Mangalica Festival! Cause all curly haired pigs need to be celebrated!

I've been fortunate in so many ways recently. Particularly that I have lots of awesome new people in my life who've helped me get accumulated to this wonderful country. I also have a small but strong group of fellow foreigners who I've been able to work out cultural confusion with. For these reasons it wasn't until my fourth weekend here that I found myself wandering around the city on my own.

So I tired to live like the locals do, I went to a festival. It seems that Budapest and Hungary in general have a constant stream of festivals. My first was the Mangalica Festival, it celebrates the curly haired pig. Many of you, like myself might find yourself wondering, what is a curly haired pig?

These are curly haired pigs:

When I arrived at the festival I expected to see many stalls with pigs roaming about, however I found only one with the pigs sectioned off in different groups. The signs might have explained the difference but believe it or not, I'm not able to read Hungarian yet. 

Fortunately there were some random English signs.

As I continued to wander around the festival I had a serious of "damn, I just moved to Hungary" moments. I don't know how else to describe them. I think its common when you move to a foreign country, or at least it's common for me. They mostly occur when I see something that is very different from what I grew up with or when I see something that uniquely belongs to the culture I'm currently living in. 

 The festival took place at szabadság tér (Freedom Square in English) in Pest. As I was wondering I suddenly turned and saw the top of Parliament (the building I most strongly associate with Budapest) in the distance. I've also been learning a lot about Hungary's history, seeing the monument on the right helped me understand the history in a more personal way. Yeah books are great but sometimes I need to see something to bring home it's importance.

The more I wandered through the festival the more I realized the festival was like about the actual pig and more about the pigs' meat. Everywhere I turned there were stands selling bacon, sausage, fried pig fat (unfortunately I'm positive that's what it was), and a variety of hot pork dishes.

 In my research before I went to the festival I learned that the pork of the curly haired pig is supposed to be much better than regular pork. I worked up the courage to purchase some curly haired pig meat at one of the vendors. Unfortunately my Hungarian sucks and few of the meat vendors spoke English. I ended up with some delicious sausage and some not so delicious fried pork fat.

                              

I do have to admit fault in me ending up with a bag of fried pork fat. I was becoming embarrassed by my lack of Hungarian and decided that I'd just buy what everyone else was buying. After having luck in purchasing two links of sausage without saying more than köszönöm (thank you) I figured I'd just buy what everyone else was buying. I went to the stand and selected a small bag of what I thought was cubed bacon. I purchased it and eagerly tasted what I expected to be bacon, it was fried fat. What does one do with a bag of fried fat? Everyone around me was eating it, I was gagging. So I did what any expat would do, I controlled my gag, smiled at the woman I bought it from and quickly put the bag in my pocket.

Needless to say I was concerned about my ability to purchase food after the pig fat incident but I heard many different languages spoken near the hot food stalls and assumed someone there could probably understand me.

The choices were endless however it seemed most appropriate to eat some curly haired pig sausage since that's what I had read about before. And of course it would have been a travesty to pass up some dark Hungarian beer.

Lunch Time!

The sausage is one large link, sorry the bread obscures it. I still don't know why the guy looked at me weird when I asked for half. As for my beverage I found the best dark Hungarian beer. Really wish I would have written down the name.

All in all the festival was quite eclectic, with an emphasis on the random things that had nothing to do with pigs.

Cause nothing makes you think of curly haired pigs more than strangely colored brooms and children's toys. Still I look forward to many more Hungarian festivals. These people do know how to do it, I think for every toy stall there were two selling alcohol.