Tag Archives: Hungary

All Hallows Day

Posted on by
Candles lighting up the cemetery on Halloween in Vaszar.

Candles lighting up the cemetery on Halloween in Vaszar.

We didn’t dress up and go trick-or-treating for Halloween in Namibia, but Jack-o-Lanterns and spooky costume parties are what come to mind when I think of the time around the transition from October to November. In Hungary –and it turns out many countries in this area– it’s celebrated a bit differently and spooky costume Halloween parties have only started to become popular in the 21st century.

On 1 November, Hungarians travel to the countryside for All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day on 2 November. They visit the cemeteries where their ancestors are buried and decorate the graves with flowers and candles. It looks really beautiful at night and I took some photos when we were in Vaszar on the weekend. It was a dark night and the pictures are mostly out of focus, but I think they’re still pretty.

It turns out Halloween is a combination of the words Hallow (meaning holy or saint) and e’en (a contraction of even, which is the Scots spelling of eve or evening), and the celebration has a long Christian and Celtic folk history.

Cat vs Crow

Posted on by

Very strange. On Thursday, on my way to work I saw a cat in the park being harassed by a crow so I recorded it. Unfortunately the video isn’t very sharp because the animals were far away and I was recording them with my phone. I thought it was really funny, as if the crow had a big problem with the cat being there, meanwhile the cat completely ignores the bird.

Funniest of all, I walked the same route the next day and they were there again doing the exact same thing!

Wood Chopping

Posted on by

Last weekend we went to visit Berni’s family in Vaszar and we chopped wood for the winter. The logs were really big, so we used a hydraulic wood splitter like this one. It was still a lot of work moving the heavy logs onto the splitter and carrying and stacking the split wood into piles, and I’m told that the next step will be to axe those into smaller pieces that can be used to heat the house in winter.

Unfortunately nobody thought to take any pictures of us in action, but these two large piles were the result of our day’s work:

A large pile of wood we chopped

A large pile of wood we chopped


Another pile of wood behind the first one

Another pile of wood behind the first one

I think I might write more often about the fun stuff that happens when we go to visit in Vaszar.