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Babel Academy 2011: the Istanbul-Dubrovnik express

The Orient Express Reporter project of cafebabel.com, which set off less than a year ago in Istanbul, Turkey, calling at several cities in the EU and Western Balkans, has arrived to its final stop in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on the first weekend of September. Babelians from all over the continent celebrated the accomplishments with the 6th Babel Academy.

Similarly to previous academies, the Babelian atmosphere was created by the polyglot crowd of 33 participants arriving from 15 different countries. The venue was no coincidence either – the countries of the Western Balkans, including Croatia, were the focus of the project besides Turkey. Timing of Orient Express Reporter could not have been more perfect, since this year marked significant steps for both Croatia and Serbia in their EU-accession process.

However, the volunteer journalist and photographers of Orient Express, in line with the best traditions of cafebabel.com’s very own “Europe on the ground” reports, have fared much further than any EU diplomat would dare: speaking to Montenegrin journalists, Macedonian documentary-makers, Serbian PR-managers and so on, they strove to present the cities they visited in a unique Babelian perspective. The end-result, 8 photogalleries and 35 articles in six languages, is available in the Orient Express Reporter section of the magazine.

Obviously, the local teams were geared up for the projects as well, organizing debates about the European integration of the Western Balkans and Turkey in five cities of the EU: Strasbourg, Athens, Sofia, Vienna and of course in Budapest too. Total number of all the debate participants was well above 500. Moreover, a photo exhibition has been organized in Paris from the pictures taken during Orient Express. Thanks to this project, two new local teams were founded, in Belgrade and Sarajevo. Next year the project is expected to continue and Budapest will be on board for sure. Details will be posted on our blog in due course.

As you can see, the editors and volunteers of cafebabel.com had a lot to discuss in Dubrovnik, but there was much rejoicing too, as evident from the video below!



Video by Lucille Caballero

I wish that at least once in their lifetime Turbo audience felt as if they were at a Led Zeppelin concert

Interview with Jero and Balázs Tanka from the band Turbo

The following amusing conversation discloses the band’s view of genres, premonitions and self-definition. Turbo is the Hungarian representative of psychedelic-progressive rock music.


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It is impossible to regulate the internet

In the past few years, the immense influence of the internet on social networks, political movements, democracy and transparency became evident. Can we explain this by the coming of age of a new online generation? Or is it just a coincidence, when modern problems meet modern solutions? With our guests from the online media, generation studies and civic movements, cafebabel.com set out to find some explanations to this phenomenon through a public debate at the Sziget festival on Saturday, 13 August.

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Spicy news: cafebabel met Hulala

By Charline Cauchie, Babel Bruxelles

Sziget Festival is an opportunity to drink beer, listen to good music, meet people from everywhere. As well as to learn more about Hungary and obviously its media. Hulala is the first Hungarian online magazine publishing in French. It was worth to learn more about the creators, Francois Leotard and Corentin Gaillard.

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Live from Sziget: The Wedding Tent

By Kristin Kruthaup, Europe&Me

Every day at Sziget Festival around 200 couples get married in the wedding tent. According to the certificate the couples promise they will be faithful to their partners at least until the end of the festival. The wedding is a hilarious, but successful idea: For the drunken people, for the burning festival loves – and for the not-only-festival couples who are not yet ready to say yes in real life.


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Live from Sziget: Interview with Fruzsina Szép

By Kristin Kruthaup, Europe&Me

Hello Sziget Festival 2011! Hello Budapest!

Kristin Kruthaup, E&M reporter has been in Budapest, Hungary since Friday to cover one of Europe’s biggest festivals. Not only is the Sziget Festival is expected to have 400, 000 visitors in total but is probably the most European one. From the Netherlands alone more than 12, 000 guests come each year. But in the festival’s John Lennon and Bob Marley street, you can also hear a lot of Italian, French, German and English speaking people.

Fruzsina Szép, 33, is the programm director of Sziget Festival in Budapest. She is an interesting mix of Hungarian-German and grew up in Munich beore moving to Budapest. For the past 12 months she has worked organising the festival with overall repsonsibility for the 1000 programs and 60 venues at the festival, she is the one who decides what is shown and who gets this presitigous invite.

Hello Sziget Festival 2011! Hello Budapest!

In collaboration with cafebabel.com Budapest team, Kristin Kruthaup, E&M reporter has been in Budapest, Hungary since Friday to cover one of Europe’s biggest festivals. Not only is the Sziget Festival is expected to have 400, 000 visitors in total but is probably the most European one. From the Netherlands alone more than 12, 000 guests come each year. But in the festival’s John Lennon and Bob Marley street, you can also hear a lot of Italian, French, German and English speaking people.

Fruzsina Szép, 33, is the programm director of Sziget Festival in Budapest. She is an interesting mix of Hungarian-German and grew up in Munich beore moving to Budapest. For the past 12 months she has worked organising the festival with overall repsonsibility for the 1000 programs and 60 venues at the festival, she is the one who decides what is shown and who gets this presitigous invite.

Read the full length interview on the blog of Europe&Me, the 6th Sense.

Hello Sziget Festival 2011! Hello Budapest!

Kristin Kruthaup, E&M reporter has been in Budapest, Hungary since Friday to cover one of Europe’s biggest festivals. Not only is the Sziget Festival is expected to have 400, 000 visitors in total but is probably the most European one. From the Netherlands alone more than 12, 000 guests come each year. But in the festival’s John Lennon and Bob Marley street, you can also hear a lot of Italian, French, German and English speaking people.

Fruzsina Szép, 33, is the programm director of Sziget Festival in Budapest. She is an interesting mix of Hungarian-German and grew up in Munich beore moving to Budapest. For the past 12 months she has worked organising the festival with overall repsonsibility for the 1000 programs and 60 venues at the festival, she is the one who decides what is shown and who gets this presitigous invite.

Danube’s finest under the spotlight

By Sonja Tadic, Babel Belgrade

While I was crossing K-hid bridge and reading welcome notes on over 10 languages I felt quite excited to be on Sziget for the first time. From the start I have subconsciously compared Sziget fest with Serbia’s Exit fest, as I am a regular visitor on Exit for more than ten years.

Initially, I’ve liked security and food check policies, because they are more liberate than on Exit fest. On Sziget you can’t bring in alcoholic beverages, but it is allowed to get in with non-alcoholic beverages and food in small quantity for your own personal use and I believe security check is more casual, because I haven’t seen any full body searches. Generally, I felt more welcome, even though I am in a foreign country.

I prefer Sziget payment system: a single festival card, which is a prepaid plastic card, over Exit token money, which is a bunch of coins for drink, so you have to plan desirable structure of your money and unfortunately, you can’t buy anything else with it. On the contrary, with Sziget festival card you can pay everything on the island: from food and drinks to all kind of festival souvenirs.

Both festivals are ranked in top five European festivals by The Independent magazine and both are held on an unique locations. The Sziget festival takes place on a Danube island in Budapest, while the Exit festival is held in fortress by the Danube in Novi Sad.

When you go around the island for the first time you may notice that tents and campers are everywhere, in some sort of chaotic neo-hippy community, but there is no crowds and quarrels, which is quite interesting. The atmosphere is pretty much the same on both festivals. Many young, friendly, smiled people eager to have a great time are creating positive aura around the whole place (no, I am not talking about huge clouds of dust). There are many various contents on the island: NGOs, theatres, museums, restaurants, bars so you can’t be bored, not for a second.

Only thing that I didn’t like is the cars and bikes driving all over the island but it’s a small sacrifice of personal convenient to overall sense of freedom of doing anything.

Show me where to sign up in a list of regular visitors of Sziget fest!

What about Europe @ Sziget?

By Senka Korac, Babel Belgrade

Europe and Sziget are similar – you can enjoy the benefits of it only if you're on the inside. This simple, but profound thought was shared with us today by Zoltan Balog, Hungarian Secretary of State for Social Inclusion at the opening of Europe Meeting Point venue at Sziget festival.

Still, this could be disputed. While Europe is not currently living it's finest days, the same could not be said for the Sziget festival. With a 19 year old tradition, this festival keeps bringing worldwide famous and not so famous musicians to Obudai island located in the middle of Danube river.

Arriving to Budapest on day 0 of Sziget festival, we had to face the stream of people going to and from the Metro station. When asked if it was because of the rush hour, Andras, president of Babel Hungary Association, simply said „No, it's Sziget“. That answer no longer seems surprising since I later discovered that Sziget has over 350,000 visitors each year for the past decade.

Cafebabel is located at the above mentioned Europe Meeting Point. You could say that we have a high-class company since our tent-mates are representatives of European consulates and embassies, as well as members of AEGEE Budapest. Next to our tent there are Corvinus Association of Foreign Affairs and Culture, Pillar European Club and a Rolling Memorial bike set up in the memory of all Roma people who died because of their origin.

Although several visitors gladly hopped on a bike, not a lot of them spent their time at the Europe Meeting Point. Not even a contest in drinking and recognizing Balkan drinks helped to increase the number of people at this venue.

After all, who cares about Europe while you're enjoying the benefits of Sziget?

Let's meet at Sziget!

That’s right, cafebabel.com gets the opportunity for the fourth time to share opinions about participatory journalism and Europe’s hottest topics with the visitors of Sziget Festival.
This year the European Union has been a sexy topic in Hungary. Festival organizers also recognized this, and that is how the Volt Festival became the farewell party of the Hungarian EU-presidency. Sziget Festival too has grown into a true European meeting point in the last 18 years, according to the organizers.

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Will there ever be a true „European identity” in the Balkans?

In the framework of cafebabel.com’s newest project ‘Orient Express Reporter’, the editorial team of Budapest invited all those interested in the EU-integration of the Western Balkans countries to a roundtable discussion on 5th May 2011. The debate entitled „European identity in EU-candidate states of Western Balkans” highlighted how the social acceptance of the EU-accession process has been lately evolving in the Western Balkans and Turkey. The obstacles setting back the birth of a real European identity - if it exists at all - were also on the agenda.

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