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„Economy is in change, culture is forever”

A conversation with Dragostin Ivanov was the perfect example of how points of view structure the world. Hungary has a totally different meaning for the young Bulgarian than for most Western expats. According to him, our little country is much more Western in certain terms than we Hungarians have imagined, and connections between our homelands are deeper than one would think. It also turned out that Drago means ’nice’ rather than ’dragon’, and in his home town we can find a museum of one of the greatest Hungarians, Lajos Kossuth.

A graduate of political science, Drago is an observant member of any society, admitting that discoveries about his home country were the main reasons for leaving it. Right after finishing university he was offered a job in Budapest, so he just took it after recalling good old tourist memories about the Hungarian capital. Now he has the chance to work mainly in the French language for a company in Budapest. It may have been the French High School or the Erasmus semester in Brussels, but something keeps him looking for a brighter perspective all around the globe. Today in Budapest, tomorrow maybe somewhere else.

cafebabel.com: Why did you decide to challenge yourself abroad? Once you told me „I don’t consider myself an ’economic immigrant’, rather a ’cultural immigrant’.” What does that mean?

Drago: After spending my university years working at home, I suddenly felt the need to go abroad. I cannot explain how I ended up in Budapest, I just recieved this opportunity and accepted it. As a matter of fact I earn less money here than I would in Bulgaria, but it is not always about the money. At some point I started to feel very bored and annoyed back home, because of things about the society I don’t really understand and cannot accept. I think Bulgarian society is still in a period of big changes, in terms of political and social reforms we are relatively ten years behind Hungary. The economic and political situation make people depressed and nervous every day, they get too agressive and we also have serious problems with organized crime. Even though these things don’t affect me directly, it was very sad to see what is going on every day. Life is too short! Probably my country will develop in some years, but I cannot wait so much. I prefer to enjoy my life right here right now, I don’t want to fight with windmills. I know that the place doesn’t really matter, you cannot escape from your problems, but this is not my issue: I escaped from the problems I can escape from. Sometimes I feel homesick, but after spending a short time at home close to reality, my nostalgia moves away.

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Crisis Versus Higher Education

This post is also available in: Hungarian

The indirect impacts of the economic crisis have reached higher education as well. It is a general tendency to increase tuition fees both in Europe and overseas. University research programmes, which usually do not even contribute to the growth of GDP, are many times stones round the necks of countries with bad economic situation. Therefore, recession has opened debate about the role and importance of higher education. Do universities make an ivory tower of science or a production line serving the labour market? Does the appearance of consumer culture on campuses lead to an increase in quality or rather to the overturn of the teacher-student relationship? What is higher education about at all and who should pay for it?


'Battle of Ideas'
, a festival organized annually in London, focused this year on the most vital questions concerning higher education. We had the opportunity to listen to a debate titled 'What is higher education about and who should pay for it?' at the festival’s fellow event organized at the Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University on October 17.

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Sergei Miroshnichenko: Born in the USSR

This post is also available in: Hungarian

Writers in America after World War I were called as the lost generation, relating to their endless, general disillusionment, since the war ended the happy times of peace – and their illusions, too. The Russian director, Sergei Miroshnichenko made an original film series about the „last Soviet generation” born in 1983 and does not leave any doubt that every large historic event raises a new lost generation, no matter which country is spoken about. However, the Russian director thinks about those of his own not as the ones who are lost, but he sees in them the hope for change. We met Sergei Miroshnichenko on the IXth Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival held at the beginning of November in Budapest.  

Along the lines of the British Up film series, your film series, Born in the USSR is also shot in every 7 year following the life of children since 1990, when they were 7. Why did you choose this form of story-telling?

There is a Jesuit saying: give me a 7-year-old child and I will say what kind of man he will be. The personality of a man is already formed in this age, and it changes in every 7 year. For example, the age between 21 and 28 is very determinant in our lives, some philosophies say that this is the age of embodiment. It is important that these participants do not become actors, because they forget about the film during the 7 years. In each 7 year the shot lasts 4 days so they do not get used to the camera. In the film all of them get only 11 minutes in which we have to condense 7 years.

How did you select the participants?

The only common thing in their life is that all of them were born in a country that does not exist anymore: in the Soviet Union. And all of them were born in 1983. At the casting, 18 children were selected out of 2000 7-year-olds, and the main criterion was that they must be able to speak in front of the camera. They are already 28 years old and their lives have changed in very different ways, many of them live in faraway countries. In fact, this film series has become a kind of sociological research, and is not exactly about happiness. Out of the 18 people only 4 has a strong, cohesive family. Some of them are raising their children alone, some of them are divorced. One-third of the participants face with psychical crisis, alcohol- or drug problems. But still we are lucky that all of them are alive: according to the statistics one fourth should not be.

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Slow down, Budapest!

This post is also available in: Hungarian

Praise for the art of slow life gets more and more followers, and in Budapest this is encouraged by local movements based on international model. As usual in bottom-up communities, those interested in slow do not have to conform to strict rules and ideologies. That is why an apolitical, atheist young person in Budapest can start to believe in it.


How slow is that! – we could hear this sentence several times on the picnic organized by Slow Budapest movement started this summer and Möbelkunst, a company dealing with recycling and renewing old design furniture. This was one of the launching events of the Design Week 2012, which set slow philosophy into focus. The compliment was given to the mood conjured by the joyful, cool jazz, the homemade delicacies, the ’lecsó’ (Hungarian kind of ratatouille) made of locally produced ingredients, the fresh lemonade and the Hungarian wine drink, Fröccs into the factory site of Möbelkunst. But travelling, raising children, eating, cities, cinema, design or even emailing can be slow, too. It is essential to encourage thinking over and decelerating our accelerated lives. As Nelli, one of the founders of the Slow Budapest movement, says when asked for an exact definition of slow: „Deceleration is only a tool, the aim is to build quality relationships among people,  to discover the power of communities and to create a meaningful life”.

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Who cares about politics?

This post is also available in: Hungarian

What are the chances of young people getting involved in politics? Is it boring? Or interesting? Only those deal with it who are really passionate about politics? Or should we all be interested because it is our responsibility? Questions like these were answered by our French and Belgian guests on the last day of Sziget.

We return right back to the starting point: what is politics? If it is what it is, why does not everyone take part in it? Why does not everyone have an opinion, take a stand, debate or have a say in public affairs?  Vincent, a PhD student at the University of economics of Budapest, says that the society was push to become apolitical. For example, he mentions the alienating techniques of the Kádár era to depoliticize the society: "don't care about politics, we will provide you what you need" . This depoliticization was accented with the false illusion of individualism promoted by capitalism and consumerism.  According to him, we manage to make the people, in particular the youngest, to believe that politics only consists on elections and the party system. Despite this he thinks that the Hungarian youths can be and will have to be repoliticized soon considering the upcoming crises.

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Glance at the Sziget beyond the concerts

This post is also available in: Hungarian

Similar to last year there were surprisingly lot of people at the Hungarian „Sziget” festival who, beside the concerts, also wanted to take part in cultural programmes - fortunately they could choose among many.

We were headed for Hajógyári Island and found the high quality programmes this year again on the Civil Island. The organizations camping here waited for the people interested with interactive games, quizzes, gifts, and because of these there were a fair number of people. With this place maybe only the Museum Quarter could compete. Here the museums were not only represented by volunteers joining for the Sziget, but also permanent colleagues of the museums, who seemingly were experts in what was shown by them in the Sziget, and their enthusiasm was sticked to us, too.

The Ability Park lost nothing, either, from its popularity last year, here we could again had the experience how the disabled people get along in everyday life.

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File Sharing and Plagiarism

This post is also available in: Hungarian

The Copyright Violations of the 21st Century

In the age of the Internet it is getting more and more natural to download and freely use available contents, although most of the texts, films, videos and pictures on the internet are under copyright protection. But many of us do not know or do not want to know about this.

On the second day of the Sziget Festival 2012. we invited Anett Pogácsás, associate professor at Pázmány Péter Catholic University and Péter Mezei, lecturer at University of Szeged to enlight the audience about artistic works and their legal violations via a questionnaire compiled by the professors. (The questionnaire can be filled in here.)


cafebabel.com: What is a creative work?

Péter Mezei: According to the law any work of individual-original nature can be considered as intellectual work. There are some cases, however, when this wording does not give a clear guidance. The question is complex because different problems can emerge depending on the type of the work. For example, in the case of John Cage’s performance, when he sat down to a piano and performed nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, we cannot talk about creation in the traditional sense. So if I repeat it, it cannot be qualified as a copyright infringement. Another vivid example is photographing. The technology is easily accessible, anyone can take photographs nowadays. Therefore, this kind of clicking is not of original-individual nature, while photos for which the location and the lights were set, can be more easily qualified as creative works. While technology is developing and becoming more and more accessible, copyright protection pertaining to photographs has been decreasing.

Anett Pogácsás: Luckily, copyright does not depend on taste or quantity, so even a two-line child poem can be regarded as such. But words cannot be monopolized, otherwise we would run out of them sooner or later. In case of disputes it is the Copyright Expert Body that takes the decision. Individual means that you made it, and originality is not necessarily the same as new. In this case it is not the original idea that matters, but the implementation.

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Getting down and dirty on Sziget

This time we went on-the-ground – literally

Let there be no mistake – camping is the best way to completely enjoy all one music festival has to offer, especially if it's integrated with other venues, as is the case on the Sziget.

And this year we couldn't have asked for a better weather. It was dry and sunny, yet not too hot, which was probably the perfect present to the organizers for the 20th jubilee of Hungary's biggest music festival.

But (yup, here comes the infamous 'but'), the 380.000 people that roamed through the Hajógyári Island during the festival helped to create the large cloud of dust. It didn't help that the dirt paths were occasionaly watered in order to prevent further dust pollution. By the end of the week, quite a number of visitors were protecting their faces with masks or bandanas.


While the dust covered all the tents with an „extra layer“, it also unveiled one huge oversight organizers made – inadequate shower facilities.

„It  took us  two hours on Thursday to get into a shower cabin. That's longer than any concert on the Sziget lasted and even longer than it would've taken us to go to Budapest downtown and back again to the island“, says Maria from Serbia.

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Goran Bregovic: Balkans is everything but cool!

This post is also available in: Hungarian

If you would have to put a face to the Balkan music, an average European will most likely think of Goran Bregovic. The producer, composer and the leader of Wedding And Funeral Band has been featured as one the headliners of the Sziget festival several times until now. Talking to cafebabel.com reporters before his performance he commended the festival for not only featuring the mainstream music, but other stuff, as well. 

When it comes to music, people tend to think that everything is on MTV. Of course, that's not the case. Different people listen to different music. The world is curious and smart. That's why people travel from all over Europe to come to Sziget and hear unordinary things. Only naive people think that TV features all of the music. For instance, I sell millions of records and I'm never on TV.

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Entrants to the job market in Hungary worth less than the minimum wage

This post is also available in: Hungarian

In theory, the minimum wage is good for the employee and the employer. The employee gets declared, he will be entitled to free medical care, have pension later while the employer is happy that the ever more alert authorities won’t take him to task for undeclared work. The aim of the government is to achieve that those hundreds of thousands of families being on the dole would go to work instead, which means constant professional development and regularity in family life, so that neither the adults nor the kids get wasted. The aim is noble.

Twenty countries of the European Union use minimum wage, including Hungary. Normally, its amount is determined by the inflation changes, so in Hungary, it grows year by year. From 2011 to 2012 the gross income grew by a thousand forints (3.5 euros) to 93,000 forints (326 euros). In 2010 it was only 78,000 forints (275 euros), but tax laws changed since then, so it needed to be increased to remain realistic. Today the net income is 60,915 forints (215 euros), less than 400 forints (1.5 euros) per hour, the price of two giant Túró Rudis (the popular Hungarian chocolate coated cottage cheese sticks). Especially in the capital, this amount is enough for nothing. Half of it is spent on food, the other half for reside, and forint countings are guaranteed at the end of the month.

"Jovenes sin trabajo y sin futuro"

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