(Vending machines of Hungary)
….or to be more precise, no further than Budapest!
The machines of Budapest that we snapped were all pretty modern. There’s no overt ‘ostalgie‘ equivalent here, hardly surprising given the brutal soviet response to an early independence bid. But there is a very well kept ‘retro‘ (translation: everyday life under communism) museum.
It’s here we were able to grab a limited selection of retro machine snaps and discover the ‘Sport szelet’ (“Sport slice”) which I don’t think I would have heard about otherwise. Oddly for a brand now owned by global conglomerate, it seems to have a timewarp website stuck in 2015 here, missing out the more recent development that saw this 1953 founded chocolate lose its traditional wrapping. I’ll stop talking and show you;
As you can see there’s some fancy packaging going on around Xmas time, but the trad packaging in the top 2 pictures sadly bit the dust in 2024, just a year after the 70th anniversary. The retro museum had a cabinet dedicated to it;
They’d returned to the old style logo for the final run, and they were replaced with the usual flow-wrapping…
But what does it taste like? Er, sort of a rum flavoured truffle bar. There’s a homemade version recipe here although no disrespect to Aliz, I’m not quite sure where the biscuit comes from unless it’s really finely ground in the original so much you can’t detect it, but why not give it a spin anyway?
Old Hungarian payphones? We got em!
Old parking meter? Just the one!
Just for reference 5 Forints is about 0.2p, more or less, at the time of publication!
From the retro museum, here’s a lotto generating machine (2 digits at a time) and a lotto postbox. Retro is fine but let’s go for a walk, see if we can’t find something retro that’s still in use. Telescopes are usually good for this…
I would love to know how much this cost to run when first built! It’s currently about 45p a go.
Coin squishing machines are also popular; of course, no-one carries the low denomination coins you sometimes need to insert on the UK versions of these type of machines so it uses a ‘slug’ instead;
In fact it’s not just coins that seem rare, nearly every machine is card enabled!
The same ‘vending shops’ we’ve seen in Portugal are popular here too;
And here’s some very old street furniture re-equipped for the 90s!
Custom postcards…
…and notebooks!
And a photo finish! A modern production made to look retro but nice to look at nonetheless.
But, not without some surely soviet era street furniture?
See you in Malta!