We went back to Mohács again this year for the Busójárás procession. We had gone on the Saturday last year, but Sunday is the big carnival day, which we wanted to see. Unfortunately, the town was literally packed and even finding a place to park took forever, in the snow and on small streets that could barely let one car through, let alone two. It was so incredibly crowded that after the procession of hundreds of Busó, we decided to call it quits.

The small town of Mohács in southern Hungary, near the Croatian border, is sleepy until the week before Lent, when Busós wearing wooden masks and sheepskins invade the town with noisemakers and mischief. The history of the event stems back to the Ottoman occupation of Hungary in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the inhabitants of Mohács are said to have frightened the Turks away with scary masks and lots of noise. Now the celebration is for the purpose of bidding farewell to winter.

I can't even describe how difficult it was to take pictures this year at the carnival. I managed to push my way to the front of a big crowd on the street, but had some totally obnoxious guy next to me speaking a language I didn't understand with his son who kept blocking my view. Then my shutter wasn't working properly (there was a big delay, which caused me to lose some good shots), and finally, I discovered after the fact that in the beginning the lens was backfocusing. Not a good day for photography!