Hello everyone,

I'm English and after living in Prague for a year I'm considering moving to Budapest in a few months (back in England now trying to make money...
you know how it is!) I have a couple of questions about living there, so if anyone can help it'd be great For example: Is it hard finding a job teaching English? What are the rents like (I've heard they're expensive)?
And is it easy finding a place to live (flat or sharing)? And, er, where would I look? I'm thinking of visiting for a few days first, to see what things're like...

I've been faffing around on the internet trying to find a site like this and then just stumble over it on wikipedia's entry on Budapest! Duh!

Okay, thanks in advance to anyone who can help

A big welcome from an ice cold South Africa!

I really envy you being able to move to Hungry!

Enjoy your stay there - the Magyar folks are really wonderful people!

Keep well!

And a big from Budapest too!

It shouldn't be too hard to find a job as an English teacher provided you're a qualified teacher. If you're not you're still likely to profit of being a native speaker but you probably won't earn a fortune.

Rental costs... depends... I have friends renting flats of about 60 m2 for ca. 60.000 Ft. Budapest has a decent public transport so you don't have to insist on living in the centre. But you're right, you should have a look around.

Wish you the best of luck,
Alice

Hi Alice,

Thanks for making me feel welcome When I was living in Prague I
always wanted to visit Budapest (and Vienna and Krakow...) but I was so busy working and couldn't get organized properly!

I don't have a TEFL, but I do have a university degree in English (literature, of course...) - I have worked for language schools, teaching business English and conversational English. I also did some proofreading
(new translation of Kafka's The Castle, which was a weird experience in his home town!) - still, it was fun.

I don't know Hungarian at all, I've heard it's even more difficult than Czech! Is that true??

D'you know a Hungarian writer called Antal Szerb? He wrote a wonderful novel called (in English) Journey by Moonlight.[i] I don't know much about the current Hungarian literary scene, but I'm interested to learn more.

Renting... 60,000 Forints is about £150 (sorry, still haven't adapted to the Euro yet) - that's pretty reasonable. I don't care that much about making
lots of money, enough to live on and enjoy myself is fine by me!

Anyway, thanks for letting me know, I'll check the Budapest Sun site you gave me too.

Finally: what is "Bye for now" in Hungarian?

Andreas

PS: Sorry, had a bit of a slip with the italics there...

Hi Andreas,

All the way from Africa... for free!

Your quote:
Finally: what is "Bye for now" in Hungarian?

It is "Szia"

Keep smiling!