10+1 Hungarian customs that everybody else finds weird

Read a list of unique habits and behaviours Hungarians have that sometimes freak out our non-Hungarian friends. Does your family do any of these? What do you find the weirdest?

The French eat snails, Americans buy weapons in grocery stores, and Italians close their shops in the early afternoon. Each nation has certain habits or customs that others find highly unusual or just plain weird. These quirks are the things that make our world colourful and fun, and they should be celebrated more often.

A few habits of Hungarians that might be surprising to others:

  1. Hungarians have chicken feet in their soup on Sundays, and they actually eat it. (We also probably watched our grandma cut that chicken’s neck earlier in the morning.)
  2. Mentioning Transylvania at dinner sets off a twenty-minute rant about the Treaty of Trianon, and how half of Europe should “belong to” Hungary.
  3. We call a 79 km-long lake the Hungarian Sea, even though we can practically swim across it.
  4. We can open a bottle of wine with only a screw and a pair of pliers.
  5. We call a triangle-shaped cheese that comes in a circular box a cheese cube.
  6. We are convinced that a shot of pálinka or a glass of forralt bor [mulled wine] is much better for our cold than taking medicine.
  7. We argue that Hungarian women are the most beautiful in the world, even though they have never won any Miss World competitions.
  8. We have already produced palinka of every fruit and vegetable indigenous to your region.
  9. We make good use of folk traditions. For instance, if the Euro-Forint exchange rate drops on the day of Medárd, then we will not buy because it will probably keep dropping for another 40 days. (The old folk observation goes: if it rains on the day of Medárd (the 8th of June), then it will keep raining for 40 consecutive days.)
  10. Every fable and bedtime story we have is about little girls getting eaten, pouring boiling water on wolves and then killing them, or piglets getting eaten and poisoned by an albino girl.

10+1. We teach children nursery rhymes about snails whose houses are burning down, mutilated cows, storks with bloody legs, crows with their eyes clawed out, and lambs that simply froze to death back in the gardens.

 

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