Metric System

We are continuing our short series on differences in Hungarian and American culture that affect our work in Hungary.

Yesterday, a friend asked for the recipe for some cookies I gave her family.  She speaks English well enough to read it, but the measurements are different.  Most Hungarian recipes use teaspoons and tablespoons, but dry ingredients are usually measured in grams and wet ingredients in milliliters. I sent her the recipe anyway.  I'm sure she will figure it out.

Hungary is on the metric system and it affects our lives every day.  Temperatures are given in Celsius, gas and milk are bought by the liter, distances are in kilometers, and we buy meat and potatoes by the kilogram.  Now that we have been here a few years, we have pretty much figured out what is what, but if we need to tell someone in the US how far we travel to someplace, it takes a little math to convert kilometers to miles.  We are very thankful for the convertors on our phones and computers, too.  Telling someone the price of gasoline takes a little more work.  First we must convert forint to dollars and then liters to gallons. (Currently, gas is at $4.88 per gallon.)

Different sized office paper is used here in Hungary.  A-4 paper which is slightly longer and narrower than American letter-size paper is used for regular letters.  Everything we print here including INSTE books must be adjusted to the different-sized paper.  Many letters we receive, even official letters from government offices, are not folded into thirds as they are in the US, but into quarters. 

So, if we hesitate to answer your question about what the temperature is or how much a pound of hamburger costs here, it's because we're doing the math in our heads, not because we don't want to tell you!