The last time I was in Hungary, I said the politics put a damper on the experience. If anything, they’ve gotten worse since I was last here in 2019. I don’t really want to discuss politics¹ but suffice to say I’m only back for Portal 11. Portal is a larp convention, kind of a weird mirror image of KP, and a very good corrective to that whole scene. Now that I’ve been to two of them² I’m starting to get a sense of it.

To start with, it’s definitely smaller — the last KP had nearly 400 attendees signed up, while I think this Portal topped out at about 150. It’s also far cheaper³ and as a consequence they don’t arrange food or lodging for attendees.⁴ That leads to what is one of the best things about Portal: there’s a much more diverse group of attendees than typically shows up at KP. There’s also a huge contingent from the local larp scene represented, so you get a lot of young, first-time conference attendees talking about their experiences. That’s great.

But if there’s a severe downside to that, it’s that a lot of the talks can get pretty repetitive over time. I think between Portal and KP I’ve sat through at least five different presentations on running a fantasy larp camp for kids and I have to say, there’s not a whole lot of variety in how you’d go about doing that. And I understand why that happens. You have first time presenters who often don’t know what’s come before and don’t know what of their experience is novel and interesting compared to others. And so you end up with bizarre presentations like the one titled “Design questions (advanced level)” on Sunday, where the speaker more or less directly contradicted every single principle I’ve seen espoused in larp design circles, apparently in complete ignorance that other opinions existed.⁵

I’d make suggestions about how to fix that, but I’m not sure it needs fixing. It may just be something that each larp community needs to work through, and slowly get up to speed with where the conversation is in other places.⁶ I may be struggling to get a lot out of the talks, but I don’t have to be the target audience. I mostly show up to conventions to see friends and discuss things in the hallways between sessions anyway. And I’ve been hanging around long enough to have friends nearly everywhere I go. That’s good enough for me.

I didn’t really make that much of the last time I was here. Since I didn’t know when I was going to be back in Hungary, I decided this time to see as much in and around Budapest as I could. And you might think you have a lot of time arriving on a Tuesday for a conference that starts on Friday, but by the time I booked a day-long tour on Wednesday⁷ I really only had one day to myself to sightsee in Budapest.

Budapest is one of those towns where you could spend a week or more. The architecture’s stunning; I saw the palaces the last time and this time saw the Cathedral and the Great Synagogue. And I made a point of visiting the Gellért Baths, taking up a whole wing of a once-swanky Art Nouveau hotel.⁸ But the city’s also quite touristy in a way that didn’t sit quite right with me. Every place takes Euros and often US Dollars in addition to Hungarian Forint.⁹ There’s a lot of dive bars¹⁰ and a lot of restaurants which aren’t much more than a takeout stand with some seating scattered outside.¹¹

To see more of the country, I rented a car and drove down south to Pécs, a city of 150,000 near the Croatian border.¹² Pécs is certainly smaller than Budapest, and there’s less to see, but I found it a lot more manageable. Less jammed with tourists and more relaxed, while still being historic and inviting. I visited the Victor Vasarely museum¹³ and toured the Mosque of Pasha Qasim.¹⁴

For my last couple days I drove to Lake Balaton and stayed in a spa in Hévíz. Lake Balaton is where the Hungarians hang out for the summer, and Hévíz has a well-known thermal lake which supposedly has curative powers.¹⁵ One of the many things it’s hard to wrap my head around is how important public baths were, historically. The United States never really had that culturally, except in its immigrant communities. But the growth of cities made decent sanitation increasingly critical, and until there was widespread indoor plumbing¹⁶ public facilities were were what the masses relied upon.¹⁷ We’ve lost that now that showers are commonplace. Modern public baths have become spas, where the focus is therapy or relaxation, not hygiene. So it’s fascinating for me to get these glimpses of what the world was like a century ago.

But after all that, it was time to leave. I dropped off the rental car a couple hours ago, after driving back from Hévíz to Budapest.¹⁸ I’m now in a lounge waiting for an evening flight back to the UK, where I’ll be spending a month and a birthday. It feels like every place is a parade of bad politics these days. But I’ll happily take the fecklessness of the Torys over whatever it is they have going on over here. We’re grading on a curve, these days.

Next: Birthday, 2023, London
Prev: Bratislava to Budapest

Footnotes

¹ As anyone who’s talked politics with me can affirm, this is an outright lie. I just don’t want to get into it right here, right now. It still feels a little rude to visit a country and then start complaining about the government.

That said, you really can’t separate the politics of a place with your decision to visit. Travel is a political act. I’m still trying to thread that needle.

² Last year’s was in Poland

³ Namely, free

⁴ If there’s one thing I really didn’t like, it’s that without shared meals and lodging, it’s a lot harder to just hang out with people. Random hallway conversations are more likely to crop up if everyone’s hanging out in the same area, and since you really can’t roll into a restaurant with 20 people and expect to get a table most places, you end up hanging out in much smaller groups.

⁵ The tips included suggestions like “Never design for emotional reactions” and “Always use stereotypes for characters” and “Never solicit online feedback” and “Avoid immersion at all costs.” It would have been fascinating if it was set up as a contrarian view on current larp praxis, but they gave no indication they were aware of any kind of larp design principles beyond what they had been doing in their corner of the world for a decade. Which seems baffling — we were at a larp design conference — but surely you would have contextualized your talk if you thought it needed contextualizing, right?

⁶ Not that the local scenes are unsophisticated or need fixing. But to the degree you’re unaware of alternatives you’re largely unable to articulate why you’re making different design choices. And once you can have that conversation both sides of the debate are going to benefit from it.

⁷ Running up to the Danube Bend, a pretty and scenic area near the border with Slovakia where the Danube cuts a rather distinctive semi-circle around what at one point was a lava dome from a volcanic eruption and now is a cluster of photogenic villages.

The tour ran Wednesdays and Fridays so I didn’t really have a choice if I wanted to go on it. It’s a very touristy area, but worth a day if you need a day to relax.

⁸ The Gellért Baths are nice but not super nice. They’re a bit run down with a lot of calcium stains and so you’re often admiring what they must have looked like when they were new rather than how they are now. It’s still a far better dotage than being in disrepair.

⁹ If you’re wondering where that name comes from, like I was, it originates from gold coins minted in Florence in the 1200s, called fiorino d’oro.

¹⁰ And a lot of swanky cocktail places as well, which I’m less disappointed in.

¹¹ Prostitution is also legal, and there’s a lot of strip clubs and sex shops in and around the city center catering mainly to, I assume, drunk Western Europeans. Hungary marks the first place I’ve ever been that had an escort service advertising on the free maps they give out at hostels.

¹² The pronunciation of Pest and Pécs, to this non-native speaker at least, is hard to hear clearly and harder to pronounce distinctively. I guess the pronunciations are roughly ᴘᴇsʜᴛ and ᴘᴀʏᴛᴄʜ, but every native English speaker I told I was driving down to Pécs helpfully explained it was just half the city of Budapest and I was already there.

¹³ Victor was a leader of the Op Art movement, which features geometric shapes and optical illusions. Even if you don’t know the name, you’d recognize the work. It’s been hugely influential.

¹⁴ The Mosque was built by the Ottomans when they controlled the city in 1546. It was converted into a Roman Catholic church in 1702 but still, amazingly, preserves a lot of details from the original, including calligraphy on the walls and some quotes from the Qur’an.

¹⁵ It’s the largest swimmable thermal lake in the world, and the natural springs have a high mineral content. It smells a little like sulfur and it’s also slightly radioactive. You’re not supposed to swim for more than 30 minutes at a time.

¹⁶ Keep in mind: when modern plumbing first became available for the masses, it typically involved a single cold-water tap for drinking water and maybe a sink for washing the dishes. Indoor toilets were later, and hot water taps were later still. It was well into the 1950s before you could reliably find baths in most homes in the United States.

¹⁷ There was a huge push to open public baths in the United States around 1900, on both sanitary and charitable grounds.

¹⁸ And stopping at Memento Park, where a lot of the epic Communist sculptures from around Budapest have been hauled. And it’s all, you know, bad art. But the text introducing the statues was written with all the hope and exuberance you’d imagine from a fledgling democracy, and given the subsequent decades since it opened it’s hard not to be a little depressed.