If It's May, It's Soup

The way you can most safely predict the first real summery weekend of May in Budapest is by checking the date of the soup day held at the Finnish embassy-  the method has been working wonderfully in the past four years, it worked just as splendidly this time, and will hopefully stick to the trend in the future.

This year’s menu included the now classic (and classically excellent) salmon soup alongside what was described as a Finnish apple-oat-dessert, a culinary phenomenon which met with mixed reviews- I personally loved it and would recommend it to anyone, but then again, I am a liquorice fiend, so my tastes might not be the best indicator of how palatable Finnish food is to the wider public.

Given the previous incidences of what Finns would call insufferably hot weather, lemonade was also on offer, alongside karelian piirakka and coffee from fekete. The latter two are of course welcome irrespective of weather.

It’s also noteworthy that, unlike many undertakings happening in the wild East, the organizers of the event actually strive to improve every year: as the number of people in attendance grows exponentially, this year the payment was made separately at two counters, and you only needed to hand over your coupons once you got in the food queue- which was nevertheless longish, but absolutely bearable.

Other snippets of entertainment included a DJ, chalk drawing, treasure fishing and mölkky (one of those throwing stuff at stuff games for which the Finns quite naturally use small logs)- of these activities we cannot say much, however, because they were either age inappropriate or deemed to be too tiring after a serving of soup and dessert. I was however on the verge of buying an Angry Birds booklet, but I decided that collecting Panini stickers has exhausted my infantile quota for some time to come.