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old life
For those of you that never made it to Budapest to visit me, here's where I lived (the long skinny one with the darker roof in the middle). My grocery store is the almost squarish white roof a little to the left of my apartment building.
And I worked here. Trefort is right in the middle. It's "L" shaped buildign with part of the roof brown and part red. It's right above the parking lot. Just below the parking lot you can see the big red roof and the little white roofs of the Kispest market.
Good place.
Posted by neal on Sep 21, 2005 at 09:20 PM | Comments (0)
new life
So I guess by now I should have mentioned that I'm officially a Seminarian.
It's a new world for me. Or at least feels like it. I remember when I graduated from Calvin and I was SOOOOO glad to be done. I swore I'd never go back to school and never take another class. Ironically, I've never really left school. I worked at Calvin for 3 years, then moved to Hungary and taught for 4 years. Now I'm at Gordon-Conwell. I also remember talking to my dad about his schooling (BA: San Diego State (4 yrs), MA: Bethel Seminary (another 4 yrs), PhD: University of Chicago (4 more yrs)) and thinking that's crazy. He was in school until he was 30! To make the irony even better, I'm starting school again only a month and a half after my 30th birthday.
Now here's the thing. I love it.
Really I do. It's great.
I'm glad I'm not in control of my life, because it's not been what I would have planned, but it's been fantastic, and I wouldn't trade any of it.
OK, now, back from my little tangent.
I'm at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, MA, USA now. Officially enrolled and taking classes toward a Master of Divinity. Right now I'm taking 4 classes: New Testament Survey, Church History to the Reformation, Spiritual Formation, and Greek I. I like all my classes. I have an unfathomable amount of work to do; but my only real irritation with that is that I can't spend more time with the material because I have to blaze through it so fast to get it all done. Seriously, this semester I have somewhere between 5000 and 6000 pages of reading to do plus a bunch of papers. It's a load. But it's a load of good stuff.
ooh, ooh, ooh, here's something else. Back to that whole 'plan' thing. Last year, even though I knew I was only staying in Hungary one more year, I found a private tutor and took Hungarian classes. Well, it turns out that (to my only slightly educated little mind) that Greek is freakishly like Hungarian! Not in alphabet or vocabulary (though the words for "hour" and "but" are exactly the same), but the grammar operates in a very similar way. See, that's cool. I couldn't have planned that.
Also, I live in a dorm. It's a cool dorm though. Originally this campus was an estate with a big mansion. Then the family that owned it gave it to the Catholic church and the Church build a monastery for young boys that wanted to enter priesthood. That folded and the Church gave it to the school in the 60s. Well, the estate had all the things that a good estate should have, including a carriage house and a servant's quarters. So that's where we live, in the servant's quarters. It's a beautiful old brick building with a quirky floor-plan, beautiful woodwork, and oodles character. There are only 19 men that live there, ranging in age from 22 to 45. It's weird having someone else sleeping in the same room as me, but mostly I like the community and camaraderie there.
I'd have pictures of all this up on the site to show you, but my camera is still slowly making its way back to me after a trip to the shop. So soon I can show you all of this.
And hopefully I can explore a bit of New England soon too. The country around here is beautiful. And today I discovered that if I stand in a certain spot on campus (the campus sits on the top of a hill), I can see the ocean. It's great.
Posted by neal on Sep 21, 2005 at 09:19 PM | Comments (3)
clean AND manly
After arriving at school last week, I was struck my a sudden, and rather belligerent, outbreak of acne. Seriously, I'm 30 now, this shouldn't still be a problem. Anyway, I wanted to do something about it. So I went to the store to peruse their selection of skin care products. I bought a tube of Nivea for men facial cleanser. I think it's funny. Really I bought it. The tube *and* the marketing. I'm sure it's the same as regular facial cleanser (read: for women) except with a manly scent. But still, I would have felt silly buying or using regular stuff. I needed that little "for men" tag to make me feel comfortable.
The Y in me is sometimes insecure.
On a further note, the stuff works great. My face has never felt so clean and refreshed. My complexion is positively glowing.
Posted by neal on Sep 12, 2005 at 11:36 AM | Comments (0)
illiterate or blind?
Yesterday I was driving form Huntington to Grand Rapids. The road (Highway 5) is an old highway, so it winds through many little towns along the way. One of these towns is Ligoneer Indiana. A nice little town with a thing about signs. They have some road construction there. I know because they told me 14 times. Seriously, in the span of one mile, there were 14 big orange "Road Construction Ahead" signs. 14!!
I did a little math. That's one sign every 377 feet. Driving at 35 mph, that's one sign every 7.3 seconds. But they weren't evenly spaced, so some were in little sign-clusters, only 10 or 20 feet apart. I'm not sure what was going on here. Is the Ligoneer Sign-Man very safety conscious? perhaps he just doesn't want anyone of his fellow townsfolk to be caught unaware of the road work. Did the road crew get sued because they only had 10 warning signs once and some motorist was caught unawares? Is the road crew staffed by bored high-schoolers acting on a dare? I don't get it.
The construction was 7 or 8 miles after the signs too.
Posted by neal on Sep 3, 2005 at 12:27 AM | Comments (0)