Smiling at Strangers

Job: Gone. Relationship: Flailing. Passport ... Check. Silicon Valley crime reporter Catherine Giotto is perfectly content chasing cop cars, scooping the competition and living life tethered to her pager and police scanner. Then the dotcom bust hits her newsroom hard, and everything familiar is shattered. Escape beckons in the form of an apartment offered by a friend - an apartment in Budapest, of all places. Overseas, Catherine finds herself lost in a...
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Job: Gone. Relationship: Flailing. Passport ... Check.

Silicon Valley crime reporter Catherine Giotto is perfectly content chasing cop cars, scooping the competition and living life tethered to her pager and police scanner. Then the dotcom bust hits her newsroom hard, and everything familiar is shattered. Escape beckons in the form of an apartment offered by a friend - an apartment in Budapest, of all places.

Overseas, Catherine finds herself lost in a country where people put their last names first and say "hallo" for "goodbye." As she struggles to find work in the Hungarian capital, she slowly starts carving out a new kind of life. One where she takes time to marvel at the first snow, learns to cook mushroom paprikás and begins having a social life (with Johnny Cash fans at the local pub). And what is with that trilingual IT guy who keeps showing up everywhere?

But in a place where Catherine can barely count to three in the local language, let alone conduct a news interview, she'll have to make sense of Hungary - and break a story big enough to get her a job - pretty darn soon. Or she's going to end up back home and broke, and even more defeated than before.

-- Join and interact with Catherine on Twitter --
"All cops reporters hear voices. It's OK. It's just the scanner." -Catherine Giotto, @reporter1999 on Twitter