On my first morning in Budapest I became aware of exactly what a marvellous and varied event is the Sziget Island (aka Pepsi Island) music festival starting the next day. Not only music, it had hundreds of performances of art, dance, theatre, live outdoor art, pyrotechnics, puppet shows etc. In addition to big pop stars like the Cure and Sterio MCs (who I was not interested in) there were also hundreds of fantastic folk music and world music acts like Cesaria Evora, Radio Tarifa, Boban Markovic (from the movie "Underground") and a great spectrum of Balkan and local cultural groups that people danced traditional circle and couple dances to. The only problem with this festival was that for ten hours a day for one week there was at every moment twenty concurrent happenings, continual stationary projects in interactive instillation art and body movement, huge adult jungle gyms including twenty meter climbing awalls, bridges and ziplines, fifty meter bungee jumping, and all kinds of other things I can not name and did not do. It produced in me serious feelings of schitzofrenia and overchoice. Day passes were 12 USD (12 Euros) and week passes were 60 USD.

Check Out the Online Sziget Music Festival Schedule

On the first day of the festival I rode in the subway car next to a Hungarian girl I did not speak to but could tell was looking at me in the glass across from us. Arrving in the station I hurried out of the train and up the escalator, sensing all the while that she was on the other escalator behind me, smiling at this but then at the top of the escalator forgetting about it as I got off, looked at my map and she suddenly approached me asking if I needed help finding something, asking me first in Hungarian then in English. Anita Rajhart, a very sweet girl, explored the festival with me that first day, we really hit it off and after a couple of days I moved out of the hostel and over to her place to save money. She had a lovely little studio flat in the middle of zone six and each day was an adventure of going back and forth to the festival, dancing, getting to know each other despite language difficulties (I knew no Hungarian and her English as rarely used and not huge). Peeling myself away and onto my roundezvous with Sara Pillhofer in Vienna was not easy but in the end I left on a noon Friday train.