Music and Art -- Hungarian Style

We visited Vorosmarty Square on Easter Sunday, a week ago. It's a lovely outdoor market in snazzy downtown Pest with wooden stalls that sell Hungarian food and quality crafts. Very little schlock to be found, though you have to watch the prices -- I somehow spent about $10 for a very little bit of dried apricots and pineapple. And our Hungarian lunch there of sausage and stew was tasty but quite pricey and not hot enough.

We ended up there on the right day, though (we keep having some pretty good luck this way). It was a little cold, but sunny and as part of Budapest Spring Festival which has been all week there was a live folk (as in Hungarian folk) music performance and traditional crafts for kids.

In a Bronxites Abroad! video debut, here are the folk music performers. You can really hear the roots of the hora and other Jewish music in their songs. Devin LOVED the music. After a few songs we turned to leave, but she wanted to stay, so we stayed. I shot this little bit of video on my point-and-shoot camera and learned it's really easy to upload to the blog. Haven't experimented much with our new video camera but I imagine there's more of this sort of thing coming your way :-) Just click on the sideway triangle play button on the screen itself or right below it to play it.

Devin made a traditional doll from cloth with the help of an extremely helpful festival staffer ...



In the shed where the kids were working on the crafts was this beautiful display of hand-painted Easter eggs and a traditional groom's outfit from Transylvania (a part of Romania where many ethnic Hungarians live as it was once part of Hungary).


The woman who painted the eggs above was just outside painting a giant one ...


... and the organizers of this event obviously have a lot on the ball, because they also provided another giant blank egg for festival goers young and old to paint on ...