Aside from all the other things that make the March 15th holiday so exciting, this year's celebrations have a few new twists. According to this report on Caboodle.hu, here's one:

Until March 19, eighteen life-sized statues of hussars in various uniforms will be exhibited at major junctions throughout the city, each representing one of the hussar regiments serving in the Hungarian army in the 1840s.

And in related news, the Szamos Marcipán Múzeum Cukrászda will be open all weekend, offering visitors another chance to marvel at its life-sized marzipan statue of Michael Jackson. Enjoy!

A chicken from the slightly-glowing town of Paks in central Hungary recently laid an egg weighing 200 grams and 24 centimeters in circumference. Géza Somogyi, the owner, has sent the egg's measurements to the Hungarian office of Guinness in the hopes that it sets a new record. According to Guiness, national records aren't kept, but the current record holder is an egg laid in Britain with a circumference of 22.8 cm and a length of 31 (?) cm. Somogyi said that his chickens only feed on wheat, corn and sunflower seeds, underscoring that their diet is all natural. We suspect the chicken might have received a little assist, however, from the reactor down the road. [index.hu]

52-year old László Fölkl spent 104 hours watching cartoons in an attempt to break a world record, the organizers of Budapest's Animania Movie Marathon revealed. As part of the record-breaking attempt Fölkl watched nearly 300 cartoons over the time period, eventually coming up twenty hours short of the world record, but still setting a Hungarian record in the process, good enough to land him a new laptop, and, it would seem, a minor mention in the press. [est.hu]

BKV vehicles are not just for stag parties anymore, apparently. Two metro drivers recently caught the metro to their wedding, except that this time it was a special train on which only they and the wedding party sat. A special train decked out in festive decorations waited for the pair at the Határ út station (where there's a third track) and took them to Nagyvarád tér for their wedding. According to velvet.hu, everyone involved volunteered their time, with the only contribution on the part of the BKV being the free use of the metro train. Considering this was the first time the cash-strapped public transport provider allowed the use of one of their metro trains for a use like this, we can't rule out if any Nokia boxes exchanged hands. We just hope that the company actually bothered to clean the car for the special occasion.

Should any of our readers not plagued by a conscience find themselves being offered a Nokia box while here in Hungary, may we suggest you wholeheartedly accept it. Following the revelation of the method by which former Budapest deputy mayor Miklós Hagyó allegedly received his graft stipend, "nokia box" has entered the Hungarian vernacular as a vessel by which to deliver bribes, to the point that a blog dedicated to what can fit into one of these boxes has been launched, as well as an instructional video by index.hu. One of these boxes can hold up to Ft 15 million (€56,000) and best of all, instead of just throwing the boxes away as people did in the old days, they'll now be reused, proving that embezzlement can also be environmentally friendly.

Like the Volt Festival before it, the annual Balaton Sound Festival has announced its headliners for this year: The Chemical Brothers, Jamiroquai and Paul van Dyk. The Chemical Brothers put on a good show at the Sziget Festival in 2007 and van Dyk stopped by Budapest last year, but honestly, we didn’t even know Jamiroquai was still around. Still, with the festival taking place on the shores of Lake Balaton at Zamárdi, it should be a fun (if a bit dated) with or without buying any vowels. [sziget.hu]

As the always-exciting March 15th holiday approaches, many of Hungary's resident foreigners will probably be planning to get out of town, both to take advantage of a three-day weekend, and also to get away from the inevitable crowds of foreigner-hating nationalists that flock to the streets each year. But this year may be different, because the same dirty külföldiek the Hungaristas love to hate may now be the only thing saving the country from demographic oblivion. Really! According to some new data from the Central Statistics Office (KSH), Hungary's population is expected to dip below 10 million sometime in June, after being clocked at only 10.013 million on January 1 of this year. Until the 1980s, the country's population was growing, then it started dropping fast, and, as tabloid Blikk explains, the only thing that has kept us in the eight-digit population club is all the foreigners who inexplicably keep moving here. And in other foreigner news:

• A foreign student was fined by national railways MÁV for traveling with a student ticket on December 25. A Hungarian passenger who helped out the perplexed student by paying their fine wrote to consumer blog Homár says that the woman's foreign student ID had been accepted by the MÁV cashier who sold her a student ticket, but then the ticket inspector said her IDs did not give her a right to buy a student ticket in Hungary and issued her a fine anyway. The Hungarian Samaritan also noted that his own Hungarian student ID had previously been accepted in nearly every countries where he has traveled. [homar.blog.hu]
• A Romanian man attacked a ticket inspector with a chainsaw on a train traveling on the Budapest-Szombathely route last Monday. The Romanian had been traveling without a ticket, and when the inspector told him he had to buy one, the man got angry, started the chainsaw he was carrying and threatened the inspector with it. The police was called, and the man was removed from the train and taken into custody in Székesfehérvár. [rtlhirek.hu]
• That same day, several foreign students were apprehended by the Pécs police after they were accused of shooting at some local cats with an air gun. A downtown resident had alerted the authorities, saying "someone was firing shots at a bus stop." The suspects said they were only trying to scare the animal away; there was no ammunition in the gun when it was seized. [hvg.hu/velvet.hu]

Oooooh look what happened when one of us recently used the "email to a friend" function on Hungarian health portal hazipatika.com. At best their choice of verification keyword (dugott) could be translated as "screwed," though "fucked" would probably be more accurate. Either way, we'd say the prognosis is negative.

How's this for pathetic: Some as-yet-unidentified thieves have made off with a statue that is the symbol of the Heves County of Tenk. Unlike many of the statues of grim-faced politicos and writers previously pilfered in Hungary, this one depicts a young woman carrying water, and was a popular spot for locals to get married. Or we should say depicted, because by now the thing has probably already been melted down for scrap. Sad! [index.hu/tenk.hu]

A couple of weeks ago our sister site Caboodle.hu had a cheery feature about how the mayor of Budapest's District V was boasting that work on the so-called "new main street" of the district was about to be wrapped up ahead of schedule. Which leads to the question, what the fuck was the schedule? Really! We snapped the shot up top of a section of Petőfi Sándor utca in July of last year, because by then the work seemed to have being gone on long enough that we wanted to get a photographic record of how long it would take. Below that is one from last week taken from roughly the same angle. But not exactly from the same angle, because if we tried to do that we would have fallen into the giant gaping hole that is still there (bottom). Honestly, it's like these politicians have no shame.

We've always loved the fact that Hungarians call blue jeans farmer, and that the Hungarian word for shirt (ing) can be confusingly added to a style of shirt to make a compound word that sounds alarmingly like a gerund in English. But to see them together is just too beautiful.

As we revealed a few weeks back, longtime contributor Sean Jordan had made plans to leave Hungary overland, in part because of his problems getting out of here by air. Well, he did finally join the ranks of Budapest ex-expats, but not before filing one final report (via SMS) about something he saw Saturday night at the meeting point of civilization/germ vector that is Budapest Keleti train station. His first dispatch came in at 23:30:

Just witnessed a 20kg pot bust on some Asian kid at Keleti! It was incredibly well done by the zsaru. About 10 [undercover, mostly under-30 agents suddenly came] out of the woodwork. Handshakes and backslapping all around. (A cop confirmed the kg estimate.)

And the second at 23:44:

All I know is, the train and all those people spilled off was from Bucharest. What was weird was how good-natured this kid was about it. The cops cuffed him and started picking papers out of his pockets and he was all awkward smiles. Also strange: how the cops opened all his shit and yanked out 4 or 5 very large bags of weed onto the pavement, for all the world to see. As people were hustling to their trains, barely a few feet away from the contraband.

Strange indeed, especially given that there was no mention of the bust in any of the local media. As for how far this incident goes to demonstrate the professionalism of our boys in blue, we'd give them more credit if our correspondent hadn't been prevented from sending us a pick due to the fact that his camera had only days earlier been heisted by pickpockets.