✈️ Budapest: day 2
Hungarian is basically better German
Picture dump
Talking to people
After sorting out my emotional issues yesterday, I felt energized and decided to take a walk and find people to talk to.
Three rounds around the block later Szimpla Kert still seemed like the best hunting ground.
The two bouncers seemed like they had interesting stories to share, but…not with me.
We’re actually busy, go talk to people inside. There are a lot of people.
Aaah, rejection!
A testament to my mediocre skill level at reading body language 😄
Ultimately, I found Marcos from Argentina, who was alone at a table.
As part of my Hungarian practice, I started translating this article about the upcoming presidential elections in Argentina.
And turned out to be super relevant so Marcos and I hit it off and started talking politics and history within 5 minutes of getting to know each other.
Sweet!
For those of you who know Hungarian (or how to use Google Translate), said article was actually full of colorful expressions like:
faszszopó
bozontos hajú
láncfűrészt lóbáló
Basic needs…still not met
The first roll is the last one and you don’t know whether it’s enough.
Exciting times!
100% made me spend my lunch break on going to the supermarket again.
Wanting to make scrambled eggs, I realized that I didn’t buy oil and only had a regular stainless steel pan 😬
At least cheese consists mostly of fat, so I slowly melted the cheese first and everything turned out just fine in the end.
For now, I feel like I’m done “figuring things out” 💪
Free Sales Training
I thought I was good at approaching strangers, but apparently only in Tallinn :D
I managed to get another rejection from strangers today, but this time it was not misreading body language, but…a crappy sales pitch.
Definitely something to work on in the next couple of days.
Today’s lesson is that:
I’m just looking for people to talk to
is literally the worst value proposition you can think of.
Now that I tested the worst one and know that is actually the worst, I can use my brain and be a bit more creative with opening lines to get people to talk :)
Hungarian is better German
One of today’s highlights was meeting a former colleague of mine from my time at Toptal, Attila.
Toptal being a 100% remote company, we only briefly met in Greece over a year ago so this was a welcome reunion.
Additionally, I managed to get my 30 minutes of conversation in Hungarian in - one of the weekly goals.
The parallels between Hungarian and German are striking - there are so many shared ideas and expressions, that it is hard to overlook:
ki-záris literallyaus-schließen(come to think of it, that is also what Englishex-cludemeans 🤔)ki-kép-zésis the same idea as the GermanAus-bild-dungfel-adis Germanauf-geben- not only in the sense of giving up but also in the sense of sending a letter or package
And so many other examples that there is no point in listing them here.
Unlike German however, Hungarian is almost perfectly regular, logical, and has predictable pronunciation.
In the conversation with Attila it also became clear that Hungarian is actually a super useful language, for the same reason that Estonian is useful - it allows you to establish quality connections with people in a very short amount of time.
That’s how Attila and I started talking in the first place at Toptal and tomorrow I’m meeting a Hungarian who’s based in Tallinn. Again, we just connected through language and now we’re meeting up in Budapest 🚀