Airline Delivers Sightseers into Arms of Scheming Skanks

Unlike many snarky international types, we love the recent invasion of discount airlines into Hungary. The more the merrier, we say, even if some of the merriest who show up spend their few hours in Budapest on all fours in the gutter outside the pub. But sometimes even we wonder if some of these carriers are doing their best to prepare their customers for the brave new word of casual intra-European jet travel. What has us worried is this seemingly harmless little quiz in the September issue of easyjet's inflight magazine. Entitled "Like you know Budapest," it offers eight questions about the Hungarian capital, starting with "The Danube at Budapest is not actually blue, it's a) pink b) gray c) yellow," and ending with "At Budapest's Statue Park, where statues of Communist leaders are mothballed, you can buy cans of air. Why?"

While at least one of the questions involves a local attraction - the Fashion café on Andrassy út - that disappeared months or even years ago, we are mainly concerned about question No. 5:

Váci Street is famous for its konzum lány or "eatable girls." What are they?

a) prostitutes
b) shop-window dummies made of icing sugar
c) cows – it's the site of a city farm.

The question and answer are technically correct, at least from a historical perspective - konzum lány was originally coined decades ago to describe the city's squads of hookers. But as many budget travelers now come to Budapest looking for easy women, and the local gals known as konzum lány generally offer something much less easy and enjoyable than the services provided by traditional practitioners of the world's oldest profession, we'd say this does not qualify as practical, up-to-date travel information.

Other than that, we'd like to salute our great friends in the big orange planes, and thank them for doing all they do to make Europe seem as small as it really is.