Really Balaton was the Riviera

They just didn’t cut the cent, like the soldiers before the dismantling, or, like school children, were not drawn on a board with colorful chalk, « ration, kettle …, vacation ». Families preparing for holidays were entered with a bullet pen in the calendar in Balaton.

• During socialism, Lake Balaton was a popular holiday destination for labor families.

• The holidays were made through trade union referrals that provided cheap and simple accommodation.

• Instead of traveling abroad, Balaton offered a resting opportunity for the socialist state.

The suitcase with a dug-in-up cardboard was closed the previous night with a smaller or larger quarrel. THE TrabantWartburg, Dacia was washed clean the next day, or if there was no car, the train tickets that are well bought well in advance were lined up on the coffee table – Don’t forget at home! At dawn, the work family started with a loud rumble on Lake Balaton, often Not with a rubber mattress rented from a state rental. The one who had not learned before, knew that the Kovács had once again managed to receive a union referral to the Hungarian Sea. And of course they were envious, but Joshua could certainly be good connections.

Because in the decades of socialism, it did not depend on money, but on the relationship and luck, who could have been on vacation, who had a place for cheap corporate and trade union holidays. For the first time in the fifties, the nationalized villas of the former aristocracy and citizenship became a short period of time for mass holidays for working families.

Later, in social work, on communist Saturdays, simple, solidly equipped corporate holiday complexes were built. Many times only bungalows, with a common dining room and a special building that provides community life, the lounge. Here was the only TV on the resort where we watched together in the evenings A who knows what or the Derrick.

These socialist state resorts sometimes reminded me of militias and school camps rather than today’s guest houses, especially hotels. The policy was more important than the guest’s comfort, for example, it was only possible to have lunch at a given time, one turn at noon and the other from 1 pm, because in the dining room, the plain was less than the referral family.

Hey, old beautiful Balaton holidays! « That’s how they remember today’s forty, but I would probably ask for themselves if they were to wait for their money now. » They would frustrate their foreheads if the apartment, the hotel, would not be the guest, but they had to be beside the wall, fearing the whims of the caretaker’s left foot.

In the party state, the working class was a prestige issue from the outset, but due to the resources available, they were able to organize it just like a working meal or House factory housing houses – cheaply and low -cost. The holiday home is in most places only He couldn’t even choose breakfast, lunch, dinner, but got what they had done in front of him, just like the school or factory canteen. Menu A and B was better offuntil one was gone.

Still, everyone could feel chosen when they came here with a trade union referral-so they called the paper, which entitled the worker to spend a week or two at the Balaton resort with his family. It was then the fact of the fact that the fact that Traveling abroad, even the Yugoslav beach really had the privilege of kissers and wealthy. Everyone else was left to Lake Balaton.

They knew nothing else, so it was a luxury when they were placed in a single room reminiscent of a dormitory and a worker accommodation, where they didn’t even have a separate toilet and bathroom, but everyone in the shared shower and restrooms. But it really barely had to pay anything for it, and the worst -looking auxiliary worker could afford it, as the state and the trade union stood most of the cost. An average family at home may have spent even more on a livelihood and overhead than you had to pay for a dotal vacation.

Anyone who stayed with the turns because he was not good with the trade union or had already received a referral last summer and did not want to stay at home under leave, could take a private room in a private house if he had money. The majority did not have. Zimmer Frei – that is, room for rent boards full of Balaton houses from the seventies from the eighties. They did not target the domestic guest circle with their prices, but money from Austria and the Federal Republic of Germany, many of the latter to meet relatives trapped in the GDR at a vacation in Hungary.