I’ve spent the past week consuming rose-hip flavored cough drops, vanilla flavored cough syrup, and seltzer barf flavored “Aspirin Plus C”.

Yeah. The medicine tastes like seltzer barf. It tastes the way your barf tastes when you’ve been drinking seltzer water.

Trust me on this one.

I’m taking this really gross medicine to recover from an upper respiratory infection and bronchitis. This was a familiar situation for me because it used to occur every year right around October. I’d managed to skip out on it the past two years after significantly altering my diet and exercise — but sadly my sleep-deprived, alcohol-weakened, stress-exhausted body was no match for the plague this time.

Thanks to liberal doses of seltzer barf, I’m better now. Hey, if that’s what it takes to recover my health…


It’s now nearly the end of our second month in Remote Year. If Croatia, our first month, was a month of amped up energy, where we turned the social dial to eleven every night and spent the weekends driving (or boating) to every corner of the country, Hungary is the aftermath.

Month two is when sickness takes its toll. Month two is when personalities start to clash. Month two is when half of us realize that the other half of us are freakin’ weirdos and why are they in this group anyway?

Oh, and by the way, month two is yet another beautiful city and country filled with beautiful sights, unique experiences and a vibrant culture.

None of the things that make this trip great have gone away. But sometimes they do get overlooked while we deal with the nagging little things like laundry and scheduling conflicts and the daily grind.

There’s still a daily grind, and that’s a good thing. It’s a baseline to build from. And when I neglect it for too long — when I forego my healthy rituals and habits in favor of too many spur-of-the-moment activities — my health suffers.

It’s hard to be a part of the community when I’m not healthy. So I need to recover my routine.


There is a day that stands out in my memory of the previous week. It starts with an escalator into the underground metro system of Budapest and ends with Beauty and the Beast.

Budapest has several different metro lines covering both sides of the river. The red line is simple and functional. The blue line is ancient and loud. And the green line is modern. I hop on the green line with the idea that I’ll visit every station heading into the Buda side, west of the Danube, and explore a little of the surroundings at every stop. I visit some lovely parks, and a lot of what seems to be 80s-era communist housing construction.

I’m not exactly overwhelmed yet.

Having taken enough photos for the day, I join up with a small group of fellow Earharts and Zsofi, the Remote Year experience manager for Budapest, to watch the sunset from the Citadel atop Gellert hill. I’d found my way up Gellert hill at the very start of my stay in Budapest to watch the sunrise. It seems fitting to cap my last full weekend from the same vantage point with a sunset.

We sit on the grass on the hillside and talk about simple things; about the memories we made together during the previous month.

We go through a small ritual that gets easier over time: the group photo. Posing and smiling with the sunset behind me, I hope the picture turns out okay; but I’m starting to realize that there are many of these photos already and will be many more, and it’s not the perfect photos that mean the most. It’s the imperfect ones that happen while we’re more focused on each other.

Now it’s starting to hit me. We don’t have much time left here in Budapest.

We gambol down the hillside and saunter back across the river to a boat on the Pest side that is to take us on a leisurely 2-hour cruise with an open bar. The open bar consists of rows of small cups of bad wine, worse wine, awful wine, an orange concoction presumably containing wine or alcohol of some sort, and beer.

Upon boarding the boat, I promptly consume 2 beers, and then spend the rest of the evening floating among the wines trying to decide which is worst, and interspersing them with the orange concoction. I keep very careful track of how many drinks I’ve had.

After 1 hour, the total stands at 15 and my friends very wisely cut me off.

The rest of the cruise floats by in a haze of drunk dancing and unintelligible conversation. At some point I am brought water, and at a later point a bag to contain the things that I put in my stomach which my stomach no longer wants to contain.

This is the most drunk I’ve ever been.

My friends babysit me back to their apartment from the boat. I am barely functional. I manage to be complimentary and grateful, I think. I also manage to be sick in a few places that don’t bear remembering. I end up sprawled on their couch with Beauty and the Beast playing on the TV.

At this point I can confidently say I was overwhelmed.

The difference between normal life and Remote Year life gets sharper as time goes on. The #newnormal isn’t something I’m ready to come to grips with yet.

The story isn’t finished yet.

John Michael Eubank

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