end of summer blues?

So Marta & Domentx has been around now for 9 days. It was a bit chaotic that 20th of August... I was cooking and bedmaking all morning as far as I remember even had a haircut at Csilla's before Timi called for me at 5pm. We made it in 2 hours 20minutes from Petőfi 71 to the Metro terminal in Budapest via the very quiet new motorway.
I watched the scaled-down fire-works (there was a public outcry for spending all fire-works money on the Hungarian flood victims - Pakistan wasn't in the news those days - a private company provided the fire-works for free, apparently. The rockets etc were going off from 3 boats on the Danube, so the firemen didn't have to attend to Gellért hill on fire, as they usually had to.) from Marta's it was great to see some of her family.
Going home on Monday, after a quiet couple of days at anyu's was not as smooth, with more traffic and road closures.
Alan looked after 11 people meanwhile...
Bit by bit we shedded the crowds, wwoofers gone, and a couple of late-booker one-nighters yesterday, so now it's just us and as the first line... they did a bit of fare-well lunch, as they are also leaving tomorrow, a nice bottle of wine and a weird sea=food paella made from and instant tin with roasted vermicelli bits instead of rice, very interesting...
The weather turned - Alan was lucky to bring down the hay before it started to rain. he's got red eyes again - it was very hot and humid the last few days before this rapid change. We took down the two little-big billygoats to Erzsi's who are happy for the extras and do all the work, we can collect the lean curry meat - sorry, this is what farming is about...
Meanwhile we managed to fit in a bit of the Adult Puppet Theatre festival of the Capital of Culture on Thursday; by accident we caught a 5pm performance by a French company doing Moby Dick in sort of English; it was very good with live cafe-house music and good puppets and actors. It was a (groovy olde worlde) tent, very very hot. Same day at 8pm we saw the long awaited Vietnamese Water Puppet Theatre in the Ice-skate rink, we were given cushions which is lucky as the concrete steps where we sat were still hot from the sun. It was interesting, again, the music was half of the show. The dragons snaking-dancing about blowing fire and water alternatively were very impressive indeed.
We plunged into it - bought our Florida tickets! We'll be at Martin's and Sharon's on and off from 23rd of November till 13th of January, poor things. We even have our Authorisation! All we need is now insurance and a proper plan of action while There.
Timi and Feri will look after our place, we think it should be ok, they have family backing here in the village to help them.
We haven't had much of a response from the house-sitter ad.
As we are happier with letting the water down to ensure that no pipe freezes, we'll have to close the hostel, not that there would be that much interest in those winter weeks...
And now off to help with the salad, Marta and Domentx's last night, we are getting Catalan omlette...

Timi is standing as mayor!

... which is good news, except she'll have no time for giving us lifts if she's elected. A bloody difficult job, we just had Tamas's farewell do and he explained for two hours why the next mayor will have a hard job. Mostly: the central funding for villages dropped one-third, families are sliding to money-uncertainties, people are less tolerant with each other... anyway, Timi convinced me to stand as councellor, and I said I would. With today's talk of difficult times and no remunerations, there probably won't have enough people standing to have a competition... there as a free meal with wine
at the standing-down do, so things can't be that bad...
We are having a returnees' week, we have two Sweedish girls who were here last August and requested lunch with monks' ears for Emma's birthday today, which must have made a made a big impression on her last time... also we had Linda, who's the mother of a wwoofer who was here 3 years ago and an English couple one of whom was here last November. We also have an outstandingly good looking Christopher from Wales, who helped Alan to fix a few loose roof tiles as well as together with Linda, looked after Zoltan, getting him to talk and were here for new arrivals, while we were gallivanting in Pecs eating lots of cakes with the wwoofers, as we missed our day out last week, or it seemed like if we did...
I am off to Budapest tomorrow for three days, as I am getting a lift off Timi, who is going to a belly-dancing seminar(!) with the long waited return of Domentx and Marta Alan and the wwoofers will have to breakfast 7 guests and themselves on Saturday morning. It is supposed to be a bit quieter next week... lots of good pictures are coming from people, I'll do a bit of editing when I get round to it.

still busy

sorry about unusually patchy postings - we had hardly a day without new arrivals or departures, very exiting times. We were lucky, as we had a stand-in pair of wwoofers from Israel, who were permanent world-travellers. They did lots of good work, catching up with stuff Alan couldn't do because being frustratingly indoors with his allergy playing up so badly. We had a few waves of oz hostel-guests, some of whom also insisted on putting in some work - thanks for finding good sticks and tying up the tomatoes dear James). Managed to make yellow plum preserve, sorrel was found on the upper field and was processed, onions were chopped and preserved ready for Hungarian dishes.
We had the 8 English girl-guide leaders, the bogracs project worked quite well, we ended up eating it for days. We just had an e-mail, they won a handsome award (looks very similar to an Oscar) for visiting " an environmentally or recycling project" (?)
Now we have lovely wwoofers from New York, after just 2 days here they (nearly) managed milking the goats themselves.
We were taken to the Pecs Sunday market which was very big, I acquired another sámli.
We visited the organic wine-producers in Pecsdevecser, they are very professional indeed, enjoyed the wine-tasting, drinking wine with Suzanna's home-baked bread and with our goat cheese.
We are very worried as our mayor, Tamás is not standing again, and there is nobody else who could continue his good work. The only one standing so far is Kresz Erno, who is a nice chap, but too old for a job, and he tends to disapprove any improvements such as the tele-house, youth-club etc, he would be a disaster for the village.
I would have a go if I wasn't so completely unsuitable for the job, being disorganised and forgetful.
Oh yes, and we partook two free concerts in Pecs, Goran Bregovic one of the Kusturica film fame - it was very enjoyable, I managed to stand and dance about for the 2 hours it lasted, though didn't quite jumped about as much as Alan and Szonya - who was also here by the way, for nearly a week with Drew. We also managed to see the Buona Vista Social Club performance at the same venue in front of the 4 towered Cathedral - even more people packed together, there was no room for dancing!
And I haven't mentioned the nice meals we had in Pecs and at home - all in all, discounting the few cases of people arriving sick (all got better next day) things are going well, considering that we had at times 12/13 people for breakfast; we have lovely comments in the guest-book and the major part of the Florida trip has been earned. We had only two enquiries so far from the caretaker ad for housesitting, we'll see how it goes. If no takers, Timi and Feri will look after the place, but we would prefer if someone actually lived in the house.
there are tons more to report, alas, either forgotten or being just a bit tired...
Picture shows us with some of the girl guides.

too busy

just a note - we are still here, had fantastic circus artist French people, we had lots of other nice guests, Alan's eye is still a bit iffy, and now we have family as well and more interesting people, too busy to post! I'll try in a few days, I promise! Got pictures, too...
this one has Alan, me, Mei and Chip just before their departure about a week ago. New wwoofer didn't show up which was upsetting as we turned down at least a dozen people for this slot, and we had no news from her at all. She sent a text message eventually, she had bad luck, never mind.