Classes, Szeged and the Opera

Well, its been two weeks since my last update! A lot has happened in these past two weeks. I'll try to at least summarize what I have been up lately.

Last weekend we went to the town of Szeged. Szeged is a town in southern Hungary. The trip was organized by the BSM program, so they bought train tickets and reserved a hostel for us. The intention of the trip was to attend a math seminar at the University of Szeged.
As soon as we got off the train in Szeged we were met by a couple university students who led us to where the seminar was to take place. After the seminar they showed us to our hostel and got us checked in. Then it was up to us to explore. Szeged turned out to be a fairly small town with not too much in it. It did have a really cool cathedral with a clock that chimed every 15 minutes. There was also a really cool fountain in part of the city, as well as some cool looking building buildings and a nice city park. Since the city was not that big we ended up walking through the entire city that Friday night after the seminar.
Then the next morning we walked through the town again and got to see everything in daylight. We also got to walk into the cathedral. Then after lunch we walked down to the River Tisza which runs through the city. We went across the bridge and walked along the river side for a while. There was a trail through the woods that we walked on. Once we decided to turn around we found a path going away from the river that led out of the woods. It turns out the the area was only wooded on a small strip near the river. As soon as we left the woods we were able to looks around and see farmland and hills off in the distance. We could even make out building of what appeared to be a nearby town. It really felt like we were in the middle of nowhere. It was quite an amazing feeling. After that we hiked back, had dinner and took an evening train back to Budapest. It was very nice to see a part of Hungary that isn't the big bustling city of Budapest.

This last week was the final week for us to try out classes. This Thursday we had officially register for classes. This wasn't an easy choice because are so many really cool classes that I want to take, but I don't want to have too hard of a schedule that I can't handle. I finally settled on taking 3 math classes and auditing a fourth, as well as taking a Hungarian Language class. The math classes I will be taking this semester are: Intro to Number Theory, Complex Functions and Galois Theory, and auditing a course on Advanced Abstract Algebra. I'm pretty excited about these classes, it looks like I will learn a lot of really cool math these semester.

The other big event that has happened in the two weeks is that this past Wednesday night I went to go see the opera. We were able to get $2 student tickets, which was an amazing deal. It was really cool to see an opera in the Hungarian National Opera House here in Budapest. It was quite an elegant opera house. We saw The Marriage of Figaro which was really cool. It was a bit hard to follow everything that was going on. I couldn't really understand much of either the Italian songs or the Hungarian subtitles that appeared on a screen above the stage. It also didn't help that I could only see about half of the stage. Even so we got to see and hear a world class opera, which was quite a spectacular event.