Expectations  

Having expectations can be very tricky! At the end of the day, they often make you feel either disappointed or overwhelmed. What I certainly didn`t expect, when I was planning my trip to Hungary, was a sleepless night on a train (I shared the compartment with an American young man who happened to be an English teacher working in South Korea whose interesting stories filled the night).

And then, arriving at Budapest Keleti railway station at 5 a.m., I expected to find some exchange office open (where I could exchange euros to forints to get to the other station, Deli, by metro and catch the train to Balatonfured). Wrong expectations, again, so I spent two hours in company with many homeless people, Gipsies and a few Chinese (fluent in Hungarian). When I finally got to Deli, I realized that my train had just gone, so there were another three hour of waiting!

To shorten the story, I arrived to Balatonfured, a breath-taking tourist resort on the lake, on time and was welcome by our host, Edit Komlosi. As I was the official ELTA representative, Edit introduced me to the representatives of other partners` associations who were present (from Check Republic, Poland, Croatia and Slovenia). It didn`t take long to break the ice and start feeling comfortable. As much as I could imagine great time I would have at the conference – it surpassed my expectations!

This Hungarian was the first international conference I attended, so I expected it to be a formal gathering of, at least, eight hundred people, similar to ELTA`s. Instead, there were about two hundred friendly, relaxed, ready-to-chat attendees and plenty of spare time between sessions, during lunch break and in the evenings to make acquaintances with colleagues from 19 countries!

Further on, I thought plenary speakers were unapproachable or – even if you did talk to those distinguished professionals, it would be about methodology of language teaching or some such. Wrong expectation and perception, again! Mark Andrews, whose company I enjoyed the whole Saturday evening, has visited far more places in Serbia than I could have imagined and adores our country, tradition, literature, mentality, food,…; David A. Hill showed much wider repertoire of `juicy Serbian swears` than an ordinary Serbian uses; Mario Rinvolucri confessed he had been pleasantly surprised seeing a great number of young ELT attendees at ELTA conference; meeting Andrew Wright and his autistic daughter equals witnessing superb devotion and immense strength.

Being the only teacher from Serbia, implied having promotional activities, especially in a conversation I led on length with Grenville Yeo, executive director of SOL Centre from Devon. His Centre organizes both teacher development and student low-cost courses for young people from SE and Central Europe, but has neither been to Serbia nor even met anyone from our country! Now, you can imagine the responsibility I felt in order to leave a positive impression! Finally, after numerous presentations, talks and workshops linked to the Conference`s topic `Thinking outside the box`, raffle party and international folk dance evening, we all went to the boat floating on the lake Balaton. In a word – beautiful! We parted and scattered in different directions, I came back home exhausted, but enriched by fulfilling experience!