I like!!!

I got this ad in my mailbox. I'm not a big fan of advertising but I can appreciate creative ideas and this ad is one that demands attention.

The headline says: My husband is cheating on me. Will you help me get even with him?

The story is the following: the woman's husband is a mathematician and got a scholarship to Australia. The woman couldn't accompany him because he said that it would be too expensive. Watching the news on television one evening, she saw her husband embracing another woman in the background. Her plan is to sell everything he has at home on the Vatera site (~Marktplaats.nl, eBay). By adding her on facebook, Twitter or iwiw (the Hungarian social networking site), you can follow her auctions and make bids on her husband's stuff.

I added her on facebook :) My compliments to the advertising department of the site.

Thesis time... again

I met some nice people at the "mafi" meeting two weeks ago and luckily, they don't even live too far from here. One of them also goes to the VU - he's a PhD student, so maybe we could substitute "goes" to "teaches" - and I dropped by his office last week with a bag of Túró Rudis. I had decided that I was going to live without sweets and carbs for some time and see whether it helps my eczema. Anyway, I thought that a Hungarian would certainly appreciate the chocolate covered cottege cheese bars more than any of the Dutch would, and so I got the pack out of the fridge, biked to uni and looked for his office. I joined him for a smoke, gave him the Túró Rudis, which he was seemingly happy about and he asked about my thesis for Veszprém.

Which was the moment I realized that I most probably wouldn't be able to finish my thesis before January.

I kept on contemplating about how I should go about this whole thing. I'm in a full time master's program here and I should write my thesis for there. I'll have two weeks at home really really soon (oh, yes!) but the reason I have those two weeks is because I need to write a ~ 5000 word paper for my course. Two weeks are more than enough for that, but squeezing in some interviews for my thesis AND write a paper AND see my boyfriend, my friends and family seem too ambitious to me.

I could get a chunk of the work done in November - I could maybe even set up some Skype interviews - but that's already the time I should be planning and reading for my fieldwork research, i.e. my thesis for the VU. I'm supposed to defend my thesis around 20 January, but I have my Culture Change and Intervention exam here on the 7th, the preparation for which will take up most of my Christmas break. This pretty much means that I should be done with my thesis before Christmas, which leaves me 2 months to write a thesis from scratch. Can we do that? "Yes, we can," I'm tempted to say, but then I'm reminded Robert Dunn's words: "After all, you realized you were not superhuman?"

I'm trying to set realistic goals, and for now that means an introduction done before tomorrow (because tomorrow I should be reading a book for my course) and a whole chapter on the UWC movement before the end of this week. I don't think that a whole thesis before Christmas is too realistic, but I've seen myself do insane things in the past. The alternative is defending my thesis and doing the state exams during the summer, which would not be the end of the world, but would mean that I would have to work on two theses at the same time. I don't see that as presenting an ideal situation either. However, it would give me more time and I really think that this thesis deserves to be well written, at least in order to help EVIME with its selection process in the future.

We'll see how it works out.

Home, sweet home!

"Home" is a word that I find quite confusing. For years, it had meant the place where I had lived with my mother and father, then my grandparents' flat on the first floor of a concrete building in the outskirts of Budapest, then the old flat in Kőbánya with my mother and Béla bácsi, and then, for a really long time, the larger and much more comfortable flat in Zugló. For two whole years, it was a room in Sunley that I shared with 3 other girls; and the grounds of the castle, the seafront of the Bristol channel and the YB room... When living in Wales, I'd say I'd go "home" for Christmas, and approaching the end of the Christmas holidays, I'd say I'd go "home" - back to Wales. For a while I tried experimenting with "itthon" and "otthon", two variations of the word home in Hungarian, stemming from "here" and "there", but I failed in any systematic use of these. Utrecht was no different. I went home for breaks and I went home to Utrecht.

"I'm going to spend 4 days at home" I thought last week, packing a small hand luggage for the journey to Budapest. I figured that right now, nothing could feel more homely than Jani expecting me with túrós rétes ready on the table, a bottle of wine and the prospect of sleeping right next to him. I fulfilled my obligations in Veszprém and the weekend was completely ours. I'm going to spare you a cheesy description of sitting by the fire, watching the stars move, walking in the forest etc. and I'll restrict myself to saying that we had an absolutely lovely time together. I probably ate more than I would eat throughout a whole week, but that's a bearable cost for a great couple of days.

Yesterday evening I was surprised when I heard myself saying that I was going to "go home" the next day. Yet another "home" in the list of homes, even though I had no intention to purposefully label it as such. I did make an effort to make it feel like home - with the plants, the extensive kitchen inventory and the bike, just to name a few items - but I didn't think it would be so easy to trick my brain. So, I'm back from Budapest, apparently at home, staring out the window and trying to see further than what the rain actually allows, thinking that I should have packed some sunshine to bring from home. I have some roasted chestnuts from yesterday though - those will have to suffice.