A Day in the Life

Next week, it will be 5 months since I got on a plane with my little family and flew to a place I'd never been. I have a vivid memory of buckling my seat belt on the plane and thinking, "What in the world have we done?" At that moment, if I could have hit the rewind button, I probably would have. We were moving across the world to a place with a different language. A different culture. A different history.

Larry told me Budapest was beautiful. Repeatedly, people I encountered on the journey told me it was beautiful. I was ready for beautiful! We got off the plane on a cold day in Budapest. Someone drove us to our hotel. Nothing I saw was beautiful. I kept waiting for beautiful around every corner. But instead, all I saw was old, dirty, and ugly. I was scared to admit it, scared that I had put my hopes into a beautiful city and something had gone wrong! That was my first bit of culture shock. There would be much more to come!

Now, 5 months later, I can see the beauty here. It isn't Hawaii beautiful, but it is pretty nonetheless. We have been through the initial phases of culture shock - from feeling like we are on a vacation, to realizing this is our new home, to wishing this wasn't our new home, to now settling in and enjoying the experience. There are things I don't think I will ever get used to, but now we (usually) just laugh and say, this is Hungary.

My daily routine is now much the same as it was before - Mondays are for grocery shopping, Tuesdays are play group with Cade, Wednesdays are open, Thursdays are a mommy and me singing thing with Cade, Fridays are activities at Chelsea's school and Hungarian class. Grocery shopping and running errands are still challenging, but I am figuring it out and making progress. We finally decided on a church and are looking forward to getting more plugged in there. I have some friends and am so thankful for that! Thank you to all who have prayed for us. God has been faithful to answer those prayers and we look forward to what He has in store for us here.

In other news, my laptop has officially died. Sad. Thankfully we did a back up before it died, but our latest pics are all on it. I will post all of those once Larry does the recovery, etc.