The fall riot season

It seems there were some minor upheavals here in Budapest last Saturday. We were in much of the day to catch up on some work, when it became noticeable that the helicopter high up over our neighborhood wasn't going anywhere. I can't say how long it was there, maybe an hour or so drifting around mainly overhead. Meanwhile more and more sirens were darting around. Because ours and most of the buildings around here are 5-7 stories there isn't a lot of visibility. It was a time one would normally turn on the news for any breaking stories. We don't have the cable hooked up, so no TV for us and English radio is very intermittent. I recalled a story I'd read in the paper a few days earlier about the mayor of District V being concerned about possible clashes coming from opposing marches planned for Saturday.

Over the next hour or so I was able to find several breaking stories posted on news websites, first in Hungarian (in which I loosely translated the ones accompanying photos of police in riot gear and other turmoil), then in English, all of which were confirming the opposing march violence theory. Finally by around 8PM the police sirens had died down and this all clear was posted on Pesticide, an informal English language Budapest website. 

The extremely brief version of the scoop is that there are some extremist 

right-wing groups (Hungary for the Hungarians, down with the WWII treaties which gave up a lot of the old homeland to surrounding countries, down with immigrants, down with the Roma, etc.) here in Hungary that have been increasingly vocalizing themselves over the past couple of years, against which some leftist organizations are starting to reformulate themselves. They are organizing to oppose the discrimination and racism that they see as a growing threat to national unity. Well, Saturday they had simultaneous marches that finished very near each other, and our apartment. Apparently some clashes broke out between the police and the Right-wingers and things were thrown, violence escalated, tear gas was sprayed and fire hoses were squirted before it all disipated.

We had a wonderful late dinner at a bar/restaurant called Dupla a few blocks away that night.