Even after looking back on my experiences almost two months later it's hard for me to really define my trip to Hungary in one, good introductory sentence. There's no set point that I can easily pick up on, some experience to expand on that will truly bring the reader to my level from the moment I arrived to the moment I left. When the country is mentioned in my History class or Budapest comes up in an English class I am instantly in a moment. Sometimes it's the image of staring at the tall, yellow house with chipped paint decorating the siding that I called home for a month. Others, I see the face of a boy I met from Slovenia and I can smell the sweet scent of a Hungarian bakery drifting to my nose as we walk down a uneven road covered with bricks. And more often than anything else, I see flashes of everything as if my life were projected onto my eyelids, fast-forwarding through my summer.

I went into forts that hosted bells older than my country, I went on a biking trip with other exchange students, I traveled across one of the six or seven bridges that held the connection between Buda and Pest. I traveled the metro and felt hip and European calling it the metro instead of the subway. I realized that they had better McDonalds than we did and generally had more helpful people. I discovered that my accent was stronger than I would've ever enjoyed admitting. I found out the do's and don'ts of being a traveling American in Europe (a common mistake is that most tourists actually do yell things like "Do you speak AMERICAN?"). I traveled to Croatia and spent a week looking at the blue waters and playing guessing games with my host-sister, Laura, about where people were actually from. I took pictures that I thought of as artistic but were actually just shots of buildings taken at an off angle. I spent a week with all the other short-term exchange students (and three long-terms) in Hungary, getting to meet people from places that I studied in class, like Brazil, Italy, Norway and Sweden. I found out about countries I've never heard of and heard accents that I could never place. I shopped for family, I bought clothes for myself, I put together a scrapbook of all my knick-knacks that I collected (like bus passes, the plane tickets and some movie theatre stubs). I watched a German movie translated into Hungarian in a big theatre and had much more fun trying to figure out the plot than my friends did actually watching it. I felt like I was falling in love, I felt like I would do anything to get back home and feel the Florida heat, I felt waves of confidence and anger and homesickness. I felt ignorant to the world but I felt patriotic when the fireworks flashed over the river on the fourth of July. I felt really, truly alive.

When I left, it really felt like I was leaving halfway through a show. The good parts were just getting started and it felt rude and almost tasteless to get up and leave in the middle of it all. I wished and wished and wished on my plane ride back that I had convinced my parents to let me do the long-term exchange, anything to have let me stay for just a little while longer. After almost a day of travel, when I walked my first steps in Jacksonville for over a month, I felt an overwhelming surge of relief and belonging and exhaustion.

A good night's sleep and I was off again, visiting friends, getting ready for my senior year, trying desperately to entertain my host-sister and give her the things I got from her. We showed her beaches, we showed her amusement parks, we showed her the Duval County school system. We took her to malls, long car rides, state parks. We introduced her to someone new almost every day, she became friends with the German exchange student. She took over 800 pictures so I could only assume she had a good time. My school got in the way as I felt guilty for taking her to a place of learning while she was still on summer break. The four weeks that she spent here went by so quickly and I found myself wanting her to stay for the rest of the year, there was so much more to show her and so many holiday traditions she just didn't get to do. My family and I showed her as much as we possibly could, we tried to expose her to as much culture as there was in Jacksonville. We still e-mail each other weekly, but she's rarely online because of school now. I want to take my friends over to visit her and her family. I want her to come back. She loved my cat, Luna, and so my parents and I are tempting her with the feline. It's not like it'll be a hard thing to do. She says she wants to visit again and I truly hope she does.