An Exchange Year in Hungary

The 4th year student of the Institute of Philology Ekaterina Morozova has spent one academic year at the Pecs University under the Stipendium Hungaricum exchange program.

 

Ekaterina shared her experience:

A year in Hungary as an exchange student has been an incredible experience for me. I majored in English and American Studies and could also choose elective courses. So alongside various courses in linguistics and literature, I have been studying, for instance, the Portuguese language, basics of Chinese tea ceremony, calligraphy, journalism, etc.

It was exciting to become a part of the new and unfamiliar education system: assess a course by “credits”, choose subjects myself, make up a schedule, take up elective courses. I was amazed by the content of the courses within my major, the list of studied authors and titles; I had an opportunity to attend special courses with a narrower focus (for example, in postcolonial literature). New authors and approaches to studying literature in the English language opened new opportunities in the field of literary studies.

The new experience was not limited to studies. In Hungary, I have tried my hand at journalism by joining the team working on the university magazine UnivPecs. Mostly due to the magazine, as well as to the fact that the English language has become an integral part of my life in Hungary, I have started writing in English while sharing my experience and talking about the life of international students in Hungary. My work in the magazine has also provided me with access to various events: musical festivals, book presentations, celebrations of the university and the city of Pecs.

In Hungary, thousands of kilometers away from home, I have managed to find a haven of Russian culture in the Russian Center in Pecs established with the support of the Russkiy Mir Foundation. At the center that has established ties with our university PetrSU I helped everyone interested in Russian culture, answered questions, assisted in the organization of events dedicated to my homeland, and reported at university seminars.

I had another opportunity to represent Russia in another project: 50 Delicacies on Earth. In the course of two months, the project team has selected people whose recipes of national dishes they liked best and announced a list of representatives of 50 countries, among which miraculously was my name. Then all 50 people took turns preparing traditional dishes of their countries together with chef from a Pecs restaurant and the team of organizers. I decided to cook Karelian kalitka and thus introduce our homeland. The entire team was blown away with the dish and our traditions. The result of the project is a book that has all recipes and tells about different places and their representatives. It also features our kalitka.

My experience went even beyond that. As I have made my mind that this year would be my year of discoveries I took a shot and applied to the festival of ice sculptures in Novosibirsk. So in January, I went to Siberia where for four days I have been carving a sculpture from snow. And in May I was invited to Portugal to a festival of sand sculptures.

 
In this year I have been to eight countries (Hungary, Slovenia, Austria, the Czech Republic, Romania, France, Portugal, and Switzerland) and met amazing people from even more countries, hitchhiked for the first time, tried my hand at creating a children book, read a plethora of new books and discovered previously unknown to me Hungary.