Big Week for Competitive Hungarian Swimming, Singing

Despite all evidence to the contrary, it’s not just gloom and doom in Hungary this week!

For one thing, it seems that Hungary absolutely cleaned up at this week’s European Swimming Championships, taking home four gold medals. (Actually, it was more like “keeping home” four medals, because the competition was held in Debrecen.) Woo-hoo!

Meanwhile, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know doubt know that Hungary has made it into the finals of the 2012 Eurovision contest, to be held on Saturday night in Baku, Azerbaijan. Unfortunately, what earlier seemed to be a case of double doom for entrant Compact Disco now appears to be one of triple doom, since not only are they sort of lame and representing a country that isn’t very widely liked in an event that is widely seen as a popularity contest, they also drew the second-to-first slot of the night, sandwiched between the much-ballyhooed UK entry of Engelbert Humperdinck and someone from Albania who is actually singing in Albanian. Of course, anything can happen, but it’s hard not to assume that our team’s chances are pretty… compact. Still, even if we lose to the Albanian, we at least made it all the way to the finals, unlike almost every one of our local frenimies, including the Austrians, the Croats, the Slovenes and – music to our ears – the Slovaks, who by the way limped home from Debrecen without as much as a bronze. Go team!