Fehérvári Piac, Budapest: The Holy Grail of Market Lunch

Quince Jelly

I used to work writing about Budapest for travel guides. All of them, pretty much - American, British., Swiss, and even Japanese. Magazines, guide books, airline in-flight mags all helped pay the bills. The pay was usually miserable, but it went a long way in the weird east European economies of twenty years ago - not that the situation is less weird now, but there isn't much that you can now label as "cheap." You can eat lunch cheaper in Berlin these days than you can in Budapest. Another drawback of writing travel guides is that you don't get author credit, if you are listed at all, and the books tend to go out of print after two years. Its as if you'd never worked on a published book at all. And then came social media and the magical days of the travel guide book were no more. 

Now tourists are seen wandering the streets with their faces glued downward onto their phones, following GPS maps to those same "best rated" lunch spots that all the other travel influencers have featured in their previous video spots on Tiktok and YouTube. I love how somebody who has just arrived in a new and unfamiliar place, who doesn't know the language or culture, and has never tasted the local food is suddenly the expert to guide you though your first visit. Where to find good Hungarian food? Just ask somebody who got off the train six hours ago. And thus: the tourist lángos, the goulash in a bread bowl, and the ice-cream filled "Transylvanian" funnel cake. 

When I wrote about Budapest I always suggested a trip to one of the city's outer district markets to sample some of "the real Hungary." The Instagram guides will invariably suggest visiting the downtown Vámház Market, where the eateries specialize in serving overpriced tourist food - particularly the lángos sellers who probably bank their daily earnings in Zurich. 

Vámház is a pretty good market for produce and especially for meat - its butchers supply a lot of the downtown restaurant biz and so the quality is high and the prices are low for the retail customer. But if you want to eat... get on a bus or tram and head away from the city center. My suggestions are either take the #7E (express) east into Pest to the end of the line to Bosnyák ter, my old favorite market. Or even closer to downtown, The Fehérvári utcai Piac, located next to the old Skala department store, probably offers the best food court experience in Budapest for traditional heart clogging Hungarian food. Take the M4 Metro or the 4 or 6 tram to Ujbuda Kőzpont and you're there. Enter the nondescript grey building marked Vásárcsarnok". Trundle past the wonderfully affordable vegetable sellers and the home made sausage stands and take the escalator to the third level. You are home, Pilgrim. Home.

First impressions: not a single tourist. At least a dozen different food vendors offering Hungarian cooking and a mere hint of "Other" (Ukrainian pierogi, Chinese steam table, Pizza-oid carbohydrates.) A lot of the tables are taken up by gaggles of retired folks knocking back flasks laughably cheap wine and chowing down on the kind of old time Magyar lunch dishes that seem to have disappeared around the time we stopped calling each other "comrade". 

The prices tend to be about a half of what you would pay in a "nice" restaurant, and you are guaranteed to get more fat, cholesterol, carcinogens and carbs in every bite. I'm sure that any EU inspector would faint at some of the stuff you can find up here. I found it hard to choose: when I see tripe in one pot and pig feet paprikás in the other, I go into panic mode. We went with two of my favorite home style lunch dishes, ones that I dare you to find in any restaurant that features a tablecloth: Rakott Krumpli (baked stacked potatoes) 

Rakott Krumpli is a standard in families where Mom can't really cook. It is like the instant ramen noodles of Magyar cuisine. You slice spuds, chop up some hard boiled eggs and csabái kolbász sausage, which will bleed orange paprika grease as it bakes, empty some sour cream on top of it, and stick it in the oven. Presto! Everybody happy! It sounds like it should be repulsive, but this is Eastern Europe, so somehow the disparate parts come together in a harmonious symphony of Sunday lunch. Sour cream, lard and paprika are the essential Staff of Life staples here. They make anything taste good.

My choice for lunch was káposztás tészta, cabbage noodles. This is a peasant dish that evokes the end of winter, when all other food has run out. It almost screams "Famine ahead! Eat while you can! Famine coming'" It takes hours to slowly sauté and caramelize the cabbage into a soft brown edible stage, oddly sweet and peppery and with a distinctive whiff of cabbage farts. It is one of the dishes I crave but don't have the patience to make at home. It was one of those old farmhouse dinners that disappeared with the rise of the microwave oven. Again - it doesn't sound like it should taste good but somehow it is.

The real reason to go to the market is to bring stuff home with you, which doesn't seem so urgent after you have eaten two or three plates of concentrated carbo-lard energy loaf. But don't miss the strudel seller on the first floor: decide how much you want and then order double that amount to bring home. You will thank me.

There's nothing more I like to do when I first arrive in a new country than drop into a market to see what's on offer: there is a lot more history and tradition to an open market than a Tescos. The Fehérvári market used to be a sprawling open tiered market, rebuilt around twenty years ago to stand the weather in all season. I used to work up the street when Budapest Week had its offices in the old Sopianae Tobacco factory. After work I used to hang out at the snack kiosks in front where the Transylvanian Roma used to hang out while sojourning in Budapest: That is where I learned a lot of Romani language over beer and sausages. You wont find the kiosks out front anymore, but head inside to the third level  and don't worry about reserved seating. There's room for everyone.

The Tourist Lángos

I just bought a subscription to the Hungarian online news magazine 444.hu, which is a first for me because I am a crabby cheap old bastard who rarely subscribes to anything. I read 444.hu every day, in fact, but they gated their feature writing and in-depth articles behind a paywall.  444, however, is one of the last holdouts of progressive journalism left in Orbanistan, where the FIDESZ government has bought up a large percentage of the private media and choked off outlets dedicated to investigative reporting and opposition opinion. With Hungary facing a federal election this coming April, independent news sources are crucial. My daily diet of Hungarian news mainly comes from 444, HVG, Telex, and Magyar Hang, and I usually peek at a few of the pro-government sites as well just to get a look at what they are saying in the right wing fever swamp. It isn't like I need more news. I read a lot in Hungarian, but I have always been hampered by the fact that, having not been educated in Hungarian schools, I don't take much satisfaction in Hungarian literature. (If you want to argue with me, first try translating a bit of Krasznohorkai.) I like the colloquial voice, which is, to say the least, not dominant in Hungarian literature. So a lot of my favorite writers are actually mere essayists and columnists, people who write in the voice of actual people. Especially when they can take my mind off of the news.

Szily Laszlo - one of my favorite Hungarian journalists - just started a new series of food reviews in 444. And so yes, I subscribed! Szily's previous food series was about some of the old  communist restaurants that still hang on in Budapest. The new series is about eating only tourist food in Budapest. Since I live in the Bulinegyed - the seventh district "party zone" - I see these places popping up weekly. Hungary doesn't have a tradition of "street food" but once it became an idée fixe of industrial tourism, "street food" popped up everywhere. If influencers want street food, influencers shall have street food. One of the most common - and from the vendor's standpoint, most profitable - offerings is lángos. Lángos are simple deep-fat fried dough, often made with a bit of mashed potato mixed into the dough. You could fashion a crispy, chewy pillow of hot carbs that would be slathered in salt and  garlic sauce or served sweet with apricot jam. They were sold at stands in open markets, at beaches and from fryer trucks at festivals, When I was a kid visiting Hungary I practically lived on lángos on the beach at Balaton.

Lángos as it should be: garlic and salt, upstairs at Klauzál tér market.

I don't actually eat lángos that much. I'm afraid that when I die and my life passes in front of me I will see visions of a greasy, salty lángos and know that I probably could have stayed on the mortal coil for another few years if I had avoided it altogether. Lángos is the fried pastry of mortality. We are all going to die. And we all have to eat. But nothing ties the two together as well as a lángos.

Lángos were always a simple, trustworthy cure for hunger, but around 1990 things changed. Gradually alternate toppings appeared on lángos: sour cream, grated cheese, ketchup... but the humble dough pie remained a feature of market stalls. Then somebody realized you could take the humble lángos - the most minimal investment in food conceivable - and market it to tourists hungry for a taste of authentic Hungarian food. Heck, you could add topping... like sausages! paprikás stew! caviar! Just watch the profits roll in! Soon the humble market lángos - the joy of destitute students, pensioners, and the homeless - were marketed at restaurant meal prices. You can easily find lángos being sold in the FT 4000-5000 range, the same as an entree in a sit down, downtown restaurant. 

FT 600 for a plain. Klauzál tér. 

Szily's first adventure takes him to the Retro Lángos near the Parliament, where, for a mere FT 3790 ($11.50 USD)  he orders a fusion lángos called "The Peasant" topped with sour cream, cheese, raw red onion, and fried kolbasz. Szily writes What does the Hungarian peasant do? If we can believe the hit product of Retro Lángos, then he gags all day long. No wonder, since there is no peasant who could get air while his entire oral cavity, plus his esophagus, is filled with a rubbery, dense, elastic substance... It wasn't just any cheese, but the cheapest, completely tasteless, usually not even "cheese" anymore, but one of the substitute products sold under the names "pizza topping", "sandwich topping" or similar. I've never eaten grated rubber gaskets or fishing lures made of silicone rubber, because they wouldn't be able to show anything new in comparison

The aforementioned "peasant" lángos (courtesy 444.hu)

Szily's writing alone is worth the price of the subscription, but he is not exaggerating. Very little of the food served to tourists is very good. If you really want a good lángos , go to one of the big vegetable markets outside of the town center. Usually around the back you can find a few kiosks selling roasted meat, sausages, and with luck, decent lángos. I recommend nothing more than garlic water and salt, but the apricot jam is divine as well. Keep it simple.

The Kádár Étkezde: Good food for Bad Jews.

Beet salad at the old Kádár Étkezde: that is adequate horseradish. 

The Kádár Étkezde is back in business! Or at least something very much like it under the same roof and name. The legendary lunch-only Hungarian restaurant closed at the beginning of the Covid epidemic, and a year ago I wrote about reports that local businessman Gerendai Károly had purchased the place with the intention of reopening it without any major changes to its quirky traditions, menu, and food. It was a long wait: besides basic renovation it took a while to sort out the paperwork when it turned out that the original Kádár had been operating since 1957 without any permit. 

It kinda makes sense: located in the middle of Klauzal ter - the heart chakra of Budapest's Jewish ghetto - the Kádár essentially served old fashioned, home style Communist Hungarian Jewish food. Good food for bad Jews. The classic Jewish bean stew sólet (the Yiddish cholent) was served with a either a goose leg or a slice of smoked pork loin, Matzoh ball soup was served alongside lung stewed in cream sauce. It was the kind of nostalgia that would - in say, the 1960s - comfort a middle aged Jewish party functionary who had survived both the Holocaust and Stalinism and wanted lunch in his old neighborhood when visiting his Grandma living nearby. Kádár  served classic Hungarian food, which cloaked the Jewish identity of dishes like sólet - a  traditional sabbath meal in both Ashkenazic and Sephardic culture. And much like the Spanish Jewish cuisine of the post-1492 era it was gloriously unkosher: extra helpings of lard and pork innards help to keep the Inquisitors away.

Sólet with roast goose leg in 2025

I'll cut to the chase. The new Kádár is good. Go there. But it is new, and it is not exactly the same as the old place. They have only been open for a couple of weeks and there was an incredible PR campaign surrounding its opening, so one can expect a few bumps and growing pains, but it shows promise. The menu is pretty limited - they are just starting and running a full house every day so they will need time to finesse their repetoire. Go to their website and make reservations beforehand: it is really popular right now. The old Kádár had a regular menu and then a page of changing daily specials - the sólet was offered only on Friday and Saturdays. Today sólet is the star of the show - not surprising since few other Hungarian restaurants offer it at all. But... but.... but... it was a bit too... cheffy. A plate of quasi-semitic beans and bird will never be haut cuisine, but the old sólet presented as a savory mess of dense bean mud and goose fat begging to be shoveled into your gaping maw, offering the promise that you would never, ever be hungry again. This version, however, was a dish of identifiable beans in a sauce. It was good, but it needs to sit around long enough to... mature? Congeal? Solidify? Pre-digest?

Sólet in 2014... with horseradish beet salad

Compare the old sólet. Not an errant drop of moisture to be seen. And more than the beans, I ordered the "horseradish beet salad" for our lunch. It came... without horseradish. I saw a strand or two of horseradish in the beets, but... the old style dish was a mound of violently pungent fresh ground horseradish that ripped your nostrils and left you gasping for air. Maybe the kitchen is worried that their modern clientele can't handle the crowd-control quality of the old dish. 

Old Kádár: goose meatloaf on sólet

One of the subtexts that identified Kádár as a secret Jewish restaurant, and one that was specifically native to Klauzál tér, was it use of goose. Klauzál tér park was once an open air market, divided into two halves: the side along Nagy Diofa utca was kosher and specialized in selling goose. Goose provided the grease of Hungarian Jewish cuisine: Hungarian cuisine is based on cooking with pork lard. 

Klauzál tér in 1896.

Károly Gundel, the famed chef whose restaurant in the city park bears his name, opened his classic Hungarian cookbook with the lines: Hungarian cooking always begins with onions cooked in lard. Jews... substituted goose fat. (This was in the days before vegetable oil, and olive oil was still stuff you could only get in the south Balkans or Italy.) Over the decades, in face of social forces including assimilation, mass annihilation, and anti-Semitism, Hungarian Jews adopted more and more Hungarian eating customs, including an increasing tolerance for pork. In this neighborhood, however, Kosher butchers and restaurants maintained a strong clientele, with several establishments that catered, like the Kádár (and the Fülemüle) to an odd chimera of Hungarian and Jewish cooking: the unkosher Jewish restaurant. And thus the demand for goose meat and fat was centered into the seventh and eighth districts of Budapest. As I often did in the olden days, I ordered ludaskása, which is essentially goose bits in rice pilav. 

Kádár ludaskása today

The Kádár went through a lot of goose: it roasted the legs, ground the breast meat into its goose meatloaf, and roasted the carcasses to provide a base for stock. Ludaskása was a dense pilav-like dish of goosebits, soup veg, and rice, dense and wet, extremely filling and fatty. I did enjoy the ludaskása we had last week, but... it was something made by somebody who had imagined it as some sort of risotto - the rice light and fluffy,  a few bits of goose guts floating around in there, and worst of all... I was hungry when I finished it. This never happened with the old version. Let me illustrate why with a few photographs of a serving of the old ludaskása:

Kádár Ludaskása circa 2016

That was a small serving of ludaskása. There were about three goose wings stacked on top of a mound of rice. Fumie and I would drop into Kádár on Wednesdays and order a takeout of two servings of ludaskása to go. They would just drop a whole roast goose carcasse on top of a box of pilav and we would take it home to strip the meat off the goose bones. We would eat our pilav of ludaskása and then boil the bones for more stock, add some rice and the excess goose meat, and make an entire fresh pot of more ludaskása for the rest of the week. (As a mixed Jewish and Japanese household we can eat a lot of rice.) 

Ludaskása to go in olden times.

Yes, I know. That was then... this is now. I am not criticizing the new Kádár for not distributing whole animal carcasses to go, or for not poisoning the clients with weapons-grade horseradish. But Gerendai, the owner of the new Kádár, is also the founder of the Michelin starred Budapest Costes restaurant, and the kitchen staff are rumored to have come from that temple of fine dining. I suspect that there may be a few erudite theories of cuisine development percolating in the background of the chef's notebooks here... as we say in the backwaters of Trumpistan...it seems that perhaps they are overthinking a plate of beans. As an old time alumnus of the Kádár, we didn't go there for a culinary experience. We went there for lunch. We didn't go to the Kádár  to dine. We went to eat. 

The late Sándor Orbán, former owner and soul of the Kádár  

And I will add that I did not try either of the desserts offered, both of which were huge portions of either sweet poppy seed noodles or vanilla sauce bread pudding. They looked great, though. and the prices were actually quite fair for all of the dishes, and yes - I will return again, expecting time to iron out all the bumps and boo-boos that go with opening a new / old restaurant. Whichever direction the new Kádár goes in, it is a welcome addition to the local food scene. It is making a genuine effort to keep alive the standards and accomplishment of the former owner, the legendary  Sándor Orbán, who passed away earlier this year. Real Hungarian food has become harder and harder to find, especially in the downtown and particularly in the heavily touristic seventh district. Welcome back, Kádár Étkezde!

Subotica, Serbia: Train to Nowhere

                                        

No summer is complete without a jaunt south to the Balkan lands! After a few months at home in Budapest's 7th district - the underage tourist drinking capital of Europe - a trip to the Balkans, even just to cross the border, is a tonic, a breath of fresh air. There is an electricity simply to being in the Balkans. Central Europe - as Hungary likes to style itself - combines the dour moralism of Protestant Europe with an East European "how many of us does it take to change a light bulb?" approach to technology. The Balkans - and I am specifically addressing Serbia in the post - is like crossing into a strange mirror world, where light bulbs are a privilege, not a right. The Balkans wear its traditions on its sleeve. Budapest is so modern, so European, so... expensive. So: cross the border, easily marked by a razor wire fence erected in 2015 when Viktor Orban was gleefully making a name as the Troll King protecting white Christian Europe from the brown hordes of refugees from the Middle East. 

A Warm and Welcoming Hello! Hungarian Serbian Border

The border has been quiet for the last decade, almost too quiet. Serbia, however, has been rocked by huge street protests against the 11 year rule of Prime Minister Alexander Vucic, a populist who cozies up to Orban and licks Putin's dainty parts and plays the Serb nationalist card close to his chest. Vucic and Orban have been involved in the building of China's "Belt and Road" railway system, a multi billion dollar Chinese Commie fantasy scam of railways and ports that will provide Chinese car batteries, and Labubus to hungry consumers in the EU. There have been,... glitches. Long story short: there is no railway service in northern Serbia anymore, and won't be for a while. 

(This is a pub, actually, not the train to Szeged.)

The lethal collapse of the Novi Sad railway station on Nov 1 2024 led to mass protests which have continued to peak this summer, with mass demonstrations in Belgrade, Novi Sad, and other cities, in which protesters were often met with violence from thugs and hooligans organized by forces close to Vucic. Big infrastructure projects are to political corruption like shit to flies. In the burning summer sun there are Chinese workers squatting around the unopened Subotica railway station chipping at concrete with hammers, and the station itself is closed for safety reasons. The Budapest - Belgrade railway, which has already officially opened three times, is now predicted to run by around 2028. For now there are no trains onward towards Serbia from here, sorry. Luckily, there is a two car tram-train that can get you from Szeged to Subotica twice a day, but beyond that you are on your own.

Subotica (Szabadka in Hungarian) just next to the Hungarian border, is the main city of the Bacska region of the Vojvodina, the northern province of Serbia that was a  multi-ethnic autonomous region of old Yugoslavia. Although Serbs comprise the majority in the province, in many places the ethnic mix - even after the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s - remains a diverse cultural patchwork of languages and local traditions that seems to have forged a tolerance that evades many other regions of Eastern Europe. Subotica is nearly half Hungarian, with a large minority of Bunyevac, a Catholic Croatian sub group that has native to the region long enough to claim its dialect as a separate language in the municipality

By chance, we arrived during the weekend of the Bunyevac harvest festival, Duzijanca. Every evening crowds would gather near the central square to listen to tamburica bands and marvel at the hay sculptures. Folk dance groups from the villages showed up, and people contentedly traipsed up dawn the streets chatting and visiting, the classic Balkan corso, the evening social stroll. 

I can only take so much tamburica music, an aversion dating to my days playing in Balkan bands in the USA (I prefer funkier,  less harmonious music, as in gaida!) On Saturday, at least, Serbian Gypsy Brass bands gathered outside the City hall to rent themselves out to wedding parties. 

The City Hall itself is worth seeing: tours are given daily by showing up exactly at noon at the main entrance. Subotica was once one of the most important cities in the Kingdom of Hungary, a role that shrank after the region was made part of Serbia after World War One. Just before the first World War Hungary - of which Subotica was then a part - had gulled itself into believing in a glorious, pan-Danubian Hapsburg future, and grand architectural statements like the Budapest Parliament and the Subotica City Hall are testaments to the dashed dreams of that briefly optimistic era. 

City Hall Square

During Subotica's glory days local architects built dozens of gob-smackingly beautiful Art Nouveau palaces and city buildings. During the communist era a lot of these were demolished to modernize the city center, but the remaining ones define the look of Subotica.

Our Hapsburg Connections! (City Hall) 

Subotica, indeed, the entire Vojvodina, was once home to a large Jewish community, who were apparently doing rather well from trade at the end of the 19th century. The Subotica Synagogue, built in 1908 is without a doubt the most gorgeous shul I have ever been in, and I have been in a lot them.

Photo by Fumie Suzuki, taken from the tower of City Hall

Designed by two local architects, Dezső Jakab and Marcell Komor, who idolized the Budapest Jewish architect Liport Baumhorn. They applied their taste to the City Hall office and many other local buildings as well. And then came the First World War, the Hapsburg defeat, and the Trianon treaty. Little did they realize at the time that the busy mercantile center of Subotica would soon become a dusty border town, albeit with some spectacular buildings. 

The Synagogue alone is worth the trip to Subotica, even if you are not Jewish. The motifs reflect the Hungarian Neolog Jewish sentiment of the late 1800s: an embrace of Hungarian cultural identity al0ngside Jewish religion following the German Reform model. The stained glass work alone is astounding. Motifs from Hungarian folk design adorn the ceilings (alongside some decidedly Bunyevac designs as well, probably not by licit intention of the artists) 

The real reason we went to Subotica is to eat. On Fumie's birthday we were thinking of going to one of the few places in Budapest still serving cevapcici... and we realized that we could take a train to Subotica, stay over night, and eat cevapi for about the same price as dining out in Budapest. So we did.

If you like meat, you will like Serbia. Cevapi, cevapcici, meatwads, call them what you will, they are good down in Serbia. They are even better in Bosnia, but the Vojvodina became home to thousands of Bosnian Serb refugess after the Bosnian War in the 1990s (replacing about 60,000 local Croats, but not the Bunyevac... its complicated....) and bringing the Bosnian obsession with little tubes of grilled meat with them.

A Master at Work: Ilijanska cevapi

Perhaps the best cevapi we found was at the Ilijanska Cevap House, a tiny place across the street from the synagogue. Ilijia is the western bit of Sarajevo, now in Republika Srpska territory, and I have eaten cevap in Ilidja itself, and the customers at this hole in the wall all assured me these were the best in Subotica. These cevapi are the reason we will be returning to Subotica in the near future.

They were spot on. The somon bread are baked in a pizza oven just as the cevapai are tossed on the grill, and the whole things is slathered in butter as it comes out of the oven. At one point a customer ordered a pleskavica: the Serbian analog of a hamburger. It was constructed from a slab of ground meat and onions literally the size of a pizza. 

Burek near the Flea Market

Burek is the breakfast of choice in the Balkans, and Subotica, again, has several burek bakeries that make theirs using the old fashioned Bosnian sac method - a retro baked-in-the-coals technique that was inherited directly from the Turks. The Sac Burek place on the road just before you get to the flea market is the best in town (we tried all of them.) They were out of meat burek when we arrived so we went with spinach and potato burek. As we were finishing our breakfast the owner arrived and plopped down a hige slice of fresh meat burek straight out of the oven. 

The Flea Market is the main draw for visitors to Subotica. Buses loaded with Hungarians cross the border every weekend to load up on canned tuna fish, laundry soap, toilet paper, and tool sets, all at prices well below what they would pay in Hungary. Most of the market sellers are, or at least can speak Hungarian, and accept Hungarian Forints in payment.

There is the usual cheap Chinese clothing section, a food section, an area selling tools, farm implements, and bicycles, a classic shit-for-sale junk and antique market, and also a fresh vegetable market. 

Of course, we were there ion the second hottest day of the summer, so I couldn't fully appreciate the garbage laid out for my perusal in comfort. I didn't even have the appetite to sample the pleskavica stands that are scattered throughout the market. Pleskavica is Serbia's answer to the hamburger. Basically, it is cevap meat in a burger shape, but better, and you get to choose the toppings, which is also better. 

Just before we began our trip back to Budapest, we visited the main vegetable and food market in downtown Subotica, which is open on Sunday until noon (the train leaves at 1pm) We stocked up on natural garlic, prunes, almonds and some vegetables at prices about one quarter what we pay in Budapest. We bought four ear of sweet corn for about a 80 US cents: in Budapest corn goes for over a dollar an ear these days. Boiled up that night at home, it was absolutely the sweetest corn I have ever tasted. 

Walking past the fish seller Fumie noticed they were selling fully roasted red scorpion fish, the Adriatic scarpina that goes for top prices in Dalmatian restaurants. For the equivalent of four euros she got a whole roasted fish, stashed it in the freezer bag she carries with her everywhere, and we set out for home, which should have been a three hour train journey.

Scarpina that came home with us

We boarded our train back to Budapest on the hottest day of the summer, having invested the exorbitant amount of $14 in order to get a first class seat that would guarantee air conditioning. Now, as much as I have impugned the reputation of the Serbian rail system, that is nothing compared to the Hungarian State Railway MAV this year. See, we actually had a working railway system. In theory, at least. But since 2022 the Minister for Transportation has been János Lázár, a long time political fixture who exemplifies the "fixing lightbulbs theory" of running state railways. Hungarian trains no longer run on time, and refunds are sketchy and often not forthcoming., Austria no longer lists the arrival times of Hungarian trains on its schedule, because... why would you? 

Farewell Serbia!

Needless to say our trip home was an endless mess of breakdowns and transfers. We were offloaded from our comfy fist class seats onto buses and taken to a countryside station where we sat in the sun with a few hundred other disgruntled Hungarians until MAV could figure what to do with a few hundred irate Magyars standing in the blazing heat. At one point they had us enter an already full train before ordering us off it again. 

Visit beautiful Szatymaz! thanks MAV! 

Finally, an old local train was pressed into duty to get us back to Budapest, on which we were grateful to have even found seats. With the heat around 100 Fahrenheit, only open windows provided moving, if hot, air. I am glad we got back to our flat with any sanity (thanks goes to my sister, who got us an air conditioner for the flat this year!) And the most surprising bit of the story: the fish survived the journey'

Don't ask how the cevapi is made...