Roobi - the virtual tuner

Robi has a hobby. It's called virtual tuning. I don't know much about cars (three pedals, steering wheel, gear lever... what else?... ah, rear-view mirror - for checking make-up ;)) but what he does with photos of cars is rather art. He is as much passionate about virtual tuning that I am about foreign languages ... but he's much more known in his hobby than I am in mine. :)
I'm a biased mother, of course, but he's really proved his talent by winning several awards on competitions. One of his designs was built in reality for the American SEMA show in 2007. It wasn't he, but the American car-tuner who won laurels for it, of course, but Robi was yet overjoyed. His dream had been to have his design built in reality.
We have always encouraged him in this activity, which he started four years ago and we are very proud of him as he had learnt everything by himself about how to do this, how to use Photoshop, how to find forums to make his works public ...etc.
What he really would like is to make a living from it in the future. Well, we'll see...
This year he's taking his school leaving exams in May and then he's going to major in industrial design at Technical University of Budapest from next September.
Those, who are intrested in more his works, can find them here:
http://roobi.deviantart.com/

Our last year - summary

I've decided to start this blog for my foreign friends and penpals who I can't (don't have time to) keep informed via e-mail. I also take the opportunity to "advertise" Hungary and encourage everyone to visit our country.
COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. I'd really like to know if anyone reads me here. :)

First, a short summary about our last year.
At the beginning of 2008 main attention (and stress) was on Zsolti, who was having his last year at elementary school and preparing to the entrance exam to secondary school. We got the results some time in April or so: he managed to get in a local school, the same that Robi attends. Zsolti goes to a bilingual class, which means that besides having eight English lessons a week, they learn three subjects (History, Physics and Geography) in English. It's hard but he seems to enjoy this new school much better than the previous one. He doesn't like learning too much though and tries to survive school with as little effort as possible.
Peti is still the most hard-working of them and favourite with teachers but he can be a real nuisance at home sometimes, getting on all of our's nerves. We hope he'll grow out of it.

In June we (only Feri and I) went to Malta to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. Don't start calculating my age! I was veryyyy young when we got married :)) Our holiday was lovely. We met my penpal Ann Marie, who was very kind and friendly and we had a good time together sitting in a café or walking and chatting. Malta is a unique place. I loved the towns, the sea, the smallness of the whole country and everyone speaking English! The only thing I missed was lush green vegetation. Returning home from Ferihegy airport, I enjoyed watching even weedy fields. That was when I realized how much I had missed green in Malta.

In August we went on our traditional 10-day summer holiday in "Orseg" (west part of Hungary, near Slovenian border) with many-many friend families. The children are growing so fast, that they form a much bigger crowd now than parents and they still enjoy going on holiday with us, which is not typical if we consider that most of them are in their mid- or late-teens. We went on bike trips, played games (for adults most popular is Scrabble) and the kids arranged funny competition for us (and this time they didn't complain that we were too lazy to arrange one for them)
Then we went to the sea in Croatia for some days with four other families. We stayed in apartments in Bibinje (near Zadar) It was great! I started most days jogging and swimming in the sea which was just some meters from the house. In the evenings we watched sunset from our balcony. Oh, fantastic! How much I would love to live by the sea for at least a short period in my life!

In September I passed my Italian exam with flying colours. I was so happy about my results that I decided to go on with improving my Italian. But I also started to learn French in October.

Our Christmas holiday was good and relaxing. On New Year's Eve we went out to a restaurant with friends and danced a lot. And now, it's 2009. This year will be Robi's. He's taking school leaving exams in May and if everything goes well, he'll start university in September.