Noteworthy Globetrotters from Hungary

WorldWalk-Peacetour: a Blog of Note

Of course we must start this post by expressing our appreciation to all of you who have visited the blog in the past few days, left your comments, shouted something in the shoutbox, started to follow us, subscribed to our feeds, wrote about our project on your blogs... And we have to thank the opportunity the Blogger team gave us by picking WorldWalk-Peacetour this 20th of February as a Blog of Note. (What’s that? Blogger Buzz: Blogs of Note: 1000 and counting!) We hope this will create a healthy buzz around the brothers and their mission, and we plan to keep this blog a noteworthy one. Maybe with your help, who knows...

Hungarian Globetrotters

It’s also worth mentioning that István and Ferenc featured an article of the Hungarian edition of a men’s magazine: FHM (For Him Magazine, I suppose). In their February issue there’s an article titled “Globetrotter Hungarians”. Apart from the walking brothers Dániel Belényi writes about a Hungarian sailor and some bikers who are or once were on their way around the globe.



The WorldWalkers haven’t met them, but they did meet some Hungarians, sometimes in comic, sometimes in troubling situations. One of them was Attila, the Paper Man. The boys stumbled upon this mimer or living statue on a pedestrian street of Málaga. He was sitting on a bench covered in newspaper. In fact, he himself was covered in newspaper, even his glasses, his ears, everything. Ferenc and István thought that he was creative enough to be saved in their virtual album, so they asked him in English if they can take a photo of him. The statue answered that of course, it was OK. Then a moment later, taking off his glasses that blocked his vision, he asked them: Are you from Hungary? To their great surprise, he asked it in Hungarian... :)



And another story from one of the lowest points of the tour. The boys spent some time in El Aaiun with no cash (their balance was 3 euros—4 bucks—exactly). Their diet had been bread and marmalade for days. They were expecting some financial first aid from home but the money just didn’t want to arrive. Desperate times call for desperate measures, they decided to visit the UN’s peacekeeping mission base there. Ferenc and István were stopped and questioned by local police, but finally they sent a message to the UN troops. Anyways, a lieutenant-colonel (or colonel?) came to see them, and as they noticed the red-white-green stripes on his uniform they had no words to describe their relief. Csaba Moravek was the man who arranged that the WorldWalkers wouldn’t have any necessities while the support arrived from Hungary.

Of course, there have been many others who have helped the brothers. Hungarians or not, it doesn’t matter at all... As a final word for all of you who just have popped in and might wonder how walking around the world will bring peace, let us quote what Ferenc said in an interview for a local newspaper in Málaga:

We are Hungarians but have lived most part of our lives in the former Yugoslavia. In our small village there coexist many nationalities. Nationalities that had turned against each other in the Balkan Wars. In spite of the raging war, the community of the village kept the peace: Hungarians, Serbs, Bosnians, Croatians, Kosovar Albans condemned the war and stood out against conflicts between themselves.

It was then when we realized that peace and friendship can be maintained in a family, in a street, in a workplace; with one word: in small communities. That’s what we call micropeace, and we think that it is the real base of peace. This tour around the world is an extreme challenge, but we plan to prove that two men in good times or in bad times can stand by each other. We believe that if we stand out for each other in smaller communities, the micropeace we create will act as a building block to create something bigger, something we think is close enough to be called peace.