Saturday was a very exciting day. It was the day of the mangalica festival. I have been excited about this festival all week, and there were several instances at the party on Friday night of someone mentioning the festival, followed by my excited chanting of "pig, pig, pig." Seriously, I was very much looking forward to this festival.
And I was not disappointed. It took place near Parliament, a fantastic building that, up to this point, I had only seen from across the river. This was also the first day where we had real snow, which was good and bad. On the plus side, snow! On the other hand, cold...

Everything looked really good with the snow. And it had been cold anyways, so I still count the snow as a win. The above is the view from the metro stop, the pig festival itself was about two blocks away, in a cool looking square centered around an obelisk.

It was a very classy looking square, currently filled to the brim with all sorts of stalls.

There was a great variety of stalls. Most of the stalls sold food of some kind. There were lots of various sausages and other smoked pork meats to take home. There was more cheese for sale in this market than I've seen in my entire time in Budapest. There were hot sausages, ready for consumption. There were more elaborate preparations, which looked to be from stores who had set up shop in the market. There were non-food stalls, not nearly as exciting, selling a variety of goods. And there was that theater, which you can see in the lowest picture above. When I first walked in there was a singer singing with a recorded accompaniment, but for most of the time there was no one performing there and they were just playing popular American songs from various decades. It was an interesting mix, this being a festival in the capital of Hungary to celebrate a uniquely Hungarian breed of animal that produces Hungary's favorite meat, and yet the music they played was almost exclusively American.
Anyways, I had only eaten a bowl of granola before showing up, so I was hungry and ready to eat. I arrived with one friend (the disapproving-looking individual in the leftmost photo), much earlier than anyone else, so we spent a good deal of time walking and eating. We first did a loop of the market, scoping things out. In the course of this, we discovered a stall filled with some of the mangalica themselves.

They come in a variety of colors, as you can see, are always covered in this wiry, curly hair, and get to be quite large. Our curiosity as to the nature of the pigs sated, we then made our way back to the entrance of the festival in order to start eating them. First was a delicious sausage sandwich: a hot sausage/hotdog (it was more of a combination of the two than the large, fatty beast that is called a sausage here), on a toasted bun, topped with fried onions and some brown mustard. It was delicious. This was accompanied with a large, steaming, delicious glass of mulled wine. After more wandering, and the discovering of an entire avenue of cheese stalls, we bought a grilled cheese. That is, the cheese itself was grilled (think paneer or halloumi) and then put on a piece of toast. It was delicious, warm, chewy, and having a slightly gouda-y taste that was interesting. They also called it grill sajt, for some reason combining the English word for grill with the Magyar word for cheese.
There was more walking, more discovering of areas we had missed in our first loop, including passing this:

We weren't quite sure whether these were just for show or would be eaten. Later in the day, there was only one of them left, so it's definitely possible that one of the stalls was selling them. In which case, I'm disappointed that I missed them...
After more wandering, we found another delicious looking dish. It was basically crepes filled with a tsatziki-like sauce (it looked yogurty and contained dill), topped with a combination of bacon and onions. It was delicious, but my favorite part might have been the dough. It wasn't thin and pancakey like crepes are, it was thick and substantial. It reminds me very much of something I've had before, but I can't remember what. It wasn't sweet at all, it was good and hearty. Perfect for filling with things.
After finishing this and making one final loop, we finally ran into other people from BSM in the market. They were, as should be expected, eating lunch. After this, we wandered around with them for awhile, eating a little more. At this point, everyone started showing up, so we ran into many many people. More mulled wine was had and then the most exciting food of the day. A group of us wandered over to near where the pig stall was and found a wonderful, wonderful dish.

Note the happiness on my face. That's a bread bowl filled with very hot, very delicious, slightly spicy pork and vegetables, tender and wonderful. There was an incredible amount of pork fat in it, deliciously rich. We're thinking that the meat in the bowl was possibly from the head and face of the pork, because we saw some heads in the stall we bought it from and the fat could very well have been cheeks. Now, as I didn't plan this out very well, this was my fourth dish. I could not, in no way, finish this, so I offered it to everyone I could find. Everyone tried it, and realized it was delicious.
This was the last of the food I ate here, though I did pick up two different types of cheese, one a nice trappist cheese, trappist as in the monks, like the ones who brew beer in Belgium, and one the cheese that is used for grilling. I then picked up a think of sausage, spicy according to the shop owner, and a slab of bacon. It was just a one-pound straight up slab of bacon, the kind you have to cut pieces off of. I had a little bit of it this morning for lunch...it was delicious. And rendered down quite a lot....there's a lot of fat in it. Delicious though.
At this point I had been here for around two and a half hours and everyone else was starting to wander out, so I took my leave from this magical place. I was always freezing at this point, so I was fine with heading out.
I spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing, and ate a small, late dinner consisting of granola, yogurt, and an open faced nutella sandwich. I then met up with some of the guys on the program, the guys I had played Magic with, to play a card game called Race for the Galaxy. I had never heard of it before, but they had been singing its praises since we got here, so I decided to give it a try. It's a very good game, one that I figure I will play much of in this semester. Unlike Magic, you don't need your own cards, there's one deck that everyone plays from, which is very nice.
So that was my Saturday, a day of pigs, food, and cards.