Working Through Spaghetti-Squash Brain

What is it about moving that makes you feel so tired? Aside from all the physical labor involved in packing up house and relocating, what makes your brain feel  like an overcooked spaghetti squash? In part the mental fatigue of moving is due to our inability to do as much on “autopilot”.  When you move to a new place, you can’t drive home, pay a bill, or get groceries without thinking through every step.  In moving to a new country we've been dealing with these changes and more. Let’s take grocery shopping for instance.

In Cheyenne grocery shopping was as simple as driving to the grocery store once per week, buying my usual brands of the items on my list, waiting and paying at the checkout and pushing my cart full of bagged groceries back to my car, driving it home and stocking the fridge and cabinets.


In Budapest grocery shopping requires writing the meal plan based on what we know to be available and what size of pan will fit in our “fun size” oven. (Thank you 4 yr. old Annora for adding scale to our pictures.) Then we need to collect the grocery buggy and head to the bus stop.  After a 20 minute ride to the grocery store nearby we need to carefully walk up and down every aisle often checking each variety of an item and consulting a dictionary to make sure we are in fact buying wheat flour and not laundry starch.  When buying produce we must use a computerized program (in Hungarian) to print labels for each fruit or vegetable. At the Checkout we have to follow the rules regarding emptying the cart, count out Hungarian forints and quickly bag our own groceries in bags we brought from home.  Loaded grocery buggy in hand we take the bus home.  The whole trip takes about two hours. We also need to make three or more 30 minute trips through the open vegetable market during the week because our fridge is small and produce will spoil quickly if left out. 

Hopefully this example gives you an idea of the scope and magnitude of the challenge we face crossing cultures.  Each day challenges our assumptions about how life should work. Just as we have shared our journey up to this point – with all the ups and downs – we want to continue giving you an inside look at the cross-cultural life of ministry through our eyes. We are so glad we are here and love learning all the ins and outs of living in the country God has called us to– even if we have to bag our own groceries.

The Month in Review!
We have been in Hungary for 6 weeks.   The first week we spent overcoming jetlag and unpacking our trunks into our duplex. The second and third weeks were largely spent making careful purchases for our new home and learning how to navigate the public transportation system.  It was also the third week the kids started óvoda (like a Hungarian preschool) and we discovered tejföl does not mean yogurt like we thought! (It is sour cream and we ate it on our granola for a week thinking, “wow this yogurt tastes like sour cream!” If it looks like a duck… We blame it on culture shock.) During weeks four through six, we have battled the flu and have been attending language school. Week five we are all healthy and have finally figured out when to put out the recycling.  We will finish language school this week and are excited for Dave to begin at ICSB on August 14^th and students to arrive August 27^th.