Friday 28 September 2012

Day one in the Debrecen house

So we arrived in Debrecen in the dead of night, everyone was asleep as we drove through the city to our accomodation, arriving to a locked front door and some confusion if we were really at the right place. We were let inside and into a courtyard with rooms surrounding which was pretty even in the dark. After a chat with the owner and finding little welcome packs in our respective rooms, we went  to sleep pretty much straight away, ready for the day ahead.
Waking up in our rooms, we were able to take in our surroundings a little more, I have the nicer room which has a double bed and exposed brick work, because I'm older, and shaunna's room is bright orange and she has a personal alarm clock in the form of people outside catching the bus to work and chatting fast in Hungarian. At least she will never be late for work!
We like our accomodation, it is a family run business and everyone we have met here has been warm and friendly, including the little dog Fidl.
Thankfully, we were being picked up and shown the way to work by the lovely Zofia and Suzannah, who gave us a little tour round the main points of Debrecen along the way. Big yellow church and old buildings, but more on this later, we had work to go to!
After going our seperate ways to our different workplaces, we met up later to discuss how we had got on. We were both very nervous about going to a new work place, especially speaking a different language and being clueless on what kind of things we would be doing! We did get some literature on the companies in our welcome pack, so we had something to go on which we wanted to build on throughout the day. We need not have worried however, because the people in our workplaces speak good English, and are all friendly and very smiley! Apparently, because we speak English as a first language we will come in useful for checking documents and reports and what not, which is what I did for the next few hours. On the other hand, Shaunna's boss decided that because of our late night, the fact it was Friday and even better with it being a sunny day, she met her work colleagues and was given the rest of the day off. To 'explore her surroundings'. Needless to say Shaunna now likes her boss and is not even slightly nervous about showing up on Monday morning.
Also , on my winning side was the fact that hungarian's finish at half 2 on a Friday. Result.
So a trip to tesco followed, with us being bewildered by the prices of everything. Added was the fact there are live fish swimming around in a tank. We can't imagine that they are like winning a goldfish at the fair. That would be one big plastic bag!
One of the main things noticed when shopping is how expensive everything is...280 florint for a bottle of coke?! But actually that's less than a pound. With 350 florint to the pound we realised we feel like we've won the Euro millions! Finally!
Upon this we decided to venture out and see how we could splash the cash on a nice meal...we ended up with 5 star quality food, including dessert, that was cheaper than Nando's. And had us talking in a Marks and Spencers advert voice. Another result!
So to round up our first day in Hungary, we've had brilliant food, become millionaire's and worked completed our first day at work, not bad for 24 hours!

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