Szülinapi utazásunk Spanyolországba és a repülős kaland

What does “hajnal” mean in Hungarian?

A birthday trip to Spain begins, as cheap flights do, painfully early: «Hajnalban keltünk» (“we got up at dawn”). Hajnal means “dawn, daybreak,” and hajnalban is “at the crack of dawn.”

It’s a warm, much-loved Hungarian word, a common girl’s name (Hajnalka) and a fixture of folk songs and poetry about the first light. The trip itself becomes a comedy of errors: the plane has to turn back mid-taxi because the autopilot fails. But hajnal is the word you’ll need every time a Hungarian describes an ungodly early start.