So last week was gay pride. It was the day after we had moved into our flat and all very exciting, except for one thing; we basically missed the whole march. We just saw the commotion to do with the police. The road was completely barricaded off and had police standing against it at every point. If you wanted to be on that road during the Saturday afternoon you had no hope without a press pass. I talked to Arnold about it the day before, interested because I’ve never lived in a city big enough to have a real march, and he expressed a view which from later research seemed to be the norm- ‘I don’t mind it, but don’t put it in my face’. Apparently, there is an anti-gay march parallel to the gay march, which gestures that this country is more conservative than I first envisioned, and there are still no marriage or adoption rights for same-sex relationships. That evening there was an after-party at Corvinteto and we headed along without much consideration. We were therefore pretty shocked when a row of policemen with shields and batons greeted us at the entrance. There was no way to get past them without a brief interrogation – “do you know what party this is?” And we were asked yet again before we were properly inside. It was very strange and made my heart beat enough for the next half hour to need a calming whisky. Once inside it was pretty normal- (from a liberal standpoint anyway) - in that there were many openly gay people about and everyone was ok with it. But the barricading at the door hints at some bubbling tensions within the social life of Hungarians that I still haven’t got to the bottom of.
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