Hungarians are proud of their music - and for good reason. The country has rich anddiverse music traditions that are still very much alive today.

In Budapest last week, I was invited to a performance by the Buda Folk band in a cafe.It is a traditional folk band that plays with the violin, viola, double bass, accordion andcimbalom.

The show started at about 9 pm and the program finished in about two hours, but thendifferent musicians joined in and jammed together. They played one song afteranother, as audience members sang and danced along. When I left, it was almost 4am, and they were still jamming.

Folk music in Hungary is very much dance music, and the best place to appreciate it isin the tanchaz, or dance houses, where folk music and dance are a vital part of thesocial life of young people.

The Fono music club in Budapest is the coolest club I've ever been to. As most clubsaround the world play the same kind of electronic music today for people to shake theirbodies to, Fono retains an old rural atmosphere in a 21-century metropolis with a fullhouse of young people dancing in traditional ways.

I tried to search in my mind for a similar place in China but failed. In Beijing, there areconcert halls for formal concerts, or clubs for rock gigs, but there's no place wheretraditional folk music is taken as such an enjoyable and fashionable thing.

Tanchaz originated in the countryside, but functions well in the urban environment,thanks to Hungarian musicians who went to villages to collect folk music and instigatedthe dance house movement in Hungarian cities in the 1970s.