Random Things to Do in Hungary - Flowers, Spas and Lions!

There's so much that I haven't written about when it comes to our summer of 2014 in Hungary, so I figured I'd create a collection of the best events we went to and day trips we did two years ago. I hope some of these will get you interested!

Szőregi Rózsaünnep

The first event I want to talk about is Szőregi Rózsaünnep. This is a rose festival that takes place in Szöreg, a little village which still belongs to Szeged. Every summer, they organise this festival, which is just about the loveliest thing ever! As the name suggests, it's all about roses. They have a parade for which people prepare the craziest things out of roses, and they also take you to see the rose fields, which you wouldn't really be able to access without a car otherwise. In addition to all this, there's food (why of course!) as well as concerts - smaller ones as well as a bigger, festival-style thing. We first visited the stunning rose fields and then checked out the many rose-related exhibitions in the village itself.

Country life!

There are so many flower arrangements for you to admire in many places in Szőreg during the festival weekend, and the ones that are in the parade actually compete against one another! Being a city girl, things like this excite me to no end :D! It's like some type of cake contest in an American TV show :D!

This is what we ate....

After eating, we found ourselves a good spot along the road and got ready to enjoy the parade itself. 

With a slushie!

Here we go! First, it's the Hungarian Coat of Arms.

The Holy Crown of Hungary.

You end up with a lot of flowers :).

Finally, towards the evening, we went to the festival area to listen to some Hungarian Eurovision entries like Bye Alex and Kállay-Saunders, as well as some, umm, folk techno?? Heh, no idea how to describe this music but that has to be the closest I can possibly get. A lovely, lovely day!

Mórahalom

Another day trip we did was to Mórahalom, which is also a small town close to Szeged. There's a spa there called Szent Erzsébet Gyógyfürdő and you can also catch a city train to try and spot some buffalos basking in the sun/bathing in the mud a bit further away from the downtown area (which is tiny). If you're into strudels, there's a famous strudel house called Mórahalmi Rétesház on Zákányszéki út 5 - highly recommended! We did the buffalos and the strudels first and then spent the rest of the afternoon in the spa.

Not a particularly good picture but it is the only type of picture I managed to take of the buffalos.

Pretty!

Met this one!

Julcsi met him, too!

A VERY Hungarian sight!

Strudels!

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures from the spa as I didn't want my camera getting wet/stolen, but it was nice - you'll just need to take my word for it :)!

Szegedi Füvészkert Lótusznapok = The Lotus Festival

This is an event that I wrote about earlier, too, but it's kind of turned into an annual tradition for us so I will show you the 2014 pictures as well. The Lotus Festival takes place at the Botanical Garden in Szeged and it's all about anything oriental, buddhist things, yoga, meditation, obviously the lotus flower, vegan and vegetarian food, tea ceremony...things like this. It's such a lovely thing, and I'm gutted I missed out on it this year!

I really hope we can go again next year!

Magán Zoo

Magán Zoo is a private zoo, and a very nice one at that. The animals there are mostly rescue animals, and the owner is a vet who takes seriously good care of them and actually bonds with the animals as individuals. He plays with and hugs the tigers and lions, and they purr and brush themselves against him when they see him. When we went in 2014, the zoo was located in Abony, but since then, it has moved to Felsőlajos, so unfortunately if you want to visit, you'll need to find out how to get there yourself. I think it's close to Kecskemét and that's all I know really. I know not everyone is into zoos, but my view is that it's better for an animal to be rescued and nursed back to health than be put down for no apparent reason.

So yes, the reason why we went was that we read that they had 4-month old white lion cubs that you could actually meet! We did quite a serious amount of travelling to get to see them, in fact, as the bigger part of our day was spent travelling back and forth on yet another train. It was so worth it, though! There weren't many people at the zoo at all - maybe 30 or so for the first meeting with the cubs and around 20 for the second one - and the zoo was in a really remote location, so not everyone will make the effort of going there and the animals won't be stressed out by having too big a crowd staring at them. So, you had two chances per day to meet the baby lions, Nala and Mombasa, and we stayed for both.

Milk time!

Nala liked drinking her milk like this!

Play time!

A favourite item!

A finger dummy :D.

Quite the experience! Obviously by this point, the lions were already getting a bit big for meeting people from this close up anymore.

Julcsi with one of the babies :).

So yes, I hope someone got the travel bug from this entry, too :). The next post will be about our day-cruise to Serbia, stay tuned!