The Budapest Parade: Sunlight is Your Enemy

It was time again Saturday for the shock and awe of the Budapest Parade, the annual carnival of Hungary's disco bunnies and club-druggies. This year's procession featured 50 floats and more than a thousand times as many marchers and watchers. And as in past years, it was not a pretty sight.

Okay, so there were some good-looking girls on some of the floats, and some of them were wearing only paint. But one of our friends summed it up when he said that the crowd was composed of people likely to look their best at 2:00 in the morning in a dark nightclub, rather than 2:00 on a bright Saturday afternoon.

Sure enough, a lot of people we saw looked worse than bad. By 3:00 one young reveler was relieving himself of the contents of his stomach on the sidewalk next to our building, a worrying sight given the conspicuous lack of alcohol at the parade. More worrying still was the idea that many of marchers, already pie-eyed at high noon, would be going on to attend the all-night parties that accompany the pageant, including at least one advertised as starting at 6:00 am the following morning. It reminded us of our last visit to Mardi Gras - the three-week-long pre-Lenten carnival in New Orleans - when we woke up the morning after the last parade in an unfamiliar bed snuggling an albino German Shepherd named "Zeus." Like we said, this kind of partying is never pretty.

Despite all this, the parade and the parties apparently resulted in negligible material and human damage. The best Színes mai lap could come up with were the same pair of gilded gazongas we have pictured above, and a trolleybus full of pensioners threatening to sue the mayor because they got caught in the parade traffic for a few hours. Even the small flock of sheep brought along as a stunt by the Krétakör art collective seemed to be holding up pretty well, given the zoo outside their cage.

Then again, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that everything went off as planned, as the people doing the planning were no doubt working for the various companies sponsoring the different floats and attractions. Underneath all that body paint and infernal techno music Budapest's answer to the famous Berlin Love Parade is just a €500,000 marketing event for the clubs, energy drinks, mobile phones, TV shows and other do-dads that the youth of the New Europe spend their money on. It may be young, and it may be now. But Woodstock it ain't.