It’s been some time since May passed and since I’ve written anything here, but things have been crazy this past month.
At the speed I am going, by the time I finish this post, June will be over already. Once again, I have a bunch of other unfinished posts waiting to be published, but I don’t want to leave May unreported.
It’s amazing we are almost halfway through the year, isn’t it? May has been the busiest month in my year so far, mostly in terms of my job. I’ve spent most of it so sleep-deprived it was hard to even think straight at times. I concentrated most of my energies on work – it did take a lot of it, and there were not much left for rest. I’ve even spent a week off, but unfortunately it still didn’t help with my sleep.
Besides all the spring showers, May brought quite a pleasant pre-summer weather in Hungary. I’ve actually been to quite a few events throughout the month, there were theatre, cultural events, meet-ups with friends, even a spa day, yet looking back it feels like it’s been all work recently, and everything else happened in another lifetime. I had to take my paid leaves left from last year at work, but since it was kind of mandatory, I didn’t have much freedom to choose dates at my convenience. I almost organized a last minute trip to Götheborg though, but I felt too exhausted for all the last minute planning of such a trip to a country I’ve never been to before. Maybe next time. I fitted in a quick trip to Vienna though on one of my days off, but it turned out to be sort of a fail. We planned it to be a shopping trip, but we accidentally went on a bank holiday due to the day of Ascension. (Note: many of these religious holidays are bank holidays in Austria, and I even knew that beforehand, but failed to check this time. Always check before travelling, people!) There was no shopping done, but Vienna is always pleasant to visit anyway.
I’ve read three books in May. A Hungarian classic was a book club pick, that I highly recommend, it’s available in English too. Then I finished the story of the Russian protest performance group Pussy Riot, that was on my shelf for almost two years, an embarrassingly long time for a borrowed book (sorry, Jutka! ☺). It is a very eye opening story, especially if you’re not familiar with the workings of the Russian state machinery. I guess I knew most of it, still I have lots of thoughts about this book, one of the unfinished posts is about those. My last read of May was a contemporary chick lit, that I finished in two days during my week off.
I listened to lots of podcasts, as usual. What I find interesting is that there are more and more Hungarian podcasts I enjoy, it seems like there are more of them than before. Back in the day, when I started listening to podcasts, I could only listen in English, now there’s plenty in Hungarian and every language you can think of. One podcast episode I highly recommend from May is this May 5 episode of Chutzpod! with Jeffrey Goldberg about his meeting with President Zelensky in Ukraine.
I even watched a few movies in May, mostly during my days off. I watched this spy movie based on a true story, and loved it. I watched this cult classic from the 80s and didn’t get half of it. I finally watched this Aaron Sorkin masterpiece that’s been on my list for ages, and it did not disappoint. And I watched this 1992 drama and I found it wierd (sooo 90s, but I remember the 90s, although I was mostly a child, I don’t remember it being this wierd, or was it?). I finally started watching season 2 of Bridgerton, but didn’t get further than the first episode (did I mention I was busy and/or exhausted?).
I started to build a French playlist on Spotify, but I didn’t get too far here either. Once I’ll have something to show there, I’ll share. In May I enjoyed listening to this one. I know it’s part Spanish, but somehow I like it better than the full French version. Any recommendations for my playlist to learn French with music? I enjoy any genres, really, the point is to learn useful French phrases.
Let’s get this out now, before anything happens. Since I started writing this post at the very beginning of June, I’ve had a few technical difficulties on the blog, including being locked out from the editing surface of my own site by my firewall for a few days. Now I’ll try to finish all the other posts too, and hope June will go more smoothly from now on.
