Walking and backpacking around the Earth gives the Ivanics brothers many surprising and funny experiences. This one has its special taste of Hungarian humor.
by FERENC IVANICS
So we just left Dakhla, and were walking south along the road to Nouadibou, Mauritania. We were many thousands of miles far away from home, we were very proud of ourselves for we had managed to walk all this distance, but of course we were feeling a little bit homesick, too. In Africa we hadn’t have too many possibilities to contact our Hungarian friends due to unreliable internet cafes and not-existing contracts between African and Hungarian cell-phone service providers. So we felt a mild but permanent hunger for Hungarian words.
My brother, István spotted a really small building next to the road. Its shape looked familiar, but we didn’t really understand why. As we came closer and closer we were able to read the spray painted caption on it: FRISS LÁNGOS. We knew immediately why it looked so familiar. These types of small buildings are often used in Hungary to sell a special Hungarian junk food: lángos. So the caption FRISS LÁNGOS means that they sell fresh langosh there. We laughed out loudly, took a photo and walked on.
A couple of miles later we found a signpost, which informed us that we reached the Tropic of Cancer. Although we didn’t have any GPS’s with us, of course we knew that it had to be somewhere around there. However we expected something more than a simple signpost; though in Africa it’s not really important what you expect. On the signpost we read the message in two languages: English and Hungarian.
Holy crap, what’s happening here?! Hungary is a small country in Central Europe, we don’t have any close relationships to Africa or Western-Sahara. How come so many signs show up there in Hungarian? The answer is quite simple: Hungarian teams of the Budapest-Bamako Rally had made these jokes in Hungarian. They had left these jokes for fellow Hungarian folks. And... for you.
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