May Day

Apparently the idea with these blog things is to write stuff in them. At least if I do this even nobody else reads it I can aid my declining memory about things that have happened and that I have done.
We are living in Hungary on a smallholding with goats, chickens, dogs and vegetables. We are living in one house and currently renovating the one next door so it’s going to be loads of boring stuff about building and small scale agriculture with some local colour and bits about alternative energy thrown in. We also sell houses in the area see www.ecohun.com.
As you can see on a previous posting Eva has detailed the hiding of the Easter eggs and apart from bits I can’t remember much of what happened before that, however we have had some excitement. We where invited to a May day celebration by one of our friends in the village. They had been having some work done in the morning but I and the other guest were a bit surprised to find the floors partly taken up and I ended up spending two hours welding a big hammer and a shovel doing the famous Hungarian pre-meal exorcise of ripping up a concrete floor, we ate on the veranda. It was the typical, and very good, if not exactly healthy Hungarian cuisine of meat with meat with a side dish of meat. In fact it’s what would be called in the west Goulash but in fact is a porkolt cooked in a large pot hung from a tripod over a fire. Hungarians do some excellent vegetables and vegetarian dishes but the food is decidedly meat based, probably from their time as wandering nomadic horsemen. The food was washed down with the local Palinka, a superior version of vodka, beer and the excellent local wines.
My wine cellar goes thirty metres into the hillside, unfortunately there’s no wine in it and at present I have no vines and not really enough space for them. I did however put in twenty eight vines of eating grapes the other day. Eva’s old friend Rita brought them down for me. She’s always a good source of advice on thing horticultural. Olga and Marta came as well and we had a night out doing the rounds of the wine cellars in Villany. It was busy as there was a motorcycle rally in town and all the wine cellars up and down the main road were pretty full but not so much as you couldn’t get in and as some of my favourites are the slightly more obscure ones we didn’t crowded and had a very nice evening.