafrost or subsea regions.

Why do we care about hydrates? The biggest reason is related to the oil and gas industry. The majority of the earth's methane is in the form of methane hydrates, and we'd like to extract it. We also need to be able to prevent the formation of natural gas hydrates in pipes.

The other main application, the one to which my work is more related, is gas separation and storage, particularly of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide emissions make up around 60% of greenhouse gas emissions, but if we could capture and sequester carbon dioxide, then it wouldn't be released into the atmosphere. One solution is hydrate based gas separation. Industrial applications generally involve a mixture of gases including carbon dioxide. If we're clever about the temperatures and pressures we use, we can form hydrates in a way that is very selective for carbon dioxide. For example, fuel gas is 60 percent carbon dioxide and 40 percent hydrogen, but we can form hydrates from fuel gas in which 80 or 90 percent of the guest gas molecules are carbon dioxide. If we do a couple of cycles of forming and dissociating the hydrates, we end up with a gas that is almost entirely carbon dioxide. The hydrogen can then be combusted.

The carbon dioxide can also be stored in hydrate form in the earth; if it's injected into parts of the earth's crust with the right conditions, then the carbon dioxide will form hydrates and not be released to the atmosphere. In fact, researchers have been doing experiments on methane/carbon dioxide hydrate exchange, working on how we could replace the methane in methane hydrates with carbon dioxide so that we can use the methane gas and store the carbon dioxide in hydrate form.

There are basically three general areas that you can study when thinking about gas hydrates: thermodynamics, kinetics, and morphology. They're all pretty closely linked, and I've had the opportunity to do at least a little bit of work on each while I've been in the lab.