Graduation Ceremony 1

Heading off to school around 9 am on april 30. You see the bus about 75 yards away bending around the traffic circle, which has a fountain in the middle. Right in front of the bus stop is a poster for a circus that will be performing in town this weekend.

A narrow road just a block north of the school, on the way from the bus stop at Kossuth Ter, the plaza across from the main church, where the post office and various shops are located. The area is being renovated, several buildings are being gutted, having new roofs put on, are being expanded, and in general cleaned up quite a bit.

We are now inside the grounds of the Gimnazium, just outside the main door. The large tree on the right is a chestnut, with blossoms only partly formed.

The main door. I don't know who these girls are, presumably students who take German instead of English. They were posing , and I just took the opportunity to take a foto of the fotoshoot.

Graduating students getting ready for the big "promenade." Each is carrying an embroidered bag with souvenirs of the day. Traditionally the bags contain an image of the school, a bit of salt, a coin, and a hardtack biscuit.

Classroom decorations. Here is the doorway to Classroom 13A, and you can see some of the students in the last minutes before the Promenade begins.

Decorations for 13B and 12E. A and B and F classes spend an extra year at the Gimnazium, a kind of pre-Gymnazium in their first year (9). The AB students do intensive English or German, depending on what they have chosen, then they enter the regular curriculum. The F students come from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds, so they are given an extra year of review to make sure they will be up to speed when they continue.

Around 10 AM, just before the Promenade begins. As yet no outside guests. The Promenade is strictly within the confines of the Gimnazium. It is an internal thing, only for students and teachers. Guests will start to arrive around 11:30 and the field will soon be full of visitors.

This is the teachers' meeting room. Teachers who don't have homeroom responsibilities gather here for the Promenade. The graduates walk through and visit each homeroom, as well as the teachers' room. The whiteboard had a quotation from Pushkin (translated into Hungarian) and was decorayed with greenery and flowers.

Together with their homeroom teacher the members of each class walk slowly, right hand on the right shoulder of the classmate ahead of them. They sing as they go-apparently three or four songs that they repeat throughout the day. The Hungarian songs sounded vaguely like 19th century American folk ballads (like a slow gypsy flavord version of From This Valley They Say You Are Going); one class actually sang Gaudeamus Igitur. In the picture below we see the entrance of 13A into the teachers' room, they then walk around the big center table and exi into the hallway through he other door (visible in the picture just above).