Sausage Festival Promotes Itself with Online Pig Beauty Contest
Vote for me!
Apologies to our loyal reader(s) if we have been a bit slow in updating over the past few days. The fact is we have become distracted by the veritable plethora of porcine comeliness found on the website of the Csaba Sausage Festival.
The annual carnivore celebration in the southeast Hungarian town of Bekescsaba, a two-and-a-half hour train ride from Budapest’s Keleti Train Station, is compiling a tally of Facebook Likes to determine which stunning swine will be the official model for the 2012 festival. You can place your vote here.
So far a gorgeous young pig named Beno is in the lead, with 142 Likes as of this writing. But it is still early.
Bekescsaba is well known throughout Central Europe for its sausage — csabai kolbasz. The festival has been a regular mid-autumn event since 1996. The 2010 festival attracted over 100,000 visitors.
The 2011 Csaba Sausage Festival will take place October 28-31.
Gyula’s Renaissance Carnival: The Party Few Are Familiar With
This online journal hates to keep secrets. Thus we shall let you in on one. Gyula is the name of the secret and it is a gem of a town situated 200 kilometers southeast of Budapest, an area which seems virtually uncharted by English speakers, or for that matter speakers of other languages besides Hungarian.
This weekend Herr and Frau Chortler awoke briefly from their winter hibernation – which traditionally lasts from late September to early June – and descended upon the annual Renaissance Carnival in Gyula. You can see photographs of their sojourn here and here.
This most enjoyable affair saw the virtual pair consume copious amounts of the region’s famous sausages, which were in turn washed down by an equally copious amount of local wines and, for Herr Chortler, stronger libations.
Gyula has other events on the 2010 calendar worthy of a visit. Coming up March 19-21 is a sausage festival, April 16-18 one can partake in a palinka (Hungarian brandy) festival, and in the summer – June 29 to July 12 – a Shakespeare festival will be held with this castle as its backdrop.
