Hungary: One Nation Under Water

Let’s say you have a people living in a landlocked nation. Not only is there no sea, but this country is surrounded by beautiful mountains.  These people’s ancestors happened to arrive and conquer this land on horseback.

And somehow these people also have developed an incredible love of water. It doesn’t make much sense, but that’s Hungary for you – a nation of water babies

In lieu of any coastline Hungary has hundreds of thermal springs, which have spas and bathhouse built over them. Mentioning the spa to a North American immediately conjures an image of a fancy-pantsy retreat in the country where moneyed folks enjoy their mud baths and massages. In Budapest, the baths are for everyone, from the working man right on up to royalty.

Did I mention they are in the city limits? Nowhere else in the world do you have not just one, but several baths within a city. There’s something for everyone. For the mud bath enthusiasts, you have the fancy pants Gellert Spa (I don’t know about mud bath availability though). You’re already familiar with the old Turkish baths in Rudas if you’ve seen the opening fight scene of the Schwarzenegger classic Red Heat. It was filmed there.

Look past the man pecks, and you see Rudas.

No man pecks here.

My first encounter with the baths was with a group of Hungarian friends at the Baroque outdoor wonder that is Szechenyi in the morning of New Year’s Eve.

It’s a tradition. You arrive in the morning, spend the day loosening up and use that relaxation to take a long nap before the parties begin. The fog was so thick that morning that you felt like you were all alone in an outdoor thermal pool filled with several hundred people. You could hear the fountain splashing and gurgling in the middle of the pool, but you didn’t know it was there until you walked right into its spray.

Kata and I try to get to Szechenyi every time she's in Budapest. In our opinion, it's the best bath in the city.

Hungary also has a large shallow summer-getaway lake. About a two-hour drive from Budapest, this lake is sort of like Canada’s Muskokas, if the Muskokas weren’t pockmarked with eyesore mansions and the calm wasn’t interrupted by jetskiers going back and forth.

On Balaton, motor traffic is limited to the ferries, allowing people to actually swim in the lake or take sailboats out. And the mansions? The communists turned them into hostels for vacationing state company workers (some of which are still used for that purpose).

The lake is shallow, no deeper than three or four meters, but it’s large enough that there are plenty of places to visit along its shore, each with its own character.

Last month for my birthday Kata and I went to Badascony, a hill formed by volcanic fissures. This left basalt columns on the hill and rich, volcanic soil below it for amazing wine growing. We spent an afternoon hiking up the hill. Exiting the park we came out onto a road lined with wine cellars and drank as we returned to our hotel to suit up and go for a swim in the lake.

The summer before, friends and I made it out to Siofok, which is Balaton’s beach resort town. It has a sandy beach and a lot of muscled dudes and bikini-clad ladies ambling along, trying to be seen.

Across the lake, Tihany is different still. It’s a hilled peninsula jutting into the Lake, almost cutting it in half. The hiking is ok, the view is incredible, and there are quiet, private beaches to be enjoyed – if you can sneak onto one.

Feet up in Siofok. Photo by Torma.

Hiking in Badacsony.

Our forbidden beach. Photo by Kata.

Somehow, this lake, the land’s springs, and this water baby love culminated into a fierce water sports competitive spirit. Hungary, per capita, has a dizzying amount of Olympians – many are divers, swimmers, and, most popularly, water polo players.

There’s a lot of history in water polo here, and I will not get into it here. For those unfamiliar with the sport, it does not involve riding horses in the water. Think of it as rugby in the water. It’s brutally violent, incredibly exhausting, but very entertaining for the rest of us watching.

In Hungary, water polo players are treated like hockey players in Canada. They are revered national heroes, endorsing all sorts of products and marrying women who Canadians would recognize as puck bunnies. The similarities are eerie, sometimes.

A Hungarian telcom set up a water polo pool with big screens in
a Budapest public square for Euro Water Polo Tournament

Needless to say, water polo is a big deal in Hungary. I caught the water polo bug during the recent European Championships, which were held here. I wasn’t at the point where I was running down the street with a Hungarian flag as a cape, but I was getting home to watch the games on TV. I was jubilant with every win for Hungary, and I was crushed when they were trounced in the finals by Serbia. Admittedly, it might not just be water polo I was enjoying; I could be turning into a Hungarian nationalist too.

How a landlocked country is filled with bath-going, water polo-loving people is still beyond me. Hungary can seem like a nation of peculiarities, and this is just of one of them – and it’s a fun one, if you ask me. So I’m just going with it.

Happy Birthday Hungary

Parliament is all decked out for St. Stephen's Day

What’s the summer without a few national holidays? Canada has a bunch: Canada Day, which celebrates the country’s independence; Victoria Day, which celebrates a queen who lived for a long time; and Civic Holiday, which is... for... something...

Hungary has only one summer holiday, St. Stephen’s Day, which celebrates Hungary’s first king and the formation of Hungary. They don’t move it around to a Monday or Friday to accommodate cottagers, so the day fell on a Wednesday this year.

He’s the patron saint of Hungary and the first king, so along with being a big deal it’s also a religious holiday. The basilica busts out his petrified hand and does a procession. Parliament opens its doors and lets everyone see the crown jewels, which I did. Of course, there are fireworks over the Danube, which a few of us went out and saw from one of the bridges spanning the river.

When the fireworks were over everyone got out of there quickly, because we all had to work the next day.

Forbidden photo: Under the dome, about to see the crown jewels.

Look very carefully, you can see the jewels.

The fireworks are over, and everyone is getting off the bridge.

A love letter to hardcore from Budapest

Bane in Budapest. There's nothing quite like it.
Photo by Arnold Torma

After a few months I moved to Toronto, I took my friend Dan to my first hardcore concert in the city. Raised Fist was in town and this was a big deal for me since they couldn’t get past the border for a Montreal show when I was living there.  I wasn’t going to miss this chance to these Swedes tear a place down in Canada, even if all my friends were seeing them in London and I was stuck in Toronto.

Midway through the set I turned to Dan and apologized. The band had played a few of their hits, and they were really giving it all, but the people in the half-filled venue were unmoved. They leaned, they talked and they drank their beers, ignoring the background music.

I wanted to tell Dan hardcore shows aren’t like this. I wanted to tell him about floor punching at friends’ shows and a lead singer who did flips off the wall of London’s Embassy Hotel. I wanted to tell him about getting knocked down by a windmilling fist in a mosh pit only to be quickly hoisted back up by everyone in the pit. I wanted to tell him that hardcore punk is not like this.

Getting in hardcore then was a matter of being around at the right time and place. For a few years London experienced an explosion of punk rock anger (there’s a lot of angst in London). Eventually it attracted everyone else and mutated into something more mainstream and less poignant. Nonetheless, as many bands died away, other band members started their own side projects, carrying the hardcore torch along, even if it was a smaller torch.

To be in that scene, in your teens and early 20s, had a profound impact on the music I was listening to. We’d go watch friends’ bands, which also opened up a world of bigger bands, some of which we saw see live and others we’d discover on a friend’s car stereo.

I’ve never grown out of loving that music. That love is so elemental, I can’t really explain why. You have to love it to know what I’m talking about. You play old albums and look forward to seeing those old bands and the newer (also younger) bands live.

As my London friends and I trickled up to Toronto, we got to know the bands in the area (Fucked Up, the Cursed, Haymaker, to name a few) and got to see the energy and devotion of the city’s scene. My initial dismay at Raised Fist soon evaporated. Before I left that city and its scene for Hungary, one of my concerns was missing out on live shows. There was no need for panic.

Budapest enjoys a devoted following for hardcore. I don’t know if it’s the anger and frustration floating below the pretty facade of the city (if so, Budapest has a lot in common with little, post-industrial London) or if it’s simply disaffection with the consumer culture /climb-the-corporate-ladder mentality of the big city (like Toronto), but they love hardcore and punk there..

This is fed by bands occasionally making stops here, and they are rewarded with incredible crowd enthusiasm. Last week, a few friends and I went to a hardcore festival to see, among others, Bane.

The band is a Budapest favourite. They’ve played here twice in the two years I’ve been here. They turned down the large stage and opted for the smaller one. That tight, sweaty little room exploded when they came on. I haven’t seen energy like that since the London hardcore days.

When we saw Sick of it All play an outdoor show in the rainstorm – we were soaked from hoodie to toe – a big crowd still showed up. Some were under umbrellas, others huddled along the edges, close to the covered bar, but most were in front of the stage with in the pissing rain.

For the last song, Us vs Them, the band invited the crowd onstage. Kata, who told me over and over again that this isn’t her kind of music was impressed. She had never seen a band do that.

As a side note, hardcore is usually something you keep discreet at the workplace. You listen to it with earphones and try not to wear objectionable t-shirts, like the Oxbaker one with the elephant stomping the guy's head. I work with two guys here who are also into the hardcore. We share music, go to shows, wear the t-shirts – this has never happened since I started working grown-up jobs in offices.

All of this is to say that there’s a genuine love in Budapest for an angry, niche genre of music. It's unexpected, but it is an immense relief for me. Expats seem to sacrifice a lot of their interests when they move somewhere, hardcore would have been a tough one for me to let go of.