Friday, August 05, 2011

10 Facts I Learned About Hungary

Below are the 10 facts I learned about Hungary after my 2 weeks stay, and I swear I didn't use google when wrote them down! These are just the result from talking and hanging out with the locals.

1. Summer in Hungary means mix between nice sunny day and cold rainy day, even storm sometimes.
2. The capital city Budapest is split by Danube river into two areas called Buda and Pest. Buda is the richer area and place for the royal castle, and Pest is... let's just say where all the fun is :)
3. Hungary moved away from communism system without any revolution in 1989. The ruling party decided to switch in a very smooth process and support the election a year later.
4. People in general are very polite and friendly. The hospitality shown by the customer is still the best I've seen so far, even when there was disagreement during discussion.
5. Even Hungary is part of Schengen, but they still use their local currency Forint.
6. Győr is the city that is near from three capital cities. About one hour drive from Budapest, Vienna (Austria) and Bratislava (Slovakia). It's better to fly to Vienna and drive to Győr directly.
7. English is not a common language here. Some adults learned Russian at school due to the past time when Soviet used to put large number of troops in the city. Some waiters speak German probably because there are many visitors from Austria during the weekend. Hungarian language is very different with the one in Czech or Slovakia, it's closer to Finnish.
8. All Audi engines are made in Győr. This is the largest engine production plant in Europe.
9. People seem to like ice cream here. Gelato is available in almost every corner in Győr.
10. Hungarian girls are, ehm, interesting ;)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for the info... i'm packing for september now to visit hungary.. :), thanks to your detail info.

eye catching must see was no. 10, which i would like to explore in depth. :)

for now it's back to sleep after suhoor. :)

have a safe trip back home.

abdul

Altoman said...

heheh this no 10 i think every know abt it

Kaj said...

Hi,


Hungarian is part of the same family of languages of Finnish but a Finnish speaker and Hungarian would not make sense of each other if they met and talked. The languages are not similar at all ;-)


Kaj

Flávio said...

Pictures please. Especially of of the interesting Hungarians ;-)

Gabriel said...

Schengen agreement and the Euro currency are not related.

The Schengen treaty was signed by several European countries which agreed to abort customs controls at their borders thus facilitating traveling between them.

According to wikipedia, this was signed in 1985, so it's not related to the Euro currency.