Festivals: Budapest's Favourite Pastime

I was just waiting for it to begin, full of anticipation, spare change in hand and a brand new pair of sneakers just waiting to be broken in. Then finally last weekend it started and I couldn’t have been more excited for the first festival of the summer. Budapest is a city that loves a festival like no other and due to it’s fondness of these happy and exciting events, they occur almost weekly and are pretty top drawer on the festival scale if you ask me.

Any small little holiday, event, food and drink, object ext that you could possibly throw a festival for, Budapest has done it. Wine festivals, Sausage festivals (take that literally, its wholesome family fun), Christmas festivals, music festivals, book festivals, you name it.

Although they are thrown for a variety of reasons, there are however a few key characteristics that you can always expect at every Budapest festival:
1) A LOT of really fatty meat and fried food (potatoes and onions in particular)
2) Roma families selling the crazy Gypsy candy that is incredibly delicious and made out of mostly natural ingredients (picture below)

3) Mostly families. Even if the event is alcohol centred and lasting into the wee hours of the night, children are always along.
4) Busking. Lot’s of good music and interesting characters to entertain you.
5) Random activities that have nothing to do with the topic of the festival and that you can’t quite understand (i.e. the motorcycle parade that occurred at the book festival today).

Maybe they can get a little repetitive and how many deep fried potato pancakes can one really eat? Regardless, they are always a great time and when you think about it a festival is basically just a huge public party that everyone is invited to.