My New Outfit When I Became a Forester
Areefa Zia Hanan — INA AFS to HUN YP 23/24
The most beautiful parliament building in the world, a lot of beautiful lakes, and a forest for nature lovers. Guess what country it is? Yes, Hungary. A country that has been filling my days for more than three months. The first time I heard about Hungary, I only knew about their amazing parliament building, but nowadays I have explored quite a lot about Hungary.
Gulyas and all types of food from peppers become my favorite here. I visit Lake Balaton, tour Budapest, and another city too, and go to the historical museums. But it is more than that, I want to share about my school, and my daily life as an exchange student.
When I started school I was very excited because unlike in Indonesia we have school uniforms, here we can wear clothes whatever we want, so I try to mix and match my outfit every day. But in reality, I’m in technical school and it is hard to mix and match my feminine and bright outfit. Almost all my friends always wear clothes with dark colors, this makes them very quick to find me in the crowd while only searching for a short hijabi girl with bright clothes.
My technical school now is forestry school. There is no doubt that there are more male students, doing a lot of physical activities, and going to the forest. Mostly in another school, they had sports class three times a week, but my school has four times a week plus one day full in the forest, and I have swimming lessons and need to go about 2,5 km from the school. So I say that I do sports every day. And my school has two buildings with a distance of 750 meters. The moving class system has become an additional exercise for me. The first month was very hard to adapt to their fast tempo. But as time passes I feel more comfortable and fit.
It was with so many activities that I realized why my friends always wore dark clothes. We had a lot of outdoor activities so the possibility of dirty clothes was very high. In particular, our school’s main activities are forest learning and animal classes. Every Thursday my class will go to the forest accompanied by two teachers for a minimum of five hours. We had to pick and observe each leaf so that during the exam our teacher would ask how much we had learned so far. We don’t just enter the forest on a footpath, we go deep without a road, the grass and fallen tree trunks make it a challenge to walk, we also have to be careful, sometimes there are holes covered in leaves.
At the end of the semester, my school is hunting in the forest. Catched deer, roe, wild pig, and fox. So, most clubs in my school are sports clubs, shooting clubs, and archery clubs. All these things were not what I expected before, I did not believe in doing a lot of difficult activities before. But now that I did it, I had a lot of new experiences.
I meet a lot of new people in a new environment, eat new types of foods, travel by public transportation every day, and learn and speak a new language. I’m very thankful that people around me are very supportive of me.
I know everything won’t always go smoothly, but this isn’t even half of my exchange journey. I want to try and learn something new that is fun and challenging. I really can’t wait for the next roller coaster journey, I will continue to look forward to it.
