Nursery School in Budapest

Devin and her new friend Cash during a juice break in the schoolyard.

Today and yesterday, we spent the morning at a nursery school with Devin. It's a really beautiful building -- the Mosholu Montefiore staff would LOVE to have a facility like this! It's a 19th century building, probably the home of a wealthy family, with a walled in garden. Very tall ceilings, big windows, big rooms. The teachers and director have been lovely toward us and toward Devin, and are obviously very loving toward the children.

Devin is joining her new friend Cash in his class. There are two antechambers to their actual classroom -- one is a room to change out of coats and such, and to change your outdoor shoes for indoor shoes (keep the room clean since the kids play on the floor so much). Then there's a bathroom, then the classroom. It's quite large, has a couple of oriental rugs, and about 5 little tables with chairs for the kids. There's shelves of all sorts of toys -- blocks, stuffed animals, lego, books, trains, phones, etc. There's a kitchen area with pots and pans and "food." Someone also had created a "hair salon" -- there were hair dryers with the electrical parts removed, empty shampoo bottles, and a plastic trash bin tacked upside down to the wall at just the right height to be an old fashioned hair dryer. Dev and I had fun with that. In the backyard, which is enormous, there are maybe 20 tricycles, 3 or 4 strollers, a couple of slides, and other fun. It's quite a place.

The kids are adorable (of course, what kids their age aren't)? A few have walked up to me and tried to communicate with me. I learned how to say "I don't understand" and "what's your name?" Tonight I'm going to memorize, "How old are you?" and "Want to play?"

Although Hungarian is unlike any Romance language, it does not seem in and of itself a particularly hard language to learn. Unlike English, each letter can only make one sound. (Unfortunately for me, there are actually a lot more vowels, because a vowel with an accent, two accents, or a dot, or two dots over it is a different vowel -- so I think you can say Hungarian has 14 vowels). If you know the rules of pronunciation, you can pronounce any word (think how many different rules there are in English, and then exceptions to all of them). I'm trying to learn a little bit. We'll see how that goes.

In Hungarian, kids refer to adults as Nene (f) and Bacsi (m) -- so the kids call the teachers Katya-nene and such. I explained to Devin that it was similar (one of her favorite words) to the way she calls her teachers in the Bronx Miss Maria and Miss Alice, and that here they would be Maria-nene and Alice-nene. This made her smile.