BKV vehicles are not just for stag parties anymore, apparently. Two metro drivers recently caught the metro to their wedding, except that this time it was a special train on which only they and the wedding party sat. A special train decked out in festive decorations waited for the pair at the Határ út station (where there's a third track) and took them to Nagyvarád tér for their wedding. According to velvet.hu, everyone involved volunteered their time, with the only contribution on the part of the BKV being the free use of the metro train. Considering this was the first time the cash-strapped public transport provider allowed the use of one of their metro trains for a use like this, we can't rule out if any Nokia boxes exchanged hands. We just hope that the company actually bothered to clean the car for the special occasion.

Should any of our readers not plagued by a conscience find themselves being offered a Nokia box while here in Hungary, may we suggest you wholeheartedly accept it. Following the revelation of the method by which former Budapest deputy mayor Miklós Hagyó allegedly received his graft stipend, "nokia box" has entered the Hungarian vernacular as a vessel by which to deliver bribes, to the point that a blog dedicated to what can fit into one of these boxes has been launched, as well as an instructional video by index.hu. One of these boxes can hold up to Ft 15 million (€56,000) and best of all, instead of just throwing the boxes away as people did in the old days, they'll now be reused, proving that embezzlement can also be environmentally friendly.

Like the Volt Festival before it, the annual Balaton Sound Festival has announced its headliners for this year: The Chemical Brothers, Jamiroquai and Paul van Dyk. The Chemical Brothers put on a good show at the Sziget Festival in 2007 and van Dyk stopped by Budapest last year, but honestly, we didn’t even know Jamiroquai was still around. Still, with the festival taking place on the shores of Lake Balaton at Zamárdi, it should be a fun (if a bit dated) with or without buying any vowels. [sziget.hu]

Former BKV chief Zsolt Balogh has been named as a suspect in the scandal involving Budapest public transport operator BKV, index.hu reports, based on other reports appearing in the press. Balogh recently implicated several Socialist politicians from Budapest in a confession to police. On March 6th, daily Magyar Nemzet published an interview with him in which he said that Miklós Hagyó, former Socialist deputy mayor of Budapest, received roughly Ft 70 million (over €260,000) from the company through him. Balogh added that he once gave Ft 15 million to Hagyó in cash in a Nokia phone box.

As the always-exciting March 15th holiday approaches, many of Hungary's resident foreigners will probably be planning to get out of town, both to take advantage of a three-day weekend, and also to get away from the inevitable crowds of foreigner-hating nationalists that flock to the streets each year. But this year may be different, because the same dirty külföldiek the Hungaristas love to hate may now be the only thing saving the country from demographic oblivion. Really! According to some new data from the Central Statistics Office (KSH), Hungary's population is expected to dip below 10 million sometime in June, after being clocked at only 10.013 million on January 1 of this year. Until the 1980s, the country's population was growing, then it started dropping fast, and, as tabloid Blikk explains, the only thing that has kept us in the eight-digit population club is all the foreigners who inexplicably keep moving here. And in other foreigner news: A foreign student was fined by national railways MÁV for traveling with a student ticket on December 25. A Hungarian passenger who helped out the perplexed student by paying their fine wrote to consumer blog Homár says that the woman's foreign student ID had been accepted by the MÁV cashier who sold her a student ticket, but then the ticket inspector said her IDs did not give her a right to buy a student ticket in Hungary and issued her a fine anyway. The Hungarian Samaritan also noted that his own Hungarian student ID had previously been accepted in nearly every countries where he has traveled. [homar.blog.hu] A Romanian man attacked a ticket inspector with a chainsaw on a train traveling on the Budapest-Szombathely route last Monday. The Romanian had been traveling without a ticket, and when the inspector told him he had to buy one, the man got angry, started the chainsaw he was carrying and threatened the inspector with it. The police was called, and the man was removed from the train and taken into custody in Székesfehérvár. [rtlhirek.hu] That same day, several foreign students were apprehended by the Pécs police after they were accused of shooting at some local cats with an air gun. A downtown resident had alerted the authorities, saying "someone was firing shots at a bus stop." The suspects said they were only trying to scare the animal away; there was no ammunition in the gun when it was seized. [hvg.hu/velvet.hu]

Hungarian oil and gas company MOL on Tuesday said it had a made a discovery in a block in Iraq. MOL is evaluating a promising result from a test at a well in the Akri-Bijeel Block in the Kurdistan Region. MOL plans another exploration well in the block at the end of 2010. MOL's wholly-owned unit Kalegran signed a production-sharing contract with the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq on exploring the Akri-Bijeel Block in 2007. MOL has an 80pc share of the block and Gulf Keystone Petroleum International a 20pc share.

Hungarian financial market regulator PSZAF is taking steps against banks that make it prohibitively costly for borrowers to restructure their loans, PSZAF head Adam Farkas said at a meeting of the Hungarian Business Salon on Monday. One-off charges are making it impossible for some borrowers to restructure their loans, Mr Farkas said. The law puts a cap on one-off fees for early repayment, but for other fees banks must follow the principle of charging the same fee for the same service, he said, answering a question by MTI. If banks charge several different fees for the same service, PSZAF uses the tools available to it to take action, he added. As competition grows, the cost of borrowing will fall, Mr Farkas said.

Hungary's gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 0.4pc in the fourth quarter of 2009 from the third quarter according to seasonally and calendar-adjusted figures, and fell an unadjusted 4.0pc and a workday-adjusted 4.1pc from Q4 2008, unchanged from the preliminary ones, the Central Statistics Office (KSH) said in a second reading on Wednesday. The quarterly contraction was the smallest one since Q3 2008. The yr/yr contraction slowed now for the second quarter. Hungary's GDP has fallen now for the seventh quarter in a row in an adjusted quarterly comparison, and has contracted for the fifth quarter in an annual comparison. GDP in 2009 fell 6.3pc according to unadjusted figures and fell 6.2pc according to calendar-adjusted figures. The contraction was below the official projection for a 6.7pc GDP drop. Hungary' GDP was HUF 26,095bn at current prices in 2009, and GDP per head was HUF 2.604m.

The Bajnai government has already spent about half of the budget reserves available to it in the first half of the year. The 2010 budget contains 57.3 billion forints (EUR 214.44m) of general reserves, of which the government may spend 40 percent - about 22.9 billion forints - in the first half of the year, business daily Napi Gazdasag said on Tuesday. The Bajnai government called down about 10 billion forints of the reserves when it renationalised airline Malev at the end of February. It has also taken out 800 million forints for flood defense, 500 million to raise the social ministry's crisis fund, 41 million to pay for depositors' losses at failed savings and loan Altalanos Kozlekedesi Hitelszovetkezet above the amount covered by the National Deposit Insurance Fund, and more than 50 million for purses to be presented with Szechenyi and Kossuth prizes on the March 15 national holiday, the paper said.

The situation in Hungary is "not ripe" for the euro; the European currency could only be adopted in 2015 or 2016, former central bank governor Zsigmond Jarai said in Budapest on Tuesday. Speaking at a conference of the Association of Employers and Industrialists, Jarai said that the actual situation of the Hungarian economy was worse than it appeared to be. "Hungary is kept afloat by the IMF loan," he said. Hungary secured a 20 billion euro bailout led by the IMF in October 2008 in order to avert meltdown amidst the global financial crisis. By the time Hungary has a new government after the elections in April, the budget deficit will reach the amount projected for 2010 as a whole, the former central bank head said. Jarai said that the next government would have to prepare a new budget based on "drastic" tax cuts with no delay. Hungary needs a budget that will make its economy more competitive, he said, adding that all this requires the introduction of "a fiscal dictatorship". Jarai emphasised that he expounded his own views rather than Fidesz's economic policy but added that there were some overlaps between the two. Jarai was finance minister in the Fidesz-led government from 1998 to 2001 and then headed the National Bank of Hungary until 2007.

"Hungary’s most powerful computer to date was presented to the media at the Csillebérc centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on Tuesday. It will research the genetic back-ground to asthma, allergies and leukaemia.

"Horse-racing phenomenon Overdose will race again in May, website delmagyar.hu reported, quoting its owner Zoltán Mikóczy on Monday. “Dózi” last raced on April 19, 2009.

"The surprise jump in Hungary’s inflation to 6.4% in January has made a deep impression on analysts and, as a consequence, they now project the country’s inflation path to be considerably higher in 2010 than before. The market presently sees it unlikely that the headline CPI figure will drop to below the central bank’s medium-term goal (3.0% +/- 1ppt) this year.

"It is now almost as hard to imagine MUPA without its Mood Concerts as Hungary without MUPA! Now in its fourth year, each week students from the Budapest Academy of Music and sometimes young musicians from conservatoires and regional colleges give intimate concerts around the Foyer of the Palace.

"This evening, we see three aspects of Iván Markó: Message of Angels from 2006 is about love and the experience of community, place upon on the “wings” of Bach’s music; Faun was premiered in November 2009 and is a reinterpretation of the creation by Mallarmé, Debussy and Nijinsky, while Sheherezade, dating from autumn 2007 and based on Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite, illuminates human relationships from a female perspective, within the famous tales of a thousand and one nights.

"The K & H group is transferring Ft 2.5 million to Heim Pál Hospital, from where medical instruments were stolen recently.

"Ever since the Welwyn Garden City based trio launched themselves onto the music scene in 2005, with their debut album ʻYoung For Eternityʼ, they seemed destined for greater things. Their second album in 2008, ʻAll Or Nothingʼ, ensured the band were here to stay.

Oooooh look what happened when one of us recently used the "email to a friend" function on Hungarian health portal hazipatika.com. At best their choice of verification keyword (dugott) could be translated as "screwed," though "fucked" would probably be more accurate. Either way, we'd say the prognosis is negative.

How's this for pathetic: Some as-yet-unidentified thieves have made off with a statue that is the symbol of the Heves County of Tenk. Unlike many of the statues of grim-faced politicos and writers previously pilfered in Hungary, this one depicts a young woman carrying water, and was a popular spot for locals to get married. Or we should say depicted, because by now the thing has probably already been melted down for scrap. Sad! [index.hu/tenk.hu]

Hungarian mortgage bank FHB predicts a further 9% drop in real estate prices in the country, reports napi.hu. According to FHB deputy CEO László Harmati, the most recent quarterly price index suggests that the rate of decline is slowing down, but that a turnaround might be as far away as 2011. Last year, the index indicated an overall drop in prices of 7.6%. In terms of the Budapest market, different areas of the city saw different trends, with the more prestigious areas of Buda seeing shallower declines. But drops 5%- 20% are apparent everywhere in the capital, while there are a growing number of empty rental properties and a corresponding drop in rents. Meanwhile, the economic crisis has not impacted all property segments negatively, as double-digit price increases have been common for unimproved plots of land.