The Hungarian Forint is never standing still, and it can be quite hard to keep up to date with the value of the Hungarian Forint. Some years ago 1 Euro was 230 Forint, and then in 2009 1 Euro reached around 320 Forint. Currently 1 Euro gives you somewhere between 280 and 290 Forints, but this keeps changing all the time. Because of this we just added a currency converter to our page about the currency in Hungary, so if you would like to know how much the Hungarian Forint is currently worth, head towards our currency page!
Month: July 2010
Formula 1 in Budapest this weekend
The most exciting weekend of the year in Budapest is just around the corner. Michael Schumacher and his competetors will race the annual Formula 1 race at Hungaroring Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and thousands of tourists come to Budapest to check out this amazing event. Hotel prices go up with almost 20% for this weekend, so everyone does their best to get the most out of this extraordinary event.
The main races will be Saturday and Sunday at Hungaroring outside Budapest. For more information about the race, check out our Formula 1 in Budapest page. If you want to get to Hungaroring using public transportation, read more about “How to get to Hungaroring.”
Enjoy your weekend, and if you still have not booked your hotel, check out our Budapest hotel descriptions! If you want an airport transfer, or maybe a guided tour, hurry up and contact us today!
Inception in Budapest cinemas
Last Thursday was the premiere day for Christopher Nolans new film Inception in Budapest cinemas. In the main roles you find Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Berenger and Michael Caine.
I must admit that this was a film I did not really want to see, as the trailer did not really interest me. But, yesterday I went with my family to Palace Cinemas with my family to see Inception anyway. How come? As I checked out the information about the film at Internet Movie Database i noticed that it had a rating of 9,2/10 which is extremely high compared to most other films I’ve seen in cinema this year so far. And, normally IMDB does not lie!
Inception is a quite long film, lasting almost 2 1/2 hours… but I enjoyed the 2 1/2 hour I spent in the cinema very much. Inception will not be my new favorite film, but it is full of action, cool scenes, intelligence (which means that you need to use your brain and pay attention) and a tensity that makes the viewer curious about what will happen next throughout the entire film.
If you want to check it out you’d better reserve tickets beforehand, because Inception is filling the seats of almost every Budapest cinema in these days!
Inception trailer
Red Bull Air Race Budapest 2010 cancelled
A good news is though that the annual fireworks will be arranged as normal. A big group on Facebook wanted to cancel the fireworks in support of the floodsuffering people in Hungary (to use the money to help those instead). A company in Szombathely offered to arrange the fireworks for free, and due to this the people in Budapest will be able to see the annual fireworks in 2010 as well. See video from Fireworks in 2009!
Official press release concerning Red Bull Air Race 2010:
The Red Bull Air Race in Budapest has been cancelled this year due to lengthy delays in the permissions process, the organization announced with regret today. Interrupting a six-year tradition of racing in the Hungarian capital, the Red Bull Air Race World Champion will now be crowned after the final race of the 2010 season at EuroSpeedway in Lausitz, Germany on 7th & 8th August.
Budapest has been an annual fixture on the Red Bull Air Race World Championship calendar since 2004 with enormous crowds of more than 600,000 spectators watching the racing from the banks of the Danube River. This year’s race, which would have been the seventh annual race in Budapest, was set for 19th & 20th August.
Red Bull Air Race GmbH CEO Bernd Loidl expressed his disappointment over the Budapest cancellation, which comes just a week after a race cancellation in Portugal due to unexpected delays in reaching a revised host city agreement. But he said he hoped Budapest would be back on the calendar in 2011. Loidl also said the 2011 calendar will be announced after the final round in Germany next month – which will include a return to New York after the historic first race there in June.
“Having safely and successfully executed the Red Bull Air Race World Championship in Budapest for the past six years, it was a tough decision to make,” Loidl said. “Following so close to the cancellation of the Portugal race last week, we are obviously disappointed and every effort will be made to see a return to Budapest in 2011. Securing the future of the Red Bull Air Race World Championship is paramount and making tough decisions is part of that process. We look forward to announcing the 2011 calendar after the final round in Germany including a much anticipated return to New York in the United States.”
The battle for the 2010 Red Bull Air Race World Championship will remain intense at Lausitzring in Germany, where defending champion Paul Bonhomme is holding a five-point lead over 2008 champion Hannes Arch of Austria. Arch has won three of the last five races and is confident he can overtake Bonhomme down the home stretch of the 2010 season to take his second title. The Red Bull Air Race has been a FAI-recognised world championship since 2005.
Guided tour in the heat
It is always fun when days end up in a different way then originally planned. This day was somehow like that! Just checking our email at 8:15 this morning I recognized that someone sent an email at 7:09 telling that they will arrive with train from Vienna at 9:50, and they would like to have a Budapest introduction tour. They didn’t really expect an answer to their email that fast, but hoping for luck they sent their email, and by 8:30 a deal was made and at 9:50 a guide was waiting for them together with a private driver at the Keleti trainstation!
It was extremely hot outside today, and I saw a thermometer showing 41 Celsius in the sun. But, everyone enjoyed the trip and the guests were impressed with the fast answer and service!
Are you coming to Budapest as well? Maybe you are already here? Send us an email, and we will do our best to help you out as soon as possible!
Over the Counter: Art Hall
On the Heroes Square you can find two beautiful museums; the Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Hall. A new and interesting modern exhibition has recently been opened in the Art Hall, and it has such a cool name as: “Over the Counter: the Phenomena of Post-socialist Economy in Contemporary Art.”
Over the Counter: the Phenomena of Post-socialist Economy in Contemporary Art
Art Hall
June 18 – September 19
Press release:
The exhibition called Over the Counter has been inspired by the economic illusions, utopias, creativity and frustration that Central Europe has been home to recently, and ismade relevant by the global economic crisis which began in 2008, and which can be looked upon as a negative critique of the process of adopting the capitalist order. The title of the exhibition refers to different work progresses going on in the service sector, and beyond this to the position of artists in the production. Eitherwe take the „effective” evasion of certain rules, or the crossings of different economical processes, we find the product on the counter, and this is the very thing to which we can relate. The English version of the title stands for a quasi informal or directmarket that avoids stockmarket. Also it canmean non-prescriptionmedicine – in the case of the exhibition we would like to state the flexibility of economical processes and the existence of an out-of-control but operable mechanism. The exhibit offers an opportunity to look for artistic practices that thematize such social conditions that result from the economic changes of the past few decades, or bear testimony to outlooks that root in artistic attitudes towards these changes.
In 1989 the socialist countries entered what came to be called the transition period. Politically, itmeant the adoption of democratic institutions, while economically it was a transition from socialism to market economy, the institutions of a neoliberal capitalist system. Currently, the post-socialist countries are experiencing a double crisis: one the one hand, the transitionalmodel envisaged twenty years ago seems to be unsuccessful, and on the other, the region has still not reached the level of western modernity. The idea of communism can be considered a radical version ofmodernism,whichmay have failed but still presents a cultural and social challenge when it comes to reinterpreting, reforming or replacing the institutional and behavioural ideals it proposed. Art, a branch of the entertainment industry, is put into a difficult position by the current crisis as the new investment interests havemade it something of a luxury article.
The exhibition features artist, fenomenons, problems fromall over the region, from the Czech Republic to Armenia, fromLithuania to the former Yugoslavia, artists who redraw the political map of Eastern Europe: these are not the eastern outposts of the European Union, but a territory where survival and prosperity do not follow the westernmodels, but was predestinated to go on a different way.
A Collection Within the Collection: National Gallery
“A collection within the collection” is an interesting exhibition about prints, posters and drawings in the Hungarian National Gallery. More information can be found below if you read the press release.
A Collection Within the Collection
National Gallery
June 15, 2010 – February 13, 2011
Press release:
As for the number of items contained, the department of drawings and prints holds the largest collection in the Hungarian National Gallery. However, the significance of prints and drawings is less well known, as paper-based objects are very sensitive and cannot be included in the permanent exhibition. The array of cabinets with prints and drawings has, for five consecutive years now, represented an effort to change this, showing a constantly renewed selection to accompany the permanent exhibition of twentieth-century paintings and statues. Collections of posters in Budapest museums, including the Hungarian National Gallery, have recently started to come to the forefront. Being on the borderline between drawing and printing and held partly in the collection of drawings and partly in that of posters, poster and book designs continue to remain hidden treasures, a hidden ‘collection within the collection’, as it were. In 2010, two of our exhibitions will feature graphic design: illustrations will be on display at the show of Félicien Rops’ art to be opened in September, while an exhibition of modern Hungarian commercial posters dating from the inter-war period, currently housed in the National Széchényi Library, will be opened in October. The program of the year 2010 has provided the stimulus for us to compile the content of the graphic cabinets including graphic design (i.e. book and commercial design) works from the collection of drawings and prints in the Hungarian National Gallery.
Roger Waters Budapest 2011
If you would like to see Roger Waters as he perform live in Budapest Sportarena June 2011, you better grab hold of your tickets right away. June 22nd is the exact date , and if you want to see the former Pink Floyd member, this is your chance. Roger Waters was born in 1943.
Roger Waters Budapest 2011
Budapest Sportarena
June 22nd, 2011 – 19.30
Tickets: WorldTicketShop
A retrospective show: National Gallery
György Kovásznai, a retrospective show
National Gallery
June 4 – September 26
Press release:
Kovásznai’s resolute personality laden with a strong calling for the arts was soon to manifest when, at the age of fourteen he announced his family his intention to become a painter at all costs. “The curse-mannerism is something deeply foreign to art.” In retrospect, he thought much positively about the free school run by Piroska Szántó and Jenő Béres, considering their work as a true art pedagogical achievement. “Later on, throughout many years, I was in vain looking for the same charm in my other masters, the Hungarian art practice was characterised by some crossness, mordancy, savage self-destruction, grieving smothered in pipe-smoke.” Between 1950 and 1952, he spent two inspiring years eagerly preparing for the artistic path at the Art High School. The talented classmates are by now acknowledged Hungarian artists: Ilona Keserü, János Major, József Bartl.
“Amidst the most rigorous political surveillance thrived the most incredible artistic and pedagogical dilettantism.” – the artist recalls the times spent at the Art Academy (1952-1957).
During the Stalinist dictatorship, not only the Academy, but also the art scene in general, was expected to serve the prevalent propaganda art under the banner of socialist realism. This is how he reminisced about these experiences two decades later. “The masters enjoyed a total autocracy, although – with all due respect to the exceptions – they were unworthy of any professional title.”
In 1954, his constant confrontations lead him to go away and work in mines (more information about this in room No.2.) In May of 1955, he approached Aurél Bernáth to help him enter the third year of studies. “My practice, memories, and my unchanging determination call for this specific genre of expression.” At the end of his fourth year, shortly before graduation, in the summer of 1957, he was thrown out of school due to unsatisfactory marks.
Abba the Show Budapest 2011
Abba the Show is returning to Budapest again. The show is always a great success, and that is why they keep returning year after year to the capital of Hungary. As always they come in the start of the year, and in 2011 “Abba the Show” can be seen and enjoyed January 16th, 20.00 in Budapest Sportarena.
Abba the Show Budapest 2011
Budapest Sportarena
January 16, 2011 – 20.00
Tickets: WorldTicketShop
Budapest events
