Category: Budapest

In not so long the 23rd Plus Budapest Marathon will be arranged in Budapest again. The competitors can choose among a variety of distances: 42 km, 30 km, relay for 3 or for 5 runners, Minimarathon (7,5 km) and Fun Run (3,5km) or walking (3,5 km).

The marathon will start from Heroes Square, and the detailed schedule can be seen below:

9.20 and 9.30 – Fun Run (4K) starts (there are two starts, because of the huge number of runners)
10.00 – Marathon and Marathon Relay/Ekiden start
10.15 – Minimarathon start

Along the way there will be refreshment stations, street musicians and the marathon will color Budapest during the entire day.

For more information, check out its webpage.

Slowly, but moving upwards! Waking up this morning looking at the Page Rank tool in Mozilla I noticed that the white bar had become a little bit greener. It no longer had only three places filled, but now four, which means we have increased our Page Rank by one since the last Page Rank update in the end of July. That is great, and hopefully it will continue in that direction!

For those who do not understand what Page Rank is about, it is a ranking system Google uses to decide how important and good a page is. The higher the rank, the more litely it will show up on the top of the searches people do in the search engine.

Many people who have been looking for cheap theater and opera tickets in Budapest have been to the Erkel Theater. Located near the Keleti Pályaudvar the location is not the best, and the building in itself is in very bad condition. So many have probably thought afterwards that they would rather have used some more money, and gone to the State Opera instead. Anyway, good news are on the way!

The government has decided to destroy the Erkel Theater (Erkel Színház) for then to build up a brand new and modern theater instead. It is expected to be finished by the autumn in 2012, and the Opera is allowed to use this one for performances 180 days a year. Living for more than two years we all know that expected times for buildling or highways to be finished almost never succeed, so it will for sure be at least 2013 before it is finished, but it is anyway good news that they will build a new Erkel Theater.

If you can read hungarian, and want even more details about the Erkel Színház, you can read this article from Népszabadság.

Today is the Car Free Day 2008. This day is meant to encourage the citizens of Budapest to rather use public transportation, their feet or bicycle. Every September 22, people from around the world get together in the streets, intersections, and neighbourhood blocks to remind the world that we don’t have to accept our car-dominated society. So also in Budapest today.

In addition the Critical Mass Bicycle demonstration will be arranged in the city today. It will all start around 18:30 at the Heroes Square, and at 20:00 they will all meet at Moszkva Tér for a demonstration there. It is not one set track for all the bicyclists, but many will probably turn right on Oktogon and travel towards the Nyugati Pályaudvar, the Margaret Bridge and reach the Moszkva Tér from there. The other expected popular track will be through Deak Ferenc Ter, across the Chain Bridge and then from there reaching the Moszkva Tér.

Maybe someone will try to cross across the Elisabeth Bridge, and following the Attila Ut they will slowly reach the Moszkva Tér as well. No track has been set, so the bicyclists are free to go where they want to.

At 20:00 they will all gather at Moszkva Tér and lift their bicycles into the air, so if you are nearby bring a camera, make some nice pictures, send them to us, and tomorrow we will publish them at our webpage (off course crediting the pictures to you).

Today there will be several demonstrations arranged in the center of Budapest, in the area of the Parlament, the Chain Bridge and the Heroes Square. There will be one gipsy demonstration, a group of motorbikers, a group demonstrating for bringing the peace back into the streets of Budapest, and one group will demonstrate against the current political leaders in Hungary (which is leftsided, led by Ferenc Gyurcsány). Hopefully everything will happen peacefully, but if you are around in the area, it might be that you want to take a turn to skip the biggest demonstrations. The demonstrations will be going on from around 14:00 and for some hours from there.

Two years ago the famous “Gyurcsány Ferench”-speach (Öszödi Beszéd) was published, and it led to major demonstrations and trouble in Hungary. Now, two years later people have still not forgotten about it, and that also has influence on the fact that so many demonstrations will take place today. You can read more about those protests and demonstrations in Wikipedia.

As we have written in our article about fast food in Budapest there are lots of McDonalds restaurants in the city. Today while travelling with the metro in Budapest there was a public transportation map where you could see where all the McDonalds restaurants could be found. I though I would just count it, just for fun. As I finished counting I ended up with the nice number of 27 restaurants. Quite a lot, ay?

So, if you want safety and rather eat a tired Big Mac than some spicy and exciting Hungarian food, there are plenty of chances for you to bump into a McDonalds while you are in Budapest.

Surfing around this morning I found a very good and informative article about Art Nouveau in Budapest, also known as Jugendstil and Secession. This style that was very common at the start of the 20th century is giving Budapest part of the special look it has. When arriving from the airport most people notice the Museum of Applied Arts, by the Ferenc Körüt, especially because of the special roof.

We recommend all our readers to check out this informative article found on the Disappearing Budapest Blog.

Budapest is the city of festivals; Sziget Festival, Spring Festival, Autumn Festival and all kinds of small and big festivals. This autumn from October 10-19. you can be Budapests guests as the Budapest Autumn Festival will be arranged in the city. For a detailed program, go to the festivalpage.

Upcoming programs and concerts in Budapest

Below you will find the Budapest Autumn Festival press release:
If I add up the two figures in number seventeen, I get eight. But adding nine to eight will again make seventeen. How interesting! Just like the Budapest Autumn Festival. Staged for the seventeenth time this year, it will certainly be as interesting as ever.

Although prosperous firms and individuals in Hungary are still far from believing that contemporary art should be oversponsored, we have been having sponsors also this year, saving us from cultural shiver on those cold autumn days by supporting what is practically the most exciting contemporary all-out art festival in Budapest, the whole country, the whole

Black and white, yes and no, man and woman, outside and inside – gosh, how many times have we read these commonplaces in the descriptions of various projects, dance concepts and theatrical ventures! Have we also landed on this heap? No, my dear friends, we have not. All we want to do is to demonstrate how a colourful world is also a better world and how pale and grey would everythig be if the paint earmarked for culture was used, instead, to add even more colour to colour television programmes. Fortunately we can say we shall not fall into this trap. With culture playing an increasingly important role in people’s lives, politicians, too, will have to face the need to meet the requirements of their beloved voters. We shall wake up one day to find all news of catastrophes, backbiting and stock exchange gone from our dailies that will write only about theatre performances, concerts and exhibition openings. The multis will realize that they can sell their new air fresheners and conditioners only by advertising culture and will therefore not refrain from digging deep into their pockets and supporting the emergence and performance of the newest, most topical and most up-to-date works.

And the people. Those sweet people! They will no longer be of the view that whatever contains a thought is modern and decadent, therefore indigestable and dangerous. In fact, they will be dying to be able to pay many times the price of a brand name T-shirt for a ticket to a contemporary dance show. And then blood rushes to their faces, their colour rises ike in those old Chinese propaganda posters where sparkling sunshine shone through a rainbow, irradiating the colourful flowers and small animals of the meadows. And our old glory returns! (Or, what is more important, appears to return.)

Well, that’s what we wanted to bring to your attention. And of course point to those fantastic artists and exciting performances that make this year’s festival so colourful. These works and creators deal with the issues of the world without prevarication and colouring, their radicalism matching the black-and-white of Budapest Autumn Festival 2008.

Balázs Kovalik | artistic director

The MOL Jazz Festival is the most significant event in the Budapest jazz calendar. This year sees the sixth massive roundup in the Hungarian capital of some of Europe’s most interesting musicians. As always, the 9th District of Budapest famed for its lively and friendly sidewalk cafés plays host to the festival. The Big Tent raised among delightully dilapidated old riverside warehouses (Közraktár) and the jazz-boat anchored at the Nehru Embankment will serve as the main venues, although the opening and the final concerts will be staged at Budapest’s state-of-the-art Palace of Arts (MÜPA). However, for those who crave more music after the main events, they can gorge themselves on high quality jazz, free of charge, in the informal setting of the Ráday Street cafés (Fotocella; Jaffa; Paris, Texas; If, Fecske) as well as at the Pinceszínház (Cellar Theatre), the Sanyi és Aranka Theatre and at the Hotel Ibis.

The Festival naturally features the giants of Hungarian jazz, it stages unique productions that join gifted local musicians with foreign jazz stars and it also serves as a springboard for our incredibly talented youngsters. One of the declared aims of the MOL Jazz Festival Budapest is to put Hungarian jazz into a European context. It hopes to achieve this by the aforementioned international workshops and by acquainting domestic audiences with the varied and vibrant European jazz scene.
With the choice of venues widening year by year, one can enjoy practically the whole gamut of jazz during the festival, from traditional mainstream acts right through to modern experimental music. One of the new venues will be the MOL Jazz Lounge, a tent catering specifically for young audiences receptive to jazz. The Jazz Lounge will open in the morning but between 19:00 and 22:00 it will feature some of our most outstanding DJs.

The curtain-raiser to the festival will be a concert by the Modern Art Orchestra playing compositions of two highly original progressive musicians, Kristóf Bacsó and Szabolcs Oláh and featuring two outstanding soloists of the new generation, saxophonist Gábor Bolla and guitar-player Márton Fenyvesi. One of Europe’s most unique jazz legends, the French clarinetist Louis Sclavis will show yet another facet of his wide-ranging talents by presenting live the sound-track he composed for the silent movie, Dans la nuit.

The festival’s special workshops will bring you the great favourite of French jazz critics, vocalist Gabor Winand, the virtuoso Armenian-Hungarian accordionist David Yengibarjan, the progressive fusion guitarist, Tibor Eichinger, the unique guitar sound of Gábor Gadó and Indo-jazz violinist Zoltán Lantos’ Mirrorworld augmented by Norwegian guitar-player Eivind Aarset.

In the Big Tent and on the jazz-boat the festival’s tone will be set, as ever, by open minded, innovative European bands the most outstanding of which will be Dave Stapleton Quintet from Britain, Jazzkamikaze from Denmark, the Juhani Aaltonen Trio from Finland, the Heinz Sauer-Michael Wollny Duo from Germany and the Trio Grande from Belgium. The quartet led by Austrian sax-player Wolfgang Puschnig will be given extra flavour by the inventions of American bass-guitarist Jamaaladeen Tacuma. One of the highlights of the festival will be the appearance of the magnetic African-American drummer Rashied Ali, one-time sideman of Archie Shepp, Don Cherry and many others who will be fronting his own quintet.

There will be several concerts highlighting the best of our brilliant young players, such as by the Plastic Septet or by trumpeter Gábor Subicz, winner on his instrument of the audience prize at this year’s jazz talent contest organised by Hungarian Radio.

At last year’s festival the Viktor Tóth Quartet presented live and to standing ovation the material of their then brand new album that was voted “Jazz record of 2007” by the critics of Hungary’s most prestigious music magazine, Gramofon. The album Climbing with mountains went on to earn serious international plaudits. As part of this year’s festival, three consecutive evenings from 18th to 20th September the quartet including Viktor Tóth on saxophone, Hamid Drake on drums, Mátyás Szandai on bass and Ferenc Kovács on trumpet and violin will record their new album live at the Take Five jazz club.

For a detailed program, check out the homepage of the festival.