It has become a recurring feature of the summer that journalists from the capital travel to Lake Balaton, its most expensive corner, have a good time, and then write that the Hungarian sea is priceless for a single Hungarian. Written by Ábel Bódi.
Crisis here, Covid there, it's hard to count how many years we've been hearing that Lake Balaton is unaffordable, the Croatian coast...!
Ever since bread cost 3.60 forints and ice cream 50 fils, since then the one-time journalist's life has been nothing but going down to the Hungarian sea and lamenting how expensive it is for the "little citizen" to vacation there. It usually looks like they drive down, hop on the most expensive paid beach on the lake and gobble up the most expensive food.
They don't even think that an average outing is not what they imagine in the cool inner gangs of the boulevard.
Lake Balaton has never been cheap since the end of the unsustainable state-socialist planned economy, in which prices could be kept low, since everything from hotels to raw materials delivered to restaurants was priced by the state.
And for the Kádár comrades, it was important that the people did not lose sight of the flames and the beer, because in the end it would turn out that the whole economy was a balloon.
Then came the compromised market existence, and prices suddenly shot up, since the entrepreneur's approach is to stay alive and make a profit, and from the latter, he collects as much as we pay for his product. If you can sell the flame for over HUF 1,000, so that the cost of the raw material and the rent are negligible in comparison, why not do it? Out of what kind of heart should you take it out on yourself?
And the truth is, beachgoers pay those prices. No one is holding a gun to their head that you have to eat flame or heck. But we don't buy and eat these at the water's edge because we want to satisfy our hunger. We know it the way we've been doing it for decades: food and drink in cooler bags, picnics on the open beach and the rest. Well, if the well-informed journalist did the math, it would turn out that a day spent on Lake Balaton for a family of four would not cost 52,000 but, in the worst case, 15,000 forints, which is roughly ten euros per person.
On the other hand, there are the beach buffets, where you don't buy food, but an experience. It's a big difference, because I doubt that the majority of readers usually eat langoustine or heck elsewhere (well, at fairs) besides the beach. These are part of the Balaton experience (!).
At the end, I would like to leave just a few questions as a reminder. Why does it cost as much as it does? Why isn't Lake Balaton a "free sea" where you can enjoy the azure water for free and with no rent? Because nothing is free.
On a free beach, who mows the grass, who digs the bed so that we don't fall into the mud, who picks up the litter and trash? The municipality? So should the locals pay for the happiness of vacationers from all over the country? Maybe it should be so hot that the buffet closes after the season, because it won't be taken out until the following May?
I won't even get into that, what a twisted example, if we consider that a family of four goes to the lake by car for a day from Nyíregyháza, and there they scatter the money like there's no tomorrow. Well, yes, so I can even calculate hundreds of thousands of costs for the beach in Gergelyiugornya.
