!Yo Diggity!

August 20th is a holiday in Hungary. It’s Szent Istvan day (I think it is anyway - don’t quote me there). I don’t know much about it besides that. To me it seemed like a holiday very similar to the 4th of July in the US. It’s a day where everyone has BBQ’s, tents and booths are set up outside, music stages, food vendors everywhere - a big celebration!

See all the people along the side of the river!! Dang!

So after church that day, I went to lunch with some peeps. Lots of new teachers at the International Christian school were getting in so there were 5 new teachers, newlyweds Gary & Kim, and Bill and me. It was many of the new teachers first and second days in Hungary so this was really probably a lot for them to handle. New to a foreign country and masses and masses of people just everywhere. It made for some really good people watching for sure though.

This is one of those things that you hope NEVER happens to you.

One of the cool things about the holiday celebration is that they have what is called “Red Bull Races”. This is a race which is sponsored by Red Bull which involves airplanes and obstacles… some of the obstacles being the bridges across the Danube!

See the smoke - it’s from the plane on the other side which is about to come under the bridge!

Here is a photo of the parliment with some more floating obstacles that the planes would fly through.

Here’s a photo you might not see too often: the castle with a cloud of smoke in front of it.

The most well known part of this day in Budapest is the fireworks display they put on at night. It’s supposed to be one of the biggest anywhere. They shoot off fireworks from 3 of the bridges and the biggest hill on the Buda side of the river (Gellert hill). It was guessed that there were going to be one MILLION people out watching the great display. I could guess that was about right. There were just people EVERYWHERE. Kim & Gary and the teachers decided to watch standing by the river. Bill and I wanted to grab a bite to eat up by the tunnel so we parted ways. Bill saved me a seat on the grass as I went in search of food.

Well, as it got dark, everyone settled into their places for the show. The started to go off and I got a couple nice shots of the display.

Here’s some people standing outside the tunnel watching the display. I’m not sure if the sprinkles on the photo were rain drops at that point or not. But you can see the mass of people that were watching.

And then it happend. The storm came.

Not five minutes after the fireworks started it started to sprinkle. The temperature dropped and you could kind of sense a general panic. Luckily, Bill and I were really close to the tunnel so we headed there. There was about 15 seconds of panic as we got to the mouth of the tunnel and ALL these people were trying to get shelter at once. There was a bit of shoving but then there broke free a couple of paths to get through. So we were dry. But the other .999999 million people certainly were not. Everyone was soaked. No one was prepared for rain, much less the wind and storm that it turned out to be. I’ve never seen so many soaking wet, paniced people. It was sad.

Here is a shot from inside the tunnel… looks just blah and gray - because it was!!

Unfortuanately, my camera died shortly after this shot and I didn’t get any good pictures to show how wet and destroyed everyone was. Incredibly, we ran into the Gary and Kim and the new teachers as they came through the tunnel. They were soppiing wet and wide eyed. They said they were just several feet from where a tree fell on some folks. Whoa. Later, we found out that those people died. Here’s a link to the story.

The storm quit about 1/2 hour later. And Bill and I had to walk to Margrit bridge to catch a tram. We had to miss one tram because there were too many people on it and then got on with a bunch of real damp, saddened people. It was sad. I’ve never seen a storm move so fast like that. And talk about bad timing… sheesh. Everyone had crazy stories about seeing people hit by debree, etc. I feel quite lucky to have made it without a scratch and mostly dry!

Here is a picture I took from up at the castle not 2 hours before the storm happened:

Someone at work sent me this picture they got of the storm. Freaky.

Happy Szent Istvan’s Day!