Ecofarmer

news extra

2012-02-05T09:57:00.002+01:00

see the surprise early arrivals plus a pic of village winter commuters. Snow is even bigger now, though the sun emerged, actually it would be lovely to go out a bit...
Alan says they look strong

winter village

2012-02-04T22:09:00.003+01:00

I intended to show snow from the kitchen window with a few hours difference in size. A village view and happy hour(s) in the village shop.
I am glad I had to stay in lately... Alan says ducks put their feet under their wings, they are not happy. Dogs have warm places to stay, don't worry.

itchy arse

2012-02-02T12:43:00.002+01:00

this is how Alan translates "isiász" which is what I got since Monday and it is
sciatica damnit, so my favourite things sitting and lying down are difficult and my right foot from above the right ankle feels peculiar. It's because the cold table-tennis room I'm sure, the heating was on for hours but it is a big room and it is cold around here, the last couple of days it hit -15C, even with bright sunshine it only gets to cca -5C during the day. I am sitting here with the elastic wool thingy round my belly/bottom that Alan purchased in Pécs yesterday, slightly worried in case this pain/discomfort ever goes away. Internet says, 90% of the time it does, and the bottom/back part is maybe a bit better but the leg is definitely not. First I thought it was a muscle-ache from the table tennis, but it got worse... Doc came and gave me a painkiller into the cheek in question (right) which lasted just about an hour while we chatted over tea with the doc... He didn't diagnosed as well as Alan from the internet... It is an ancient ailment and still nobody seems to know what to do, you can see very varied advice from the multitude of sufferers.
Doc is free here, but due to the stupid Hungarian setup, they are paid so little, that if they don't get tips from that part of the public who can afford it, they starve - well, no, they just go and work abroad for 10x + more money)
Ducks started to lay eggs, and we are buying an incubator for cca £50 and Erzsi (Timi's mum) who has the expertise, will deel with it all in her house, as she'll have duck eggs, too. Between us with some chicken-eggs we'll fill the 60egg tray. Apparently, you have to help these special Indian running ducks out of their shell.
Nothing much else to report besides the KiskassaBlues getting more and more thought to it, though no money yet.
Last week we found a new restaurant to savour in Pécs, the Bohemian Kitchen,
everything is cooked in beer, Alan loves it, But I liked what I had, too. It was a large portion that I resolutely won't eat anymore, I have to loose weight if I start to get these age/weight related horrid things.
I can't remember if I mentioned the chain-saw, Alan got one and between us, after a safety lesson from Zoltán, we cut up quite a lot of wood without chopping off important body bits.
Goats/ cats/dogs and us all are getting fed up with the winter, that's about it...

sunny winter

2012-01-22T15:24:00.003+01:00

yes, we haven't had it colder than -3/4C even at night, so since that first cold-spell sometimes in November we didn't have to turn off the water in the other house or do any other frost-fright measures. Lack of rain/snow was worrying, with the Danube being it's lowest level for donkey's years; but had a bit of rain and snow since.

About the all-important council meeting on the 4th of January - well, Alan represented me, I accompanied Martin to Budapest - who knows when we see him next - I wanted to use all the time available to be with him.
So anyway, the outcome seems positive for us, the elected reps - we voted not to dissolve ourselves, and all the (2) arguments against us turned out to be silly. One was, that the mayor resigned because he couldn't work with us - well, I did tell you why he resigned (I have first hand information, that he hasn't turn up to start his 5 years sentence - the well and not so well educated opinion is that he is in somewhere South-America... the random Hungarian system of justice allowed him to have travels abroad while his appeal was pending, and that even after that was finally lost he was allowed free to start his sentence 30days later, which, as I mentioned above, he had failed to do.
Anyways, he did make the village the extra money he promised, even if the company registrations were somewhat murky, with the agency doing these transactions having disappeared, and the list of registered entities safely kept in the ex-mayor's head and nowhere else, never mind.
oh, the other complaint was against us, that 2 of us become part of the council, because of 2 places became vacant (Ernő bécsi died while we were in Florida last year, and one chap moved away) so the next two person on the list who received the most votes become members. As they were voted on, this was another silly accusation. As there were no other complaints it did seem quite apparent, that it was a covert ploy by the post-woman mayor-candidate, who seems to think herself already victorious at the March elections and rightly guessed, that we wouldn't be pawns on her chess-set.
Anyways, the village finances are in good shape, lot's of useful works have been decided, such as assisting parents who are taking their kids to the Ujpetre nursery, with bus-passes; to repair the road to the cemetery - which seems to be a major grievance here, we also purchased a projector planning film-screenings, and of course, the table tennis klub is to be developed further.

The Durant household also ended up with extra moneys (nothing to do with village communal finances, honest - my mum's apartment in Budapest was sold), and as the advice is not to leave much in the banks, we plan to spend - yes, sorry, our green credentials will be a bit shattered - we are planning getting a small pick-up truck, that would help us with the continuous problem of hay/straw collection, and the carrying of goats and other difficult stuff.such as guests. So with the help of multi-talented student Zoltán, we are hunting for such a vehicle. It should be able to climb these hills, as well as going cross-country to Boly, which is a decent little town this way much nearer than Pécs.
We had some victories over some long standing technical glitches - managed to install a new main line phone with hand-sets and fixed the door bell. Well, mostly Alan did it. Also he managed to connect the csecskavágó (the cornstalk /straw chopper) to the old 3 phase motor in the grinding room, so we do not need to turn the wheel manually, which was hard work as Martin had found out...
What else? The hens started to lay again, only a couple per day, but that is brilliant for winter and plenty enough for us.
The biggest success of the bottled food this year is the pickled red cabbage and the cherry jam, but everything else turned out well,but as per usual, we are lagging behind with consumption, which is much better than the other way round.
And at last but not least - it seems that Kiskassa Blues might happen, pencil in the weekend starting on 31st August, Friday night to Sunday afternoon 2nd of September. The Finnish Sami and Bori from Budapest are the organisers, it is a university project and the grant-application, website, video, design are all being kick-started, very exciting. I got the approval of the council...
just two photos, a favourite walnut-tree in its winter looks and the kemence of Hokkedli - a pleasant and individual pub in Pécs where we spent a pleasant afternoon with the kids over their xmas stay.

... and more photos

2012-01-07T15:04:00.002+01:00

the little xmas shaw with the hospitality food display in the culture house, this year's tree, and The Yorkshire Pudding.

Happy New Year!!

2012-01-07T14:43:00.003+01:00

Well, not so new, we are well into it now... Kids got back to their proper lives, far away from this little village. This little village had a bit of a boat-rocking with an attempted takeover of the elected committee of representatives, but in the first round we prevailed... though I wouldn't have minded to resign, to tell you the truth, but wanted to support the others, but anyway, this is too long a story for the blog... meaning, that I could go on and on...
anyway, there will be elections to find a new mayor, the previous one resigned - either in prison, as he got a guilty verdict with his appeal lost, or - as some in the village guesses - somewhere in South America...

The New Year's party was quite good fun, we had a bit of jumping about even though the music wasn't quite as "retro" as we would have liked it... the atmosphere was very good, there was enough to snack on and tons to drink... we walked home at 2 a.m. from újpetre under the stars - three of us, as Szonya had left by then.

Photos include food (of course) snow - yes, we had a white xmas, about the only such area in the country - though it has long gone, with some very mild rainy days since. Also the smaller xmas program in the culture house, visits to the Opera House, pubs... it's a jumble... maybe two lots of them.

post-xmas pre-New Year

2011-12-31T15:50:00.002+01:00

we were too busy having a lovely time with the kids, sorry for avoiding you, dear reader.
Pictures will come next time, when I figure out where they are. So, all was well, my little trip to Budapest to meet Szonya, with nice evening with Juci eventually and a little bit of Márta while having a peep at Juci's groovy new apartment. Then we had walks, meals, lots of drinks in Pécs, got our xmas meal ready - this year to Szonya's initiative, we made proper stuffing and proper yorkshire pudding, none of your instant rubbish - first time! Cake, tree, all just perfect really... We played the new games - the Discworld looked at first a bit complicated, but it turned out very enjoyable. The Banana wordgame is more intense, I wouldn't have minded a few more goes...
anyway, time to get ready for the new year's party in Újpetre, retro with virsli and lentils we were promised... so I left a few things out, but I am not yet back in blogging mood.
Happy New year!!! B.U.É,K,!!!

sunny winter pictures

2011-12-08T17:24:00.004+01:00

so we did have the sun out, which I'm sure the goats approved of, too. We are taking them up the field every morning, Hannibal and Cassandra are tied, which more or less ensures that they do not jump fences to the neighbours. The electric fence battery is charged via a solar thing, so at the moment the system is down. The Sheep is back, keep your fingers crossed for little sheep.

The mayor resigned. Not publicly, I only got to know about it because we had a meeting with the chief administrator of the Ujpetre office, where all the 3 other surrounding villages belong. And she told us. We had this committee meeting about the grant application of this company, that paid more than 12million in car registration tax to the village, but had the right - apparently to claim 40% of it back - doing useful things in the village. Well, the useful thing will be a concreted and fenced depot area - which will mess up the view of the village. I failed, not checking the law and the minutes of that meeting - I am sure I told them to put in the condition of application that the village view cannot be compromised. Well, we'll see what happens. It is a big firm with lots of trucks - that's why they could pay us so much tax...

Anyway, I am glad the mayor is disappearing in the mist, but what next? I can't see anyone decent surfacing. Tried to convince Nora, the minority council activist to stand, but she wouldn't. Well, maybe there will be a last minute new face - we were lucky that way the last few times - up to a point...

We checked up with Tibi the ping-pong tables,and he promised to fix them during the holidays. Still no bats and stuff - the deputy really promised this time - but hasn't delivered again, so I have to figure out how and where one find decent sport stuff myself.
We wouldn't have had time with sis, we were too busy looking round again at the Croation market, and other shoppy places.

Jenny - it is really nice to hear from you, thank you for the compliments - please send me your e-mail address again , because I can't find it

Had the Santa do for the children of the village, and while the clown did his bit, 2 of the present bags of sweets were stolen. I think it was an over 14 kid, who felt bitter about not getting any... Still - a nasty crime in anybody's book... the village is appalled.

Pali's newest quotable: he couldn't come today because his van was glued in the mood...
(= stuck in the mud)
Pictures show the first ever sauerkraut we made - we were so frightened to look at it, that we had left it for 2 months on its own to do its thing - and it turned out ok! Just had to skim the top, and it is good! I bottled 8, I haven't he foggiest how it keeps, but one would think it did all the maturing there is to do, and it is salted after all.
the others just made while walking the goats/geese/sheep up the hill, and the winter clothes of the fig trees.

winterish

2011-12-01T19:16:00.002+01:00

mild weekend is promised - just a change would be nice from this foggy, damp dark cold we've been having for weeks and weeks.
Unfortunately, we had to give up the experiment of milking the goats over the winter, the little bit they produced, was not worth the energy spent in washing the milking cloths and the work itself. But there are 4 pieces of cheese made waiting for the kids judgement when they arrive in a couple of weeks. We cannot even get the delicious local cow's milk, as Erzsi said, two of their beasts are off milk, and they need the rest to fill their quota, they are not selling to individuals until sometimes in mid-January. However, we do have fresh, unpasteurised milk delivered in the village by a local dairy, it is nice and cheap, I tried it last spring before we had the goats.
We just have to make sure we catch the van, in lunchtime, playing the Boci boci tarka - popular Hungarian nursery rhyme about little cows and milk.
Slowly we are making things tidy, we trimmed the figtrees, the roses, the raspberry, the grapes. The houses are a bit tidier, but not exactly sparkling...
I am busy with council stuff - more and more murky, it seems, with that comparison of our mayor to Tony Soprano having been unsurprisingly apt... The Télapó celebration is on Sunday, with that fairly dreadful clown doing a show again, and every under 14 will be given a decent bag of chocolates. The giant tree in the bus-stop wont be decorated - there aren't any mad people risking their life climbing it to put on decorations, so we are buying a modest tree with roots, it will stand in the front of the council buildings.
Our sheep is visiting a ram in Újpetre, but the sheep keeper chap there doesn't think it very hopeful, it was too late in the season.
The second table-tennis table was found and allegedly taken down to the culture house, so we do have them now at last, all is needed some decent net and bats and balls, but the second disappointment is the deputy mayor, who is - how shall I put it - thick. He keeps wanting to do everything - like this purchase, for about 6 months, but he just doesn't do it. So when my sister comes this weekend, I'll buy the lot and claim money back.
No photos today - I don't want to depress you with all that gloom...

crisis comment

2011-11-22T09:33:00.001+01:00

do we want another global war - that is the usual solution of capitalism for global crisis.
How come more people cannot see this? I just can't comprehend this uncomprehension, I am not -that- clever, yet it is so evident...
The local "left" "liberal" daily seems nowdays doing nothing else but trying to convince people about TINA in every bloody article, just because the Demagogue of the Day realised that anti-capitalist slogans Can be Popular (though what he does in practice is the panicky defending and cushioning the 1%)...

Eva exasperated and making the wine-cellar into a refuge...

long winter?

2011-11-17T22:24:00.004+01:00

shouldn't complain, as it is rather nice during the day, but so flippin' cold in the mornings, and the winter seems very long... Water is frozen in the ducks' basin in the mornings, water has to be turned off at outside taps, lucky Alan's contraption pulling out water from the rain-collector, works well; I think we forgot to mention this thing.
We having the little stove on in the little kitchen, which is nice.
Gus is still not sorted - the very thin wires for that radio control snap very easily, that's the snag.

The pensioners day went well, the food was good, it was hard work, as was the singing clown...
Apparently the number of the guests were the same as usual, some old people just doesn't like these communal things. There were about 60 people.

Eva the shop keeper took me a Koncz Zsuzsa koncert, that was really above my expectation. This singer of my youth - must be quite near to 70 - was moving and singing, as before, and the old songs were great, and the new ones weren't bad at all. Also she was political to my liking - she was always giving the impression of being the intelligent one...The concert was in the fairly new Expo Centre in Pécs, where I haven't been yet.

We managed to put the furniture we dragged down here to good use, the computer room is rejuvenated, see picture! There is even a sleeping place for Szonya ('tis a bit small...)

well, that's all for today, we've been to town and I'm a bit necked. Photos show newly done room, the pensioners and the a living room vista with papi's lamp.

more moves

2011-11-04T12:44:00.003+01:00

Well, as I'm typing into Kifli here, a second lot of furniture and tid-bits are being moved here from my mum's flat in Budapest, which was miraculously very quickly sold (if all is well...) via Pali's pick-up. Stuff we don't really need, but it is a heartache to give up. So the next job is finding home for everything - won't be easy, though of course, Alan has his plans in the ready...

We started the Dogs Do As Told Scheme; a few weeks ago, when Jutka took us to Pécs market, we found an interesting looking device, which with the help of a special collar and wall unit emitting radio-waves, gives electric impulse noises as well a bit of a pain (Sorry Gus) so that at last we thought to be able to free the dogs from continuous chain-up, which is even more pain for everyone concerned. Well, so far so good - to our (and Gus's) immense surprise, the system works, sometimes too well, Gus must be a basically relaxed dog not becoming a nervous wreck during the period of learning the whereabouts of his new invisible fences. Presently to be safe, he's staying in the goré where the milking stand is, and I am not encouraging further lesson until Alan is back.

We had a visitor yesterday, Ders, a Hungarian young man from Pecs, who entertains thoughts of becoming a self-sufficient person, and is in the process of making up his mind, how. He had the tour and a chat, he offered to come down, whenever we needed some day-help, which is nice.

The newsletter is ready to be printed, and the organisation of the big communal meal for Pensioners Day next week seems to be all under control.
From local to global - advice to Greece... http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2011/08/25/why-iceland-shold-be-in-the-news-but-is-not/

We had a few beautiful days with cold nights , a day of unusual pea-soup fog, and the autumn colours make the views spectacular.

It is pumpkin season - there aren't many, and not as sweet as last year, but the soup is nice anyway, and the roast is not that bad.

Photos show Ermintrud in the milking stand, Same corner with Gus in his new location and the bio-briquette maker in the background, the pile of wood, autumn green veggies and the half-winterish figs.

Back to a not-sunny place...

2011-10-25T16:28:00.003+02:00

... that was full of confused goats, as the electric fence was not well maintained after all. So the first few days were spent re-learning the (only slightly) painful lesson of not doing naughty goat things like eating fruit trees. But all is repaired by our able farmer... Due to not eating properly, milk production was down, but improving steadily - this will be the first winter when we'll milk through the season.

We had our wood sawed - we bought cheap left-over stuff from plank-manufacture, so all legal and even greenish, but good quality wood to burn. And no need to chop them - only a few thicker pieces. Nice to look at the pile - our insurance in case the Russians fall out again with the Ukrainians, turning off gas-supplies, which was the unhappy feature of a few winters here.

We don't look forward to a long winter - it will seem especially long this time as we managed to skip the worst bit last year.
We left here a lovely summer when we flew to England and came back to winter - it was -7C in the morning! Did go upto 20C during the day, mind you. The leaves on the fig-tree and the green stuff (chad, kale, brussel sprouts) looked frozen dead in the morning and during the day they managed to look good again, should have made pictures...

I returned to the same cold war simmering in the village - E. decided not to do the village newsletter - in the last minute, when this month's issue should be published. But hopefully the youngest of the councillors will take on the job - we will show them! Including the mayor, who is in touch from abroad, but still in a sour disposition, about us daring to oppose him - just the once...
Until now his office printed the newsletter for free - from now on he would charge the village. How petty he can be, I am so disappointed. Still, the Teleház will print them, with only the cost of paper and ink. And I don't have to worry if my responses will be printed or not...

On Sunday the pensioners' club trip to the theatre was a success, the minibus and a car managed the transport; all had a good time - except Marika néni's worrying wobble, but she was ok after the first interval. Even I thoroughly enjoyed it; I remembered Kálmán's Csárdáskirálynő as mighty smaltz, but actually it was full of humour, good tunes and even a moral against snobbishness and hypocrisy... it was very well done on every level, the direction, the singing the dance, the set were all spot on. Alan agreed. He had no trouble to follow the story, even some of the jokes.
We had champaign and cakes in the intervals, dead posh, dead cheap.
(Two glasses of champaign, 2 little pogácsa and two chestnut hearts for less than 1000HUF - less than £3)

talking about food - (sorry, Dad) lunch was duck soup reconstituted from frozen base, pasta bake (with goat cheese, bacon, mange-tout and sweet corns - I know, a bit idiosyncratic but it was ok, and no cake whatsoever! Lots of home grown figs. I experiment with fig preserves, so the kids can have a taste of them
when they are coming for Christmas - the silver lining on winter...

Pictures show the Manchester campaigners we talked to, who were (are?) camping in the city centre in dismal weather, against the global bank
system - is that what it is for? For the bottom 99%? Of course I am supporting them - but what is it they want exactly?
the whole system -sooo- sucks, but still nobody
talks about that - if banks were nicer, all would be honkey-dory..??
Népszabadság makes me sick with its "how nice is everywhere else" lectures.

the other photos show the pensioners in the theatre, and Alan in Wetherspoon, Rochdale with his three-beer taster deal, not a good picture, but you can see his happiness shine...

from the land of rain

2011-10-13T09:56:00.003+02:00

not really fair, allegedly this was a hot and dry place a couple of days before our arrival. However, the drizzle and other varieties of wet had never stopped since we arrived to the midst of the Pennines (picturesque when visible...)
We are having a pleasant time, though we had our adventure with officialdom and the ruins of public transport here. But lovely curry, chat with old friends staring at miserable Rochdale (reaffirming we did the right thing) make another reasonable holiday. Dad and Muriel are lovely and are doing fine, we are well looked after.

Jai and Kylie are looking after the farm on their own, Alan found them well capable. There are a few problems that would have happened whoever is in charge, hopefully all get solved - will be back in a few days. On the 17th, probably late night, as we have stuff to do in Budapest. It is also nice to be away from the local politics of gossip and petty quarrels; I will keep doing my best as I was elected by a handsome majority, but another 3 years of this stuff seems awfully long...

Student Zoltan got 40/50% for one part of the exam (it is what I expected) but 0 for the other - which is usually multiple choice - so I would query that, it seems
impossible to achieve. He is a bit downhearted, but the truth is that the
difference between the basic level and advanced level is nearly as great
as that between nothing and the basic - it needs more time, unfortunately.

There will be pictures, such as Alan drinking 3 local beers simultaniously, if I find the lead to connect Alan's mobile to the PC.
and now Dad is taking me to Morrison's so that I can replenish our supply of tea, custard, curry-paste, parkin...

hot pre-trip times

2011-10-02T22:33:00.003+02:00

- bit busy here, what with starting every day with fig-hunt - picking them before the sparrows wake up - and collecting a about 10-15g (cca quarter pound) raspberries every day...
then eating it up quickly before Alan claims them for his jam-making...
due to this incredibly lovely indian summer, other stuff still insist ripening.
I've just done the above pleasant morning tasks, waiting for Alan to get up to do the goats - he's got a bit of a sniffle, so I let him have a bit of lie-in. We have about 2 pints of milk a day from these new goats, so I made the first batch of cheese. Still got a rock-like remain from last year, smells and tastes like parmezan, and grates beautifully.
so I am in a grande mood, even though should get the place tidy, get myself decent (I mean at least on the outside) process some stuff - no need for cooking, I did a "rakott padlizsán", with cheese sauce on top, that should last till we leave for Milnrow, on Wednesday afternoon.

Also have to show how to do things to Timi's family, who's going to do most of the animals - rest will be looked after by a nice couple Jay and Kylie from Florida, of all places, who were here for a few days as hostel guests and decided to return (on Monday if all goes well) as care-taker wwoofers.
They are inexperienced in the agribusiness (ha ha) but they will be in the house and keep enthusiastic company with dogs and cats.
so in theory all is sorted. I have to work out tons of homework for the students, lessons being today and tomorrow, as they keep want to sit exams, which is stressful, not just for them...

well, I did want to chat to my kidlings this morning, but the third next best thing, an e-mail, turned out sort of blog-like, I'd better put it on, before we leave. At least this pre-composed way Szonya read it...

another thing not to talk about...
well, we had our first bust-up, us four reps voted down the
mayor's proposal for a deputy-mayor brought in from outside.
She would have no voting rights or access to finances, but
would have some role when/if the mayor resigns, apparently.
His protege is Erika, the postwoman (she was on the council before us and helped a lot lately organising village events), but she bears a lot of grudges and makes decision on not necessary what advantageous to the village.
Before I made my decision I had a chat with her - she of course said that she would work together with everyone, but she dropped some threatening type of remarks which made me uneasy.

the mayor was furious and surprised me an unpleasant way when he declared that in his first year he did more for the village than all the other lot before him. He did bring in some money with the manoeuvring of some of the local taxes, attracting some companies to register their cars here (thereby bringing their car-taxes). But I still to see how much this will be as said companies can request a good part of their monies back "doing good works" for the village. I'll be the chairman of the committee that decides on this - mayor and deputy not allowed to sit on this body.

so things are hotting up. I wanted the two table-tennis tables moved down to the culture house to start a table-tennis club for the youngsters, one of them were moved down after 6 months of begging, it turns out the other one is ruined - these are cca 3 years old tables, hardly used, dammit.

mayor will be away for a month managing his foreign assets or whatnot, Alan thinks he is organising a getaway...
exciting, init??

Oh, and we had an other cultural event - the hot-air balloon bloke at our own Festival of Light (see July) turned out to be a multi-faceted artist, this weekend we had the "Autumn greeting" in the culture house, with an exhibition of his pictures, and his style bab-gulyás, with free-flowing beer and wine, for all attendees (this later ones I preferred to the pictures, which were too kitschy for me, but the villagers were very enthusiastic about them. One was sold - I wonder who bought it? Maybe one of the German inhabitants) and there were our home-grown talent; little boy reciting poems, and a girl singing karaoke style, but quite well, and we have now another dance group - most pretty young girls in the village seem to be in it, and 2 lads, too, Erika organised them, another good thing she' is doing - for which the village should be very grateful. See, you don't have to have an official title to do good things for the community...
which reminds me - I managed to secure tickets for the pensioners, we are going to see the most famous operetta, Csárdáskirálynő, on the 23rd of October, transport more or less arranged.

pictures are a scramble of new goats, village cultural event, our newly delivered wood for the stove, a morning collection of raspberries and figs; some might be put on next time;
and one of them is not re-sized, sorry, it might take long to download.

new goats, busy times

2011-09-24T22:19:00.003+02:00

there is a bit of asynchrony picturewise, so do not look for
photos of new goats yet. They are beautiful, though at first they were a bit intimidating, as they are four seriously bigger goats than the others. All of them with horns, except for the one billy. But they are not at all aggressive, and quite intelligent. They learned about the electric fence quite fast (touch wood) and milking is going well. It is lovely to have milk again. maybe cheese soon.

Probably the last guests of the season just left today, nice couple from Germany, we were given a CD of sound massage (TM) - hm - interesting... which reminds me - my sis is visiting more often, which is nice, and when she's here, she's getting Feri, our local qualified massage master to do her back, and she says he's very good.

Alan got some support in his idea of organising a blues festival here - so there goes - this is the very first mention of it... see what happens. He had a jamming session with Dodi today, both seemed happy.

Pics are made by Marta, of Capri and Sulfatara, which is another vulcanic crater near Naples I wasn't ever of before. From the holidays I talked about last time. A bit different.

back from city life

2011-09-13T22:01:00.006+02:00

weird being back in Kiskassa, I collected tons of paprikas and aubergines and raspberries and 3 figs this morning, did my usual morning things, then had headache and had to lie down, the week in Naples was just amazing, but probably more tiring than I realised.
did everything, Pompei, Vesuvius, Sulfatare, Capri, Amalfi coast, museums, beach
(just an hour in Capri) pizzas... but the city itself is the best in my opinion, just wondering about in those narrow and incredibly lively streets... our apartment faced one of these, therefore we had a view along it (including a bit of the sea), on a little square (where kids played football till about 1:30am), and all the activities on the innumerable balconies.
I forgot to take my camera, but Eszter let me use hers, she'll send the pen drive with them, so you won't escape a few probably incredibly artistic shots...

6 out of the 13 guests did not turn up - the Croatian rhythmic gymnastic team hadn't bothered to tell us about a change in their plans. The Polish 7 did, but they were probably too tired after their long drive, to enjoy the place. They asked breakfast for 7am, Alan managed to get it all - in spite of the village shop opening later on a Sunday - including a variety of our fruits - but they declared at 7am, that they didn't want breakfast after all and were annoyed that Alan had no right change for their euros... it is a long drive from Poland to Montenegro...

anyway, Bonzo's little hedgehog has been turning up regularly, we hope it stays, and eats all those mole-crickets next year. The new ducks are becoming really pretty with more colours in their side feathers, will try to make better picture.

My photo with The Cabbage was made a couple of days before I left for my hols; same as the tree-frog photo and the ducks, Alan made The Sunflower picture while being on loose ends on his own. By the way, he also made raspberry jam and quince conserve. I forgot to mention, that we know at last, which is our quince tree...

on holiday!

2011-09-03T21:47:00.002+02:00

yes, this lady-farmer upped it, leaving Alan in the lurch (there must be a phrase like this). I am on my way to Naples with the old girls the friends from my Hungarian secondary school. I arrived to Budapest, and the place is full of free live music of all types, really bubbly and nice, like if summer has never turned into September - well, the weather is upto it, must be still over 28C and it is 10pm.

Short report from the farm before I leave the country for a week-

well, actually, same as last time, still lots of things to process,
I will miss my morning handful of raspberries, bunch of grapes, hunting down figs from rude sparrows. The ducks seem to have grown quite a bit and still fun to watch, and Alan is in negotiations about new-to-us goats.
Bonzo woke us up last night barking continuously, when eventually we crawled out to get him to shut up, it turned out that a tiny hedgehog pretended to be a thorny tennisball in his basket. We saved the little thing and peace was restored.

So anyway, do give support to Alan, keeping the fort, including 13 guests arriving on the 10th of September, while I do my best to enjoy Italy, my favourite country, and going to places like Pompei, Amalfi, Capri, wow...

hot busy days

2011-08-21T15:41:00.002+02:00

a bit of a breather today, a quiet Sunday, from the steady flow of very pleasant guests, wwoofers are on their way hitch-hiking to Istambul, Alan's watching the first match of the season (Újpetre playing at home).
It's 35C outside, a bit cooler inside, though I had hot boiling pots of tomatoes for bottling - not much peace for this wicked soul...

The festival was a success, the exhibition of local artifacts - about 6 pieces from our household - was well laid out, the guest craft-people, the veteran cars/motors, the hot air baloon and archery all happened, as well as the quality singing/dancing culture programs. Saturday was exhausting with all the cooking - I was down there early morning with the wwoofers to help with the preparation of the communal bean-gulyás. With the crowds and the heat it was a very long day, especially with the dance the previous day, where we managed to turn out in good numbers; besides me and Alan, the wwoofers, two Canadian and a US guest guys. Alan went up in the hot air baloon, got his head slightly singed he says, though not visibly. The burner was a bit lower than one expected...

Other news: we got 3 Indian runner ducks. They very entertaining, and useful - eating insects and weeds, but not tomato/paprika/aubergine etc useful plants! I don't know how, but they are very clever like that, as well as washing there food before eating it. Except flies which they can eat directly from the air. Got them from the village from the lady who first told me about them.

We had a freak gust of wind the other day, and the Savonius broke its frame and fell over, alas.

Can't do justice to the festival with pictures - got some with the hot air baloon, you can see the apple grinding process as we made some apple juice; you can see Eva's typical breakfast,Alan with his favourite aubergine - I cannot save the blow -up pics of the ducks - they have to wait.

come to the 4th Kiskassa Festival of Light!!!

2011-08-10T20:47:00.002+02:00

yes, it's kicking off on Friday afternoon! It goes on till Sunday evening!
details (in Hungarian, but you can get the gist of it...)
http://iwiw.hu/i/esemeny/fesztival/Kiskassai-Fenyfesztival-IV-45965

there will be lots of local performers, exhibition of old traditional tools and artefacts, hot air baloon, the usual kiosks with weird stuff on sale, the communal kemence will be used to bake local variations of lángos, lepény and rétes, there will be pony rides, arrow shooting, veteran bikers, a big dance on Friday night with the biggest local band called Harold (!!) and much much more.

meanwhile there was more volunteering - mostly by Alan, this time shifting rocks... our random wwoofers (ok, so they are sort of ship-wrecked, so it was such an unusual story, we had to let them come... and they've helped tons, even if they don't have experience with this type of work.)

Tons of the vegetables/fruit need our attention - it is the busiest time of the year picking and processing stuff. Beside the potato mole-cricket calamity, everything is doing well except the cucumbers, they are represented with one lacklustre plant, but even that is producing enough for our salads. The aubergines, paprikas, tomatoes are fab, not to mention the sweet corn...
so no pictures, as thay would involve food and food production, and Alan's dad gets bored by that... I made ketchup! Alan made yellow plum chutney. And he is plonking away on his guitar in every free moment he has, he is a master of the slide.

meanwhile our council members (including yours truly) were severely dissed by an un-named person in the village newsletter, which is supposed to be the voice of - council members. If you want to see true press freedom, read our newsletter! (and avoid most of the Hungarian media...) Well, my answer will be in the next issue, with my name on...
Lois where art thou hope all went well in Brisbane.
Happy Birthday Sharon!!!!!

life goes on - busy busy...

2011-07-31T14:40:00.005+02:00

we had the rare pleasure of having son Martin here, my sister brought us down to Kiskassa a few hours after the family meal we had after the funeral. It all went as smoothly as these things do, a bit of my sister's piece about our mum was read out and we talked about her...
We all needed to get ourselves together. So we were back to collecting yellow plums and jam-making, tomato preserving, kohlrabi freezing... Simon, the English hostel-guest was promoted to wwoofer status for a few days to look after things while we were away, which he did, and while he did he gained some valuable experience about continental bed-making... because meanwhile we had more guests, the flow just dried up now a bit now.
Martin left today, so we are a bit down, as well as a couple of german-iranian guys who were on their way to Istambul on a big Yamaha, and did a bit of wwoofing on the way, they needed a couple of days as all their gear was very wet. We are having a cooler week ot two, with lots of rain. We wanted it, but now it's enough...

Thank you very much for all the kind words of condolences, very much appreciated.

I forgot to mention, that we now milk one goat and nearly have enough milk off her if no extra amounts are needed. Such as today for a large portion of custard made to go with the poppyseed/black-cherry self-created, bread-pudding type of thing loosely based on what they call here "guba".
The picture was sent to us by Maggie, one of the lovely guests we had here from Singapore-cum-Germany, you can see them, Jutka, my sister, Martin and us, and I have a shockingly awful posture...

sad blog avatar or "the spatial awareness of organic production"

2011-07-21T20:46:00.006+02:00

I was sitting on the train going to Budapest, a day earlier than planned, as my mum's condition turned to the worse, when my sister phoned me to say that she'd died.

As to avoid dealing with that, I wrote the blog I'd failed to write last weekend;
a replacement blog...

So last Wednesday, Harry, the Taiwanese wwoofer materialised. Well, sort of, as he turned out to be a very frail and thin specimen of 20 going on to 12.
We took him on as we had a special request from a Hungarian wwoof-host who, for some undisclosed reason cancelled his stay there. Apparently his trip to Hungary was sponsored by his university and all travel arrangement had been already made.
So he badly needed a place... as we understood the story. He said his major was history and he did also sociology, so the educational aims of this sponsorship seem to be a tad difficult to fathom.
Anyway, after two days of lacklustre help with collecting hay, processing beetroot and clearing paths, Harry declared, that this was not what he expected. And when I asked what he expected, the curious answer was the phrase in the blog-title.
All through his not quite 3 days stay he had hardly eaten anything and he didn't seem fit enough to work, I suspect sadly,a health problem with this youngster . To our mutual relief he departed on early Saturday morning requesting a lift from Timi. He told us he'll look for a flight going back home. So another enigma to colour our organic production... other Chinese wwoofers and guests so far seemed to have liked my food, and enjoyed or at least were intrigued with the work...

Meanwhile we had a nice cluster of hostel guests, on Monday morning we breakfasted a lovely family of five from France, a Japanese dancer lad who lives in new York, and who stayed longer than his booking, a Polish couple on their way to Bosnia and Croatia, and Simon, the English would-be-wwoofer.

Well, I am typing in all this in the evening, in my mum's eerily quiet place, with treasure Julika (who looked after our mum so well) tearfully resting in her room, and with my sister sent home to do the same. Tomorrow more arrangements to be made, the usual upheaval when there is a death in the family even when sadly anticipated – my mum would have turned ninety in November, if she'd just made it... still, she had a full life, which was mostly happy, after the survival of being imprisoned as an illegal anti-fascist, taken to Bergen-Belsen... working for the soviet led international youth movement where she picked up a good working knowledge of French and English; being kicked out of job and party as someone not to be trusted when her parents emigrated to Israel; picking herself up while working as a private maker of ladies specialist undergarments (her original trade) being rehabilitated and working until retirement for the office that dealt with Hungarian artists'' contracts and travel and work -documentation when they were working abroad, and the same for foreign artists when working here, meeting and getting to know and love a lot of very famous people... And then, of course, she helped looking after the grandchildren... She enjoyed reading, TV, and of course all that frustrating politics, keeping her humour, when hardly anything else left...

pictures show flowers, me with mum and dad about 4 years ago at the stop of the 59 tram in Budapest, an up-to-date view from my favourite spot in the front yard in Kiskassa; the feeble wwoofer, and Gus on the mat – he has the privilege when being frightened of a storm.

heatwave not in Rochdale

2011-07-13T22:16:00.004+02:00

Hi dear M&B from Rochdale, hostages to fortune somewhere near Barcs - we cannot e-mail you as the comment does not give your address. Look up our website (www.ecohun.com) for our e-mail address, or just come and see us!

As for the horrid bug, it it a mole cricket, but all related information refers to ones upsetting golf courses, and lawns, not rugged potato patches... they advise us to catch them young - it is a tad too late for that. If indeed they are the culprits.

It is incredibly hot, it has been upto 38C, but "only" 35C today... the last village community volunteer building(!!) works happened on one of these potboiling days last saturday; getting ready the yard and fields at the culture house for our Kiskassa Festival of Light in August (12th, 13th and 14th)
Alan was down there at 7:40 in the morning, managing keeping up with the hard physical labour till mid-afternoon. There were big concreting jobs - nobody thought of getting a concrete mixer. We had to lend ours - nobody was aware we had one, so all work would have been halted without us...
Well, good to feel important as my work in the kitchen and round the culture house was a bit leisurely as to compared to the rest, though doing anything was an effort in the heat.
Mancika supervised with the help of a few more from the pensioners a very tasty bab-gulyas, with Anita's chocolate kalács for afters. Vine and beer were available to the thirsty and, hmmm, very health and safety conscious workers... I still don't quite understand how Armin managed not to fall into that well...

So how come all village life is continuing as per usual? Well, yes, the mayor is staying on, there was a big collection of signatures (more than 150!) asking him to, until he can.
The petition was presented at yesterday's official council meeting which was attended by about 50 villagers - our usual meetings unfortunately do not attract such crowds...
anyway, the mayor presented the situation and offered his resignation, but was persuaded to stay on... his appeal could take years and he might have better luck with it...

We received our wwoofer today, he is Harry from Taiwan, who won a scholarship from his university to immerse in some exotic foreign culture... his family would have preferred him sampling life in the USA, but he had insisted on bottling beetroot in Kiskassa (this was his first job here today on his first day), He has never seen a village before - or used a tool or any such non-city-stuff, anyway, we resolved that he'll go home strong and a bit less thin... tomorrow he is shifting hay with Alan in the heat - if he survives, he'll definitely be a fitter person...

I have been on The Bicycle! To my amazement I managed to do it, if a bit wobbly(ly?). I'll do more practice before I venture to the shop - or to Újpetre...

Pictures show the 2 little goats - Pici now reached the size the other one was at birth;
and some glimpses from the communal works

we got a silver medal!

2011-07-03T21:52:00.004+02:00

well, one of our Portuguese guests did, as it turned out, our long awaited group consists of participants in the Pécs orienteering world championship. This is the first ever Portuguese medal in this event!!
We survived 3 days now in these large numbers, the atmosphere is very good.
I actually used our dry compost toilet... but there are no big queues or problems as such.
Alan reckons Hungarians aren't after all the world's noisiest people...

As we were so busy getting ready for guests, picking and processing apricots and greenbeans and marrows and looking after guests once they arrived,I had no chance to familiarise with the Kindle or with the Bicycle, but it is so nice thinking about them... tomorrow, definitely, now things are getting a bit calmer...

about the mayor fiasco ; the village knows less - except for the rumours which are this time tamer than the truth... our mayor was convicted to go to prison for 5 years for corruption. He told us at an emergency council meeting, that his company won a very (very!) lucrative contract from the customs authorities. (this is his version and I actually believe some of it) the competitor who lost brought the lawsuit and apparently had the better connection to the judge... so now that the new ex-mayor (he resigned to avoid embroiling the village in scandal(!) we are left with loads of cash his new scheme (manoeuvre with local taxes making companies to register here) making the life of a newly elected mayor rather easy. I wanted new elections for representatives, too, as 2 out of 4 do bugger all, and this would have been a better ploy to avoid that scandal, but alas, the deputy mayor who's going to be the caretaker mayor for a good few month until the mayor elections, wouldn't do it (he's worried he won't be elected again... he is on the thick side, but he is good organising events, maybe if he is elected he'll let people like the old ex-mayor think for him.

our potatoes were destroyed by some sort of weird bug, at least 2 inches long and half an inch wide, looks like something out of a science fiction... if any of you know what it is, and which eco-warrior super-hero can help it back to it's own dimension, we'll be grateful. Other pictures show Drew from last week with some pálinka, Éva relaxing in favourite corner in the usual company,and our Potuguese medalist.

New kid still here and more, not to mention the b-day surprises!!

2011-06-27T22:58:00.003+02:00

So the officially named Pici is doing all right, except still being incredibly little, especially compared with today's even newer arrival, not yet named, of Bambi - at least three times bigger. It stood, run about, found mother straight away. It is beautiful and looks weeks old, it's mother must have thought so as buggered off in the afternoon, leaving the newborn alone to fend for itself against geese and suspicious mum of Pici. So much about goats.

Going back to my last trip to Budapest, I was just chatting to Marta, when out of the blue Szonya MegaDrew appeared! The first Big Birthday (60 on the 29th) surprise, first of many!
We had a lovely time, met up with Edit and Juci (nieces) and aunt,
returned to Kiskassa together, just in time to pick loads more black cherries and use them with raspberries as base for trifle.
Saturday - milling about together, cooking, eating and the pensioners' birthday afternoon for me. I ordered pizzas just to be different, making goosefat butties with red onions for backup, we expected a few to be suspicious about the foreign fare - but everyone seemed to have a go at the pizzas with gusto, it went well.

Sunday started with me being presented with birthday surprise no 2: an Amazon Kindle! Alan reckons that will stop me stacking up more and more books... it is fantastic! Of course I'll have to get used to it, like is the case with such super tech wonders...
Anyway, I had a little sleep in the afternoon. As I woke up, Alan called me to look at something weird outside... and there walked all the Budapest old girls! All to join the bogrács cooking singlehandedly conducted by Drew. But before that - another incredible present - a bicycle! I used up all the adjectives for the Kindle - just imagine something shiny and sophisticated...
with 7 gears and basket. I refused sit on it with all the spectators - I haven't sat on one since I run over some natives in
Nepal with one (or this is how Alan tells that story). So again, I need to familiarise with It in private... Picture follows when I manage to conquer my awe... also Marta presented a present from Lois, beautiful Szamos chocolate basket that was stripped bare in no time... (and don't forget the umbrella!)

The bogrács turned out good (all had gone!), and it was a very pleasant gathering, a perfect evening, including an impromptu
little performance by some of the village belly-dancers, when Timi and co arrived from another engagement.
Alas, today everyone abandoned us... and the news this evening: our council decided to dissolve itself... now that is a cliffhanger, isn't it!

surprise surprise!!

2011-06-21T22:24:00.003+02:00

we got an extra little goat - still a bit wobbly, but hope it'll make it. Delivered by white goat that was sold us by the same guy, who sold us the suspect sheep. We were told both goats might be pregnant, but we were skeptical - but looking at Bambi's enlarged teats just recently, I wondered - and there goes the other one. dropping this tiny thing this morning - its sibling was born dead a bit later. No picture until we are sure its a survivor. It looked very doubtful at first, but Alan reported (I travelled to Budapest with my sister for a few more days with my mother) that little wobbly managed to stand up and suckle from those suspect 3 small teats of small white mother goat. Very unusual, and reason for Alan's suspicion that we were cheated. Bambi is much bigger, and we expect more and stronger arrivals any time now... no pictures until all is sure! Keep our fingers crossed for milk and cheese again! We have 2 small pieces left from the last lot being now about 9 month old, smelling like old parmesan and very good grated.
Maybe there are new mutant mosquitoes here in Budapest - ones without making noise, I am definitely bitten by something here, typing away on little Kifli on the balcony at my mum's.
Instead of little goat pictures you get the drawings of my aunt Edit, about her grandparens - my greatgrandparents, who owned a little grocery shop in Budapest. Grandad is doing a house delivery.

Kikassa Smallballs

2011-06-19T15:38:00.003+02:00

that is the tradename for the spinach/chard/egg creation, deep fried, that happened today.
Sorry Dad - talking about food today, but at least I did not photo it... very nice if I may say so.

Mayor is back from holiday and the organisation for the Village Days - Festival of Light - is going on with rigour. Please note: 12/13/14 August!!
there will be art/objects exhibition linked to the history of the village, ball, hot air balloon, and tons of other mostly cultural entertainment at the newly cleared field behind the culture house.

The program can accommodate any number of guest artists, including performers and exhibitors -
bed and food is the payment, sorry like the rest of the globe - the village has to economise...

Weird but lovely thing: so far there are no mosquitoes at all this year, should we be worried? There are swallows, if less in numbers, but there are plenty of frogs/toads.

We had our first wheat harvest - Alan sowed some last autumn to a part of the field, and it come up nicely. After being cut and turned and gathered, it was all chopped up with our ancient szecskavágó 9see photo) on one of the hottest days so far. Once we worked out how to do it, it was quite fun... The product was packed into sacks and will be used as feed for the goats and sheep.

Photos also show a tray of drying cherries, one of the cherry trees we planted looking good,
and the usual suspects, some more photogenic than others...

sumer works

2011-06-10T14:54:00.003+02:00

these are the last portion taken from Lois's photos; Shawn, the sheep, close - up. (presently she has even less wool, and Alan is getting better at the shearing business, the main thing is the tool sharpening technique). A Zsolnay (Gyugyi) exhibition picture, the solar shower, the community centre, where the pensioners' club, the doctor's surgery and other services of Kiskassa village dwell - it used to be the school.

News - Kálmán bácsi - he who frightened us no end by falling off our loft 6 years ago - died (of unrelated causes I hasten to add). he was outstandingly healthy until this last year, when he became fragile and lost his lust for life. He'll be missed, just like Ilonka néni, who also left this world a few months ago, there was a very large funeral, she was a very popular, lovely person. She was ill for a long time.

The mayor is on a well-earned holiday, besides a few formal meetings about electing a head-master (only one candidate and she didn't make a great impression on me so far, but who am I to rock the boat...) there isn't a lot going on in local public life.

The wall that shed it's render has been expertly fixed, and now there is a place for a door, which makes that large area next to the garage more usable. Also Master Obermayor's able workforce levelled (re-concreted) the car-port, looks more tidy, for sure. There is only a small roof job to do next week, and we can breathe with relief - all done for now.

We actually had a few guests - just in the midst of the building work, of course, a Japanese girl, who was catching up on her sleeping while here, and a Czech couple on the way to Bosnia - they'll come again on their way back home.

we had an odd hm - not young - couple here for 2 days, Kata was addicted to picking and shelling peas,Dave insisted on helping Alan move the clay/dirt mountain produced by the builders, - and - we were paid for letting them work!!! Though I did feed them with a well-turned-out goat curry amongst other things... Thank you again, Kata and Dave, nice people.
That's it! We should just choose the wwoofers who are prepared to pay us for the pleasure of working here! As we have very few hostel guests but 2,3 or more wwoofer applications per day, maybe this is something to consider...

My mum is stable at home, when not in pain, she manages to enjoy herself albeit on a different level than before, she is not the same person now, which is hard to get used to, though she does have the character traits -
child becomes an adult and again a child... she is lovely, recognising loved ones with such a pleasure, full of kisses and humour, and all that energy to re-arrange things to her liking.

The garden is beautiful, with new kohlrabi, peas and stoned cherries in the long-suffering freezers, also a good lot of the cherries being dried in the solar drier. But we were eating
probably as much as we processed (well, mostly me). There is also decent strawberry this year and the raspberries are just getting ready.
There are immense amounts of gigantic lettuces - of course they do their thing in the same time, no matter how carefully and periodically were that planted.

There were a few storms, but we could do with more rain, the soil is getting very dry.
Today is absolutely perfect, not as hot as has been, but 25C with a pleasant breeze.
Alan used the stones/etc from the building work to make a path to the repaired steps up the hill, it looks good, I will make a picture, promise...

more lois's pics

2011-06-01T20:34:00.003+02:00

for content and more pics see last post(s). The one that is not our place, is a Pécs city wall that took Lois's fancy. And I have no idea who is the fat old lady on the picture doing the gulyás masterclass. The weird room is a corner of The Old Stable. The rest can be guessed...

lois's pics

2011-05-30T20:44:00.003+02:00

mostly alphabetically from the farm, such as sheepshearing and the new animal stock, our trip to Zsolnay exhibition visit, gulyas cooking etc. What I can't fit here goes to the next (or previous) post.

all well

2011-05-26T22:03:00.002+02:00

sorry, we had a very busy time - first of all I spent more time than usual in Budapest being with my mum in hospital. She's the same and was taken home a few days ago, my sister organised specialist homecare, the necessary appliances etc, it is not easy, and as the same relaxants are not available as the one used in the hospital, mum is restless she cannot sleep.

The hay, cherries, strawberries are ok, we didn't have too much rain, in fact we could do with some more. It is a pleasure to look at (and to eat) all the lettuces, spinach, and peas are ready to pick anytime now.

We also got Lois - and we had the usual adventures and very good time with her, had nice walks and meals in Pécs, went to see a good band yesterday (A Köztársaság Band) fantastic violin and cimbalom players, good singing, I've never seen this venue so full.

Tomorrow we'll look at a Zsolnay exhibition, and see how the new "Culture Quarter" is doing, it all supposed to be completed by the autumn.

I keep forgetting to charge the cameras - I waited with the blogging keep wanting to put pictures on - well, next time...

Oh, yes, we had some guests! 6 malaysian pensioners! Same age as us, 5 ladies, friends since high school, travelling together. They
arrived with a big lump of beef, they wanted to learn how to make the real Hungarian gulyas, so I had to scrub up the old bogrács, and in 20 minutes we managed to get it organised! The ladies chopped onions, vegetables - I added a bit of goat-meat from the freezer - it turned out to be very good, if I may say so, it was a very pleasant if busy evening.

back

2011-05-08T20:06:00.002+02:00

and I meant to make pictures of the village's beautiful new stone-circled
flowerbeds, the re-painted play-ground features, the newly concreted ball-game ground, but by the time I got round to it the weather turned horrid;
Yesterday it was beautiful, we turned the tonnes of hay Alan cut - but alas, it is all getting wet today, after a forecast for two weeks of dry weather. It is cold as well, so I am a bit worried about the cherries and the strawberries that were expected to ripen in a few weeks. I am pleased I managed to trim the sorrel and collect a good load, for two portions, one for the freezer and one to be eaten straight away.
There are no bookings - it seems that everybody want to WWOOf - we have two/three applications per day for that - but nobody wants to be hostel-guests; we have about 3 single nights booked besides the Big Portuguese Event from the 30th of June for 9 days. (15 people! It should get the solar shower and the dry composting toilet a good try!)
Also we'll have some concreting and wallrendering work to be done that was not planned, hopefully gets done before Lois gets here.
(Isn't it great that we have no guests...)

my mum is in the same condition with the same ups and downs, so we have to figure out how to care for her before they pronounce her stable enough to leave with no more medical options.

rainy day

2011-05-01T11:44:00.002+02:00

my mum is back in hospital, this time with all the dreaded indignities -
after the 2nd stroke in 2 weeks - all the right hand side gone, but the left
is still vigorous. She is a fighter survivor as I must have mentioned her history before, but at this point
that is good thing as well as bad...
yesterday it was despair as she was in pain, today is peace and
twinkly eyes again.

meanwhile Alan is keeping the fort, down at the farm, the communal village-work day was a success for the second try, I'll have to see the new mini-football, the flowers, the tidiness when I am able to get back home.

p.s. relax!

2011-04-25T14:02:00.001+02:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBzon0p4BH4&feature=player_embedded

easter sunday

2011-04-24T22:10:00.003+02:00

Yes, we had the egg-search, but there were a disappointingly low number of toddlers, sweet as they were.
all the other age-groups were much more numerous, searching for eggs on wilder terrains, where horrid adult folk hid eggs
amongst the nastiest nettles. I managed to donate 60 eggs!!
There was a professional egg-painting artist helping with
the egg-colouring, curtesy of the german minority league.

The goat curry was a big success yesterday, when old friends arrived for the weekend. Today we enjoyed walks and more food in Pécs.

No pictures - you've seen them all, no point in repeat pictures of Pécs or strawberry plants or naughty dogs...

Tomorrow it is easter sunday, when girls/women get sprinkled with water or smelly parfumes, for which honour they have to pay with painted eggs, cakes, drinks and even money. No chance of this latest,
economic crisis... they'll have some sweets and that's all, and if they come at a silly early hour they'll get b.'all.

we had a bit of panic as - as per usual when expecting important guests, we had no mainline phone, no internet and no hot water in the guest-house - but as per usual, it all worked out in time.

There'll be The Great Voluntary Work Day in the village - next saturday - starting at 7am sharp. There will be major building work - replacing the front path to the council building (very slippy stones there at the moment very dangerous) concrete play area for
a type of game played with football called "lábtengo" for older kids, laid on the playground, general cleaning and flower-planting everywhere; there'd better be a mass -turnout or else!!
in the late afternoon there'll be communal food cooked by the pensioner's club for the tired workers in a big bogrács.

happy birthday Marc-Barc and Juci!!!!

p.s. It is a bit of reflection of the changing media here -
it was reported as part of the news what Jesus did on
easter Sunday. I was a tad surprised, facts and religion mashed together - need I say more...
also we were told by a friend today, that in Pecs university psychology department students reported that some authority figures started to teach that being gay is a curable illness... unbelievable stuff. Heading right back to the dark ages. And the so-called socialist party still doing nothing to figure out the reason for their abysmal showing, namely, refusing being even a little bit socialist, privatising and being the vanguard of fairly vicious capitalism when they were in power, even if not as much and not as much demagoguely as the present lot. But the hoards leaving Fidesz have nowhere to go - people who don't want (ever?) to vote again are now 50% in Hungary, we should be lucky they did not go straight to the arms of the fascists. There is no real "left" to go to - same as everywhere else.

down still...

2011-04-19T20:16:00.002+02:00

sorry about being scarce, I was just back home from visiting my mum,
when she was taken to hospital due to a stroke, which turned out to be relatively mild, but you can imagine how frightened we all were. My mum is back home today - the hospital wasn't exactly top notch, things gone much worse than I remember, with very few nurses and no standard supplies for bathroom, etc.
anyway, mum's control of her mouth is the only function effected,
and even in these few days she's been improving. At first she could only say "no" clearly, everything else came out garbled. But today I could talk to her on the phone, the first few words now intelligible, then it goes off a bit. But she is not as frustrated and upset as everyone else was... She has her laugh, which is very comforting.

back at the farm there were major escapes, we had no dogs, none, for about 3 days. 3 girls from the village came to our gate telling us about the wherabouts of our deserters. It is not a nice feeling when all these years your dogs pretend to adore you, and then they can just not do anything else but escape as soon as they can.
when I went up with the girls to this last house of the village, they were in that yard with other loose dogs. At least they did come to me when I called them, and with the girls we managed to take them home. I was carrying Bonzo, and Gus was pulled on a leash.
Elderberry drinks and chocolates were the reward, and we had a nice chat about the school, so I managed to gain inside information - apparently there is a teacher hitting the kids which I am sure is illegal, and I am now on the schoolboard thing as the rep from the village.

We called out the vet as the dogs were in a bad shape full of tics, and Bonzo having bits of him missing. They had painful injections and been tied up ever since. Bonzo seems happy enough - he's got a new place next to the garage, and he is used to being tied up now. But Gus is miserable and was crying for days, stopped now.
we have no choice, if they climb through everything. They can be shot by the local hunters guarding the wild life, also the other dogs are quite aggressive, the girls said.
we'll try to buy the type of fencing that bends backwards, see if we manage to find out where to get these.
the sheep and the goats are happy however, the electric fence is working (touch wood - well that would be shorting!) and they are out eating good lucerne etc. Things started to grow, though Alan is always convinced this time of the year that things won't grow...
the strawberry is flowering, the tulips are doing well, and had to cut the grass...
getting ready for easter, expecting friends and there will be the usual easter egg search in our front lawn on Easter Sunday by the toddlers of the village.
weather is lovely - bit chilly in the morning and 20+ during the day.

shit happens

2011-03-30T14:34:00.003+02:00

... even if it wasn't a mad sad bad world (Zoltán: look out for Conditionals!)
I don't like giving you bad news, this corner should stand for a cheerful and positive world, a la Melody, however, one of our sheep dropped dead, just like that. Alan noticed it hyperventilating on about the 3rd day of us acquiring it. The chap we bought it from suggested giving it Rennee tablets, but it didn't work. Next morning it was gone to sheep-heaven, making the other sheep rather upset and depressed ever since, putting it with the goats didn't help, even after the goats realised that it is too big to be bullied. The seller person from Borjád promised us a replacement company, but should we trust him? We cannot help feeling, that he knew there was something wrong...

Anyway, if I wasn't a born skeptic, I would think it all happened because I failed to put the sheep picture on the blog last time. So I put it on for good luck anyways, even though Lois warned me not to put on deceased lifestock, in case I upset some faint-heart readers.

So besides this trauma, what else can I interest you with? We went to see "The Eights" exhibition in Pécs. This was a group of Hungarian painters exhibiting together for-awhile from cca 1910, influenced greatly by Cézanne and Matisse. It was a nicely done show up in one of the re-done exhibition centres in a beautiful old building. Very good paintings.
It was a lovely afternoon out as per usual, with cake (Mecsek krémes) consumed sitting
outside of the Mecsek cukrászda, on comfy chairs, soaking in the sunshine.

Spring is definitely here though the blossoms are very slow this year, the first one we have is on the Siberian Berry - see photo. Also there is one about Bonzo having a hangover in the walnut-basket after an other night of debauchery - we just can't keep in the little - well, we had some unseemly words we called him - he actually chew a hole in the wire fencing, would you believe.

Also pictured some violets growing amongst the strawberry plants, the new (hopefully) cherry tree Alan planted near the gate. oops, forgot to rotate it, sorry if I gave you a sore neck.
of the sheep the white faced one is the ex, might as well, we were always partial for black sheep for some reason...

late pictures

2011-03-21T22:10:00.005+01:00

... to add to the last blogg's text... :
new goats Dixie and Doxie, new sheep - opinions differ about name-giving;
this year's pigeon-frightener;
the solar hot air system succesfully keeping some of the seedlings warm,
Alan painting the doors next door, and whatever else I can fit in...
well, it would only do 4 photos for some obscure reason, sheep and the rest will
show up next time... patience!

mad as March

2011-03-19T19:02:00.002+01:00

yes, we had summer and winter all rolled in one day, but still,
sorrel and tulips are showing, all the "new" trees have good buds.

We were too busy with stuff - mostly Alan doing the usual
growing, ploughing planting fence-making, preparing the accommodation for the now installed two young nannies and two young - SHEEP!!
They are all beautiful, and allegedly pregnant, but we have our doubts about that, but won't be particularly upset if they weren't.

I made pictures - but there is some problem connecting the camera to
the pc, so that has to wait.

Also, of course one just had to follow what was going on in the Arab world - have to read up on Socialist Appeal - I am getting a bit confused - if everyone is suddenly all for the rebels - including the US - then must be something wrong... what about Bahrain? also of course the terrible stuff in Japan - and one wonders how much we are in the throws of that global media - as I said I suddenly realised I have no idea what is going on.

we had an early hostel guest and more, quick cleaning up, airing bedding etc, when we had those glorious warm days with the glimmer of spring to come; another pension-club birthday, even more extravagant as the previous, with 4 more people turning up.

There was the village meeting - lots of shouting in cross purpose - but in fact it seems, that the new mayor is doing what he promised,
and got all that extra company-registrations for the village.
We also had the theatre-visit for the ladies, the Women's Day village quiz - we came second this time, it was a bit long, but was ok with free wine and beer - crisis - what crisis...

Lois'll have her work cut when she's here in May, - we just don't know what to do with Gus, he can climb out the 2m high front gate - we'll have to tie him up. Cats only visit for breakfast - than disappear for most of the day - with random appearances around the other house.

As you see I am in a sort of impatient mood - must be the time of the year... In fact I wasn't in a blogging frame of mind, the lack of gusto must make it tedious for all concerned... thanks for the worried enquiries, all is well really... we had lovely meals and the usual hurried shop in Pécs, English lessons...

hopefully pictures are coming up soon

ready to farsang...

2011-02-26T20:15:00.003+01:00

"farsang" being the word for the February/March carnivals, the noisy balls to forget that there is snowy cold out there with spring seemingly very distant dream. Next Friday - our pensioners'club theatre outing afternoon - also the time when in Pécs there will be
"Busó" - Serbian, Bulgarian and other folky frightening masks and noise to disturb and excite downtown.
Besides our lively old ladies in the newly resuscitated club, there is no such revelry in our village yet... but they do their best, we had champaign and gigantic birthday cake for Ica not to mention the lovely sandwiches - which here mean an open type with ham, boiled egg, pickles and grated cheese, lovely. The delegation of jobs organising stuff is not easy as most ladies are not in the best health. Still, I managed to pass on the birthday present buying task for the next party...

Alan is back and into his several projects, such as connecting the Savonius (see picture) to a working generator. He managed to get out some voltage... he promised to explain all that himself, very soon.
He is also getting a lot of painting and repairing done.

I had a few days of down with a cold - enjoyed most of it minus the headache - with all the books Alan brought back from England.

other pics show Pécs fresh food market, the club birthday do and the Southern Black Racer snakes Martin caught last weekend on the camera in the Paynes Prairie National Park, near Gainesville, Florida - where we with Alan also saw fantastic wildlife and beautiful trees... did it really happen??

home alone

2011-02-13T21:16:00.003+01:00

Yes, Alan made it to Dad's in Milnrow, and I am coping... today was supposed to be the only day without seeing any other people - but Dodi and Timi turned up, so I had company after all. Tomorrow Juci is coming with her boss for lunch, so that is exciting (pumpkin soup, stuffed pork with veg/rice/red cabbage, apple crumbles.) hope they know that winter Kiskassa is sort of gray, not like those lovely summer pictures... and of course all is in bad need of that spring cleaning, the windows, for example look terrible.

On Friday we went round the village with Mancika to get pensioners to turn up for the re-opening of their club, next Tuesday. It will be in the doctor's waiting room which doubles as village library reading room. The rooms where they used to come together previously are difficult to heat even when the dodgy chimney pipes are working. A theatre trip is half=organised too, just have to see how many people will be interested.

Yesterday was the Újpetre Nursery Fund-raising Fancy Dress Ball, I got a lift there with the Kiskassa Belly Dance team. There were some good costumes, the best, Mr and Mrs Shreck, so much like the smaller version of the movie stars... I was a wet blanket and left the others dance till the morning, I walked and managed just to catch the last bus home.

There was the first proper council meeting where the more I contributed the more stuff I ended up lumbered with... no wonder, that 2 of the 4 reps failed to utter a word yet.
By the way, "council" is a word they try totally avoid here, it is associated with that nasty old system, for some reason. Now they use "önkormányzat" which means, self-government, twice as long, in any language, never mind.

and thats's it for now... hens are laying nicely, dogs are cute, geese are nasty...

picture shows Zoltán our new mayor (any similarity to Tony Soprano is purely coincidental)
and Norbi, who is the new all-round administrator who helps him - and the village of course, he printed the nice flyers for the pensioners' club, for example.

gray winter

2011-02-03T21:28:00.004+01:00

... but we are cheerful and busy so there.
Alan did some painting and fixing walls, laid foundation for a decking in the front, and made a biobrick press - well, the presser bits are to be made yet, maybe Zoltán will help...
The little fire is crackling away in the smaller kitchen, some nice meals were cooked though freezer stocks are far from depleted.

I was asked to take over the organisation of the village pensioners' club and entertainment, and I had to say yes, being the only pensioner on the council. So I am to look over the club that was not used since october; as the heating is dodgy. I had a good talk to Mancika, who did all the work for the last few years. I like her, she is a nice person, but ended up doing all this work alone, including cleaning the club, baking cakes etc... well, no chance of me doing all that, I have to do some motivation and delegation... whatever I got myself into??
still, there is plenty of time made in the evenings for knock-knock rummy with Alan, I am just ahead
25 to 22 - "Honi soit qui mal y pense"

Thank you for comments from Nicole (from Quwait!!) and John - weird that you
read the October blogs - I did hear that for some not the latest
of my gem appears but older stuff and the newer has to be found,
weird, when I look it up to see it's still there,
http://ecohun.blogspot.com I always get the latest entry.

I smuggle in just one more picture from Gainesville - guess which one - as well as the above mentioned good works and freshly chopped wood guarded by Gus, who hopes all of that basket will be used as throwable sticks.

all is well...

2011-01-20T14:36:00.004+01:00

Kiskassa, reasonably warm living room, good tennis on the telly from the open in Melbourne...
We try leisurely potter about getting our phone work again (done) bank things (hopefully done) cleaning up a very dusted up house (a job never done) try to entice the pussycats to like us again... Bonzo put on a lot of weight, a right little furball... Gus hasn't climbed the front gate since we are back, he's being a very good dog, I think he doesn't want us to leave again...

The RedCoach we took from Gainesville to Orlando was the fabbest luxurious one we've ever seen, just 3 big cushioned seats per line, with a leathered leg-rest! The flight from Orlando to London was much less fun, (thank you BA) with uncomfortable seats and a continuous 3 hours of turbulence. I watched Avatar through that time, I won't remember it with fondness, the never ending film, that had the same shooting, violence and heroism will solve all our troubles theme.

Arrived home with the mother of jet-lags, lingering still. Timi and Feri looked after thinks well,
no problems. We were lucky to have two days with beautiful +15C+ sunshine, helping us to re-settle into winter - that managed to re-assert itself since yesterday, with temperatures under +5C, fog, rain, and today, a bit of snow. First night was a bit cold - I put the bedding on the radiators, but still... But the house warmed through quicker than expected.
Back to the diet of borsófőzelék fokhagymás pulykamellel (green pea-pulp with garlic turkey pieces) - whatever is the pot-luck from the still very full freezer.

The Big News: Takeaway Pizza! We just have to try it tomorrow - you know, support your local enterprise... The Újpetre Napsugár is finally in business. Otherwise there seems to be no change in the village. There are doubts about the new mayor, the usual christmas dos for pensioners and kids were not upto standard, the village christmas tree looked pityful, the administrator was not employed by the alleged loads of companies who promised to register in the village to bring tons of money... well, I hold judgement till next week, the next council meeting.

the photos are a mixed bunch - I am still working my way through pictures made by two cameras - our old one and a lovely up-to-date-to-us, that used to belong to Sharon, who insisted we should have it as they now use a newer one... anyways, there's one with us and a sponge-merchant in Tarpon Springs, a lovely key where Melody took us; the apartment next door to Martin's and Sharon's, where Drew and Szonya stayed over christmas; a New Orleans house with its Christmas lights on Burgundy street where we stayed in the Hotel St Pierre; the best picture of a Manatee in the Wakula national park, on our visit with Donna and Marta, on the way back from New Orleans; and the new dinner-set we got for christmas from Pali and Erika... just to demonstrate how futile it is to tell you all about Florida or even all about Kiskassa even though this later is somewhat smaller...

So long, Florida!

2011-01-12T23:35:00.003+01:00

We are off tomorrow, with some trepidation about the end of a beautiful holiday, a long journey, and the worry about re-heating those mudbrick walls in Kiskassa, if indeed the water and the heating system will cooperate.

We did go back and the butterflies were much more impressing alive than dead, one insisted on being intimate with Allan - was sitting on his mouth (you not allowed to touch them you know) A kindly attendant took away the enormous beauty that is the most gorgeous blue when airborne.

We had a tasty Chinese sitting next to yet another lake watching the wildlife,
Martin made the artful photo.

We returned to the alligators of Paynes Prairie and this time we had an unexpected encounter with a large one, just 6 feet from us! I nearly had a heart attack, but ofcourse Alan insisted on having a good look (he knew it was too cold for it to move dangerously fast, he said later...) I was too frightened to fidget with the camera... anyways, just to illustrate, that I couldn't really tell about all our adventures here... all the food, all the beers and margaritas Alan had, all the kilos we managed to put on... see you back on the old, cold continent overthere...

countdown...

2011-01-06T03:34:00.003+01:00

just a week to go before returning to the land of snow and ice...
Meanwhile we had the loveliest of New Year/Alan bday eve; taken for a meal by kids,
then the Beatles band was above all expectations, playing difficult songs real well,
and of course a few of the more well known ones. The atmosphere was good, lots of merry and good natured revellers. Before going to this, we managed to play a bit of table tennis in a pool hall, and I ended up playing with a bunch of youngsters and winning a round-the-table game, I earned some ovation and an offer of a drink... On New years Day we got ourselves together and were driven by Doris (the kid's comfy little toyota) to St Augustine, the oldest town in the US! It was a bit over-run with tourists, but it is a small city of beautiful buildings and a well preserved Spanish fort next to a pretty harbour and draw-bridge. We stayed at a beach hotel a few miles away from the town centre, so next morning had a chance to dip our toes into a rather cold but very impressive Atlantic Ocean.
Every day we had a bit of adventure here in Gainesville, travelling the city bus we visited the Natural Museum with it's butterfly collection, though we failed to find the well hidden entrance to the bit with the tropical forest where one can walk amongst the most exotic butterflies, but when we asked we were given tickets to redress the hitch.
So we are getting to the last bit of this incredible holiday packed with adventures and good times with the kids... I will have to sum up our impressions about the US... soon... before all becomes memory when one asks - has it really happened?? The weird picture which I failed to turn round is the meditation building of the University, lovely spot next to Lake Alice in the middle of the enormous campus.

BUÉK!!!

2010-12-31T22:10:00.003+01:00

What is it like that New Year so far?
We are still having the old one sunny 4pm, 25C on the sun, and very pleasant in the shade.
We had a lovely xmas in six-some, since Szonya and Drew left for home it's a bit quieter...
Martin and Sharon are taking us out for Alan's birthday meal, we were not allowed to know where;
afterwards there will be Beatles music on the Bo Didley city park till midnight, a few drinks in one of the surrounding bars, and that's all done for joining your time-frame... hey, I should blog, too, I put it there, lazy me...
Happy New Year and Everything!!! pics show visit to Cedar Key and/or Manatee Springs (where we managed to see more of those magic creatures) and the xmas tudukin, which was nice,but the ham was voted better, and our chef with the xmas tree.

merry xmas from a sunny place...

2010-12-24T15:22:00.003+01:00

It is xmas Eve, in a crisp sunny morning in Gainesville, Florida (10C) everyone still sleeping at Martin's after a wild night of margaritas and a game called Apples to Apples or something like that, our first night 6 of us together, and it seems to be a pleasant combo so far...
It'll be a short report till the others emerge - there is a big xmas tree to decorate, family in Budapest to skype - the big xmas happening is right there already with great excitement for little Hani and Feco for sure. The next door apartment where Szonya and Drew is staying just full of splendour and space. We had a very enjoyable and Interesting(!) fortnight in Dunedin, Melody made sure we had something fascinating to experience every day - though just the walks on the beach were sufficiently fab, even when it was unseasonably cold. More details will come through in due time.
The worry is that Zoltan stopped sending homework - all I know is that the written exam's result is out, and he passed that, too. I am very worried, as there was a sudden stop to communication, which is not in character.
anyways, the pictures show mostly Alan everywhere as I made them - Dali museum St Petersburg, botanical gardens, pencake breakfast, etc - all "Melody adventures" rest will follow... should try that picassa album thing as I made hundreds of them. ooops surreal picture has to wait, only 5 images are allowed it seems... have lovely times dear blogfollowers, Alan is up, relative early riser lately... roll on Xmas! (we are having a tu-du-kin for xmas dinner tomorrow, guess what that is!!)

Dunedin Holiday Parade

2010-12-13T22:48:00.003+01:00

last Saturday we took part in the Dunedin Holiday Parade, so there!!
My head sporting antlers (one green one red) one hand leading a cute doggie called Lyl, the other one having a glove puppet wriggling,Alan and Melody similarly attired, with Napoleon a luckily good natured and rather large labrador, and of course Melody with her Jessie,
as part of the local Dog Rescue contingent -
as they say, a "once in the life" experience. I know now how J.F. felt riding his limousine amongst the boisterous crowd, though he was a tad less apprehensive, maybe... We were well received, there was so much holiday goodwill, that one could definitely got giddy on it... The sun was out, we only froze our ass off in the periods when it hid away.
Afterwards a decent cider (on tap) for me and lots of beers (some of them very good says Alan) for the others and all the celebrated dogs admitted in the House of Beers establishment and catered for with dog-dishes. Have I mentioned that the USA is a weird place, where one shouldn't say "weird" or "strange" because that sounds derogatory, so from now on it is "fascinating", interesting" or even "different"...

Both in Gainesville, and here, and even in some less touristy bits of New Orleans, people say hearty hellos and wish us well on the street and they look as they mean it.
This morning we were on our way back from our egg-benedict and oat-meal pancake breakfast at Kelly's when a bloke just hit Alan's shoulder to wish him again a good day, he nearly jumped out of his skin. When a Mancunian is tapped on the shoulder, he tends to instinctively punch...

Which reminds me, both England and Hungary have under zero (C) temperatures and snow.
so even though it is windy and sometimes rainy here, it gets still over 10C. Record cold weather is forecast for the next few days however.

Picture shows Alan and Jessie at home at Melody's and Melody and me joining the for our first welcome drinks at Rosie's last Tuesday. We are 1 minute walk from that bar...
lots of other photos were made of the beach, boats, quant houses, food etc - but as mentioned - they have to wait for a camera-lead back in Gainesville.

Dunedin

2010-12-08T17:21:00.002+01:00

We made it to Melody,s via the casino adventure in Tampa. So the only "public" transport available was the casino bus, $60 return from Gainesville to Tampa, including Hard Rock Casino membership, 2X$5 meal coupons and 2X$25 casino betting coupons. Martin and Sharon took us to one of the WalMarts to the pick-up point. The mini-bus was 45min late on a very cold very early morning (thanks again kids) but it was a quick and fairly comfortable ride. The casino was out of our world - enormous, plush, glitzy, with carpets, chandeliers etc - and just big, big and big with endless lines of slot machines, poker-tables, noise of these machines, rock-music and announcements continuously. We managed to park our bags and set to feed our coupons to one of these millions of complicatedly twinkling machines. I have to say we enjoyed the experience as the randomly selected beasts which we managed not to understand how to operate, decided to spew endless number of winning tickets - 21 in number - and we claimed back $34 in cash!! And the meal coupon bought us a good sized chinese dish, surprisingly tasty.
the psychology to stay with the machines and spend our winnings worked, but luckily we had no time to do that, as in no time Melody arrived to collect us, and since then we are in her attentive care.
Her house is lovely, friendly and Melody-ish, the doggie, Jessie ditto, the garden includes an orange tree and a grape-fruit tree full of their produce, and the sun is warm - though in the shade it is still quite chilly. We are a few minutes from the beach, the place is just magic. We had a welcome drink in Melody's favourite bar run by her friends, had about 10 hours sleep - and after a morning of thinking and organisisng (by Melody, who ofcourse is a professional organiser) we decided, that we'd give Key West a miss... the area here is so nice, we'll have so much to do when we are not lazing around the house which is also would be just fine...
pictures will come later when we are back to Gainesville.

done New Orleans...

2010-12-04T21:22:00.005+01:00

the hotel St Pierre was a bit rickety - but Louis Armstrong stayed there, so who am I to complain...
We had a very enjoyable 3 days listening to music, eating and roaming those beautiful streets in the French Quarter where we stayed, the Garden district, going by tram, by ferry to the other side of the mighty Mississippi... on the way we stayed over in Pensacola beach, where we had our first proper US restaurant meal, and it was just marvellous. Also the view from our room was just a wide ocean - and sky - and nothing else... returning from New Orleans we managed to catch a horrendous cloudburst that wouldn't stop, so we had to cut our journey, sleeping in Panama city, which was also an experience. Next day everything was clear and shiny like if all that rain nver happened, so we managed to see Wakula park and lodge, and took part of the springs boat trip. I was dreadfully cold, as I had no warm cloths, and the sharp winds might have been all the way from Lancashire... but we saw all the wildlife - all the birds, alligators, turtles insisted on being seen. And not forgetting those mystical creatures - manatees! Yes, we saw them quite close by.
sorry about being short - but I cannot do justice to all the beautiful, weird, tasty, weird, interesting and weird things... Sharon lent me her old camera, so I could make photos, maybe I talk more about it all when it settled... even though it is colder here than usual, it still makes it up to 20C during the day, while it is snow and freezing temperatures in both Hungary and the UK... glee glee and glee... we are planning our trip to Melody next week, to St Petersburg and other parts of more to the South of this enormous peninsula, maybe more boat trips to the Keys
see how it goes.
pictures show tram inside, garden district, music scene, street...
the point is really, that this country is so bloody giant - days of days of interstate highway, we done 2000miles and didn't get very far from Florida really, though we gone through a bit of Mississippi and Alabama before Louisiana... all flat with trees and trees and water everywhere...

Gainesville

2010-11-26T03:29:00.003+01:00

Kids' place is absolutely amazingly beautiful, spacey, comfortable, it is just the best place ever, for a rented apartment, they got very lucky with it.
We had a couple of walks, and it is so interesting - for lack of a better word - sad? - to see in this area renovated beautiful houses like this, and next them places from Uncle Tom's cabin, if not worse... all very atmospheric for sure, exotic trees with those hangy down bits. People are very nice even when seem to be rocking their chair outside of the most ramshackle looking place. This is the end of the "nice" bit apparently, we were not allowed to venture to the
really poor bits. It doesn't help that I am reading Kathryn Stockett's "The Help" book.
Pictures are made by Martin, I left home the relevant wire for my camera. These are about the amazing apartment and Martas'60th birthday combined with our proper USian thanksgiving dinner - well as proper as we could make it with only one USian amongst us - Donna - and she's been living in Canada for yonks so probably doesn't count
I hope to have photos of the areas mentioned above after our trip to New Orleans, where I hope to be too busy doing the touristy things such as eating good food and listening to music to do any blogging.

made it to a place far far away...

2010-11-23T12:32:00.002+01:00

... journey wasn't too bad, so far only met nice people in the US, even at the immigration/security controls.
the shuttle to hotel was a mess, but you can't have everything... Alan managed to make life long friends at the hotel bars already...

sad news from the village - Kresz Ernő died. Ex-mayor, bit of a talker, often a bit of a pain, but we did like him, Alan will be upset when I tell, Marta and he are sleeping for 10 hours now, they are not snoring, so who I am to complain? otherwise all is well with animals said Timi, except Bonzo is off his food - must be missing us...
I d love to swim before breakfast, there is a pool (ofcourse) at the hotel. Off to Gainesville to Martin's and Sharon's in the afternoon...

the Anna fiasco

2010-11-20T20:38:00.002+01:00

so yesterday 4:30am my mobile nearly gives me a heart attack. It's
Anna - the neighbour who used to keep pigs here, still keeps her zillion bottles of pickles in our wine-press room and was going to look after our place while we were gone... she's screaming at me, that Gus killed 25 of her fattened ducks... so I walk outside still a bit worse for wear - Gus is right there, not even wet (it was raining all night) and no sign at all of the alleged massacre. Not a dot of blood/mud, anything at all. I go over - they still hysterical and don't want to hear about looking at the spotless dog. Besides, whatever did in their ducks made a hole on the chicken wire at the door (which somebody obviously left open) so it wasn't a dog - a dog would have just jumped that chicken wire which was less than a meter high.
besides that even if Gus somehow got out - which he hasn't done since he were kept here in the front, because he couldn't - he was never clever enough to find his way back if the gates were all closed. Which they were. I am furious. If it was any chance that it was Gus, I would of course fork out whatever Anna demands as compensation. But this seems like that somebody of her staff made a mistake and they want to find somebody who is able to pay up.
(Of course both the people who could be culpable swear that they
saw Gus ("a dog with red collar") to jump a fence a few minutes before Anna rang me... making Gus a wonder dog, who showered and
dried himself, brushed his teeth in a few minutes, besides keeping Bonzo quiet who probably due to jealousy - tend to bark his heart out when Gus has one of his escapades.

Anyway - Anna says she rang the mayor (she did, he rang me and now knows how silly these accusations were) and the police (I don't really think she did, and even if she did, she has no case)
but obviously, we had to look for somebody else to look after the house last minute. Thankfully Timi (the lift-help for us and guests) and her husband Feri are doing it. In a way it is better,
they are internet savvy, which Anna's lot isn't so we can be touch
from that far USA.

So all we needed this pre-trip drama, when, as I mentioned, we are stressed, nervous tummied... never mind... forecast is 26C for Gainesville for Tuesday... Florida, New Orleans, Key West... here we come... I'm taking my lovely Kifli with me, so you might get a few blogs from the US... all packed... off to Budapest tomorrow, flying via Gatwick Monday morning, arriving to Orlando late afternoon, staying in an airport hotel, then Tuesday meeting up Donna, who's picking up the rented car and four of us should arrive to Martin's comfortably for tea - I mean, dinner...

travel pains

2010-11-09T19:15:00.003+01:00

The birthday meal was lovely - just close family, ten of us in Béke buffet lunch, where we used to go a lot when my dad was still around. It was the first time we made it there without him. The two ancient musicians were re-instated giving a bit of atmosphere and cheering my mum up no end. She was happy, all old-bone-pains forgotten. Food and the 2 grandkids were at their best, though Hani was a bit quiet, I think she's still in shock about having a little brother and not being the centre of the universe any more. Pictures are from there except mum's which is a bit older, I managed to forget to make a picture with her, and the cake and all that. Others did, with me on, too, so you are not missing anything...
I also send that picture of my mum to lovely sounding Marlys, who is yet an other of my approving readers from far away cyber-space, I mean Santa Fe NM...I'm afraid I am not as familiar with the Tarr films as she is, but I try to catch up, I haven't seen any decent film for ages. But we are going to Pécs opera on Friday to see Donizetti's Anne Boleyn, so we are getting cultured...

I try to get over our main stress; we got an e-mail yesterday, they re-scheduled totally our outward flights, adding another leg and about 7 hours extra to an already daunting journey to Florida. Anyways, with lots of panic and phonecalls and e-mails, we end up going a day earlier, but by keeping the original flight times. If that's what's happening, still haven't received the re-issued e-ticket. it is very stressful stuff never mind.

Having to fill a "statement of wealth" for me and for Alan for the pleasure of being a council rep
was not a particular pleasure either...weather was pretty English, too, tomorrow must be a better day...

quick autumn pics

2010-11-06T08:55:00.006+01:00

Yes, we went for a walk, and here are some pics I tried to make arty... easy when at last we had some beautiful weather, nearly as enjoyable as springtime. Pictures are of the Kiskassa cemetary next to the church.
We had temperatures up to the 20Cs, so Alan did a lot of work, sowing autumn wheat. ploughing, getting in some hay - it will be good next spring if we get goats or sheep maybe... his eyes/face was still sensitive, so the allergy maybe more to do with some nasty weeds than sunshine.
General clearing, sweeping - it is really enjoyable to mess about outside.

Today is Zoltan's written exam - lets keep our fingers crossed, though he can probably obtain his degree certificate now with just the oral results. He is much more confident lately, thinks more in English, I think we got through a barrier... update: he just phoned, sounded slightly hopeful even though he left his dictionary at home, which he could have used...

And the big news is, that it seems, that through this very blog we managed to re-connect with one of our oldest friend Jenny, from Thessaloniki, Greece!! Her husband Kostas was the one making a comment last time here, and when I looked up his profile I managed to read the Greek letters and knew he was from Thessaloniki, but I didn't make the connection, it is a big city... But out of the blue I got and e-mail from Jenny!! Such a lovely feeling, we really were worried about her, as we just couldn't get any letters/phonecalls getting across to her, and not heard of her for something like ten years, if not more! Now we have to convince them to visit us in Kiskassa...

I am off today to Budapest to celebrate my mum's 89th birthday, I'm afraid you'll get pictures from there, too...

The first serious council meeting was last tuesday, I swore, that I'll do my best, keep secrets(!!) and I managed not to say the "so help me god" at the end, which would have been cheating from an atheist, nobody objected.
The new mayor set out very energetically to do all he promised, he seems a quiet, resourceful, intelligent sort, let's hope all goes well for our pretty village.

Meanwhile we are having our probably last guests this year, and other surprise returnee; did I tell you about the Finnish lad who threw up in Zoltán's garden when visiting the "Palkonya Open Cellars" wine-event? Well, he's back with his lovely Turkish girlfriend, initially for 3 days, but today is the fifth...
Hesn't done the

ooo, should have made a picture, of me after Alan cut my hair first time ever, it was so much better than Csilla's, even if a bit uneven, but that suits me well, - alas, I went down to colouring and I'm back to 60s village round-head style, never mind...

good and sad news...

2010-10-29T12:44:00.002+02:00

... all the goats have gone. Big time farmer from Boriad bought them all yesterday afternoon. All happened very fast, local man Shumango let them know sometime back, and they came over the back roads as soon as the earth tracks dried up enough for their trucky things. We even got good enough price, and the goats will have a lovely time with 24 other goats on limitless fields...
all for the best. We keep in touch with the buyer, we might just get one milking goat and a couple of lambs next spring... now we don't have to worry about running out of hay and hungry goats running amok while we are away.
as I mentioned, Alan's allergy was too bad this summer to work with hay, and it was too many goats, too much work for a lazy retired me. Enjoyed it, done it, got the tshirt... still feel sad and guilty... will go for a nice walk, it is sparkly day with sunshine and full autumn colours, I'll try to make a few arty photos...

futile muscle-ache

2010-10-26T21:06:00.005+02:00

had a lovely time yesterday cutting corn-stalks, got pink (well purplish) should do more exercise like that... Alan turned the hay he chopped the day before - alas, all a waste of time as it is again p&%*ing down, and it is also freezing cold. That's agriculture for you; a high risk business. Alan is looking into making silage,
I am not keen on the idea, I remember the smell...

Nevertheless as picture shows, we can still pick a handful of raspberries and the odd fig.

I made an enormous portion of pörkölt, the meat that Pali left in his freezer is in big packs, I had to defrost all. So we invited Pali and Erika over to help, but they were not up to expectation, didn't eat much really. Of course I had to make a largish portion of Hungarian style apple pies, as they were guests after all... and they brought ferraro chocs... so we are getting rather large, me and Alan, should fit well in with the Florida population...

For the Future of Kiskassa Public Benefit Foundation is up and running, if anyone wants to send it tons of money, I can send you the founding document and a bank account where moneys can be transferred...

Thank you for your interest and support kind person Costaslogh, I managed to remember my Greek alphabet, you are from Thessaloniki!! Great!!

Picture shows the new lake in autumn colours, the one we have next to the road out of the village since the big rains this summer; and the giant cabbage that must have frightened the goats, as they failed to taste it, like they did with most others. It is bigger than Bonzo, should have got him in the picture so you have more sense of the size...
Which reminds me: still no interest in goats, who'd want to buy now when they need to be fed all winter and there seems to be a severe hay shortage.

red sludge and other stuff

2010-10-19T18:32:00.004+02:00

For all those concerned, a late note:we are far from that sorry place. The more you get to know about the details, the more upsetting it is. There was no agency responsible for the safety checks on that sludge reservoir, which would have been dangerous enough even if it was just holding water. Human stupidity and callousness seem to be just so depressingly limitless. Anyways, you must have heard enough of this - think of those lucky Chilean miners...

We had a meeting - the new council reps (minus one who failed to turn up without apologies for this first informal meeting) - and Zoltán the new mayor who seems quite ok, so far... Thursday will be the official founding of "For the Future of Kiskassa" public benefit foundation, of which I will be a curator member...

anyways, we were busy before leaving for Budapest for 5 days; I was scheduled to look after my mum as my sis went for a spa-break, and also we managed to have a date to get a minor op done on Alan's neck. It turned out, that this op will be not quite as minor as promised - it will require at least 24hr in hospital and a longer healing period, so it is re-scheduled for after our return from Florida in January. Another check was done on this trouble spot,and it is still as innocent if bigger and more annoying, as it was 7 years ago.
still, we had a nice goatless time, Alan had chance to see some music events and to roam the city talking to unsuspecting visitors all over the place, getting annoyed when they did not bother sufficiently immerse in Hungarian culture...I had nice time if sometimes a bit frustrating with my mum, and the old crowd of girls managed to get together also.

we got back today - of course the goats managed to break out and chew the giant cabbage beauties and even some of the pumpkins the bastards. They behaved so well, even affectionate before we left. Maybe they know we now have to put up with them longer. I haven't mentioned maybe - we are obliged to try to sell them. With Alan's allergy getting so bad, getting together enough hay without losing too much money is difficult, so this is a bit of a heartbreak decision.

By the way: ZOLTáN PASSED BOTH PART OF HIS ORAL EXAM!!! This might be enough to get his degree accepted without considering the results of the upcoming written parts.

Mrs Most Popular

2010-10-04T10:05:00.003+02:00

yesterday's election results for representatives into the village council:
Képviselőtestületi jelöltek eredményei
1. Durant Éva (Független) (91)64,54%
2. Bátorfi Csaba (Független) (75)53,19%
3. Csabrák István (Független) (68)48,23%
4. Cserni Zsuzsanna (Független) (67)47,52%
5. Kresz Ernő (Független) (67)47,52%
6. Mihályi Gáspár (Független) (45)31,91%
7. Szopoliga Csaba (Független) (17)12,06%
8. Sár Béla József (Független) (15)10,64%

Next step: The President of the World!!! (and I could do a good job an'all...!)

It was a bloody long day as I sat on the vote counting committee for the German minority council part of the local elections from 05:45 to 20:30 which wasn't as long as last time 4 years ago.
Anyway, we have now a new mayor, a Balogh Zoltán, an ex-policeman and businesman (security) from Pécs who promised everything and has Tamas (popular and successful ex-mayor) full support. Let's be optimist, he might be alright, but I hereby promise to be a severe scrutanier. and now, last trip to sunny Pécs before Martin returns to even sunnier Florida.
pictures show voting cubicle, sunset from the counting office and my kicsi kifli notebook and the nastursions (flowers, no idea how it is spellt).

in-the-moment

2010-10-02T14:00:00.003+02:00

report; just finished lunch of curried goat that was eaten outside in the company of Alan and Martin and a few sleepy flies and wasps.More pleasant than I expected, as it was rather chilly earlier. Now we are digesting inside, listening to radio 4's Newsquiz. Last guests left yesterday, including a surprise hitchhiker from Canada, who appeared out of the blue at 9 one evening and stayed fro 3 days. Besides getting a lift that took him from Budapest to Kiskassa, he managed to get one from Villány, too.
Other news:Zoltán got 65% to one part of his oral exam!!! Let's hope the other part will be over 60, I'd be so proud. I do think, that he's got a break-through, he's been speaking with much less inhibition lately.
The weird and junglish salad beans had been harvested, very nice. It turned out that the ones that were not ripe made good green beans.
Chickens and geese were moved to their winter quarters, Martin helped tons with everything as well as working on his astro stuff. Hm, should make notes, it seems that tons of other things happened... oh, we had the election meeting for the unknown business man candidate for mayor from Pecs, who's only, but strong advantage is, that Tamás, our old mayor supports him. I don't quite understand why he has to be a mayor to do all that investment he wants to do here allegedly. Or all those charitable foundations for the village. It is a bit murky. But judging from the attendance of this meeting - practically the whole village turned out, while there were only about 25-30 for Timi - he will be elected. If I get in as a council rep, I'll make sure to check out what's going on... A lot of people came up to me sayiing they are voting for me, but I wouldn't be very sad if it turns out differently and I won't have this new responsibility.
Pictures are from our afternoon in Villány and in the Minaret in Pécs with Marz and Sharon.

autumn sunshine

2010-09-22T10:46:00.003+02:00

Martin and Sharon arrived and brought sunshine much appreciated, we kind of took it granted until this weird season. Nice woofers Sarah and Ethan left us to enjoy their study stay in Vienna, and Lovely guests Jane and Mark are probably back to work poor things but all seemed to enjoy their stay with us, we had a full page from each couple in our guest book! (still going strong in its third year, thank you Lois!) Today son and his girl intend to do some woofing, digging and processing the rest of the carrots, getting in apples and pears perhaps. As the pictures show, cider making already on-going and the goats had been manicured...
Pécs showed its best face yesterday, we had lovely walks, food, cakes and a little music before Timi took us home for more nibbles.
Zoltán took his exam on Saturday, lets keep our finger crossed, he sounded slightly hopeful...

I've got a netbook!!!!!

2010-09-19T21:37:00.002+02:00

now I can blog from outside and everything!! Martin and Sharon brought it - it is worth at least 3 birthdays and 2 xmases!!! Now I have to figure out how it works... be patient,,, wow and wow, it is so neat and pretty and clever, I am so chuffed.

sudden unset of September...

2010-09-09T21:33:00.003+02:00

... with a few unusually very cold and wet days, which still did not manage to get rid off Alan's red eyes allergy altogether, which is worrying. But now he is taking Pali-suggested olive-tree leave capsules, so problem is over... ha and ha.
We had a hostel guest family last week, little Lewis was just lovely, and he enjoyed himself, though was a bit wary of as ever over-enthusiastic Gus.
New and work-minded wwoofers arrived on Saturday, Sarah and Ethan, young new Yorkers, who study in Chicago and taking part there in some urban gardening scheme. They've done tons of stuff inspite of the weather and can now milk the goats unaided. Lovely people, as per usual. Maybe the youngest workers we had here, they are only 20.
More yellow plums were jammed; apples collected etc.
Had a merry late afternoon in the Blöff yesterday, managed to meet up again with the interestingly entertaining author-pair David and Beth (=Erzsébet), and I was given his, David Rozgonyi's book: "Goat Trees". I only glimpsed in it briefly, it seem to have beautifully poetic language. It is a most agreeably sized book, too, I can keep it in my handbag and can be my travelling book.
The arty pictures were made by Heather, who was a guest about a months ago with her boyfriend, who helped Alan hay making, and seemed to enjoy this experience immensely.

end of summer blues?

2010-08-28T18:05:00.003+02:00

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!

2010-08-19T20:54:00.002+02:00

... 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

2010-08-13T22:12:00.003+02:00

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

2010-08-01T19:34:00.004+02:00

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.

scorch

2010-07-22T18:24:00.002+02:00

after a few days of gentler temperatures we are back to the heat of over 30Cs. The crowd has gone; mei's birthday surprise was her friend's arrival for a brief visit from Italy. We also had a couple from the UK, Patrick turned into a wwoofer for a day helping Alan getting down a big load of straw with the little tractor in the heat. While Heather was nursing her sudden unset weird allergy - got better eventually. just these brits cannot take the climate...
We braved it after some reluctance and went to pecs yesterday. Alan was disappointed with the usual Wednesday communal folk dance in front of the theatre; it was Serbian, and Alan expected the Kusturica style stuff, but it was the very best of kolo, which is very much like the Croation stuff in fact, hope I haven't annoyed any readers by this revelation.

By chance we found out that there was an (ancient) greek satyr play "Cyclops" at the Barbakan, where Timi's son Kristof (17) helped with the pyrotechnics. It was well done.
Meanwhile cucumbers and paprikas are doing well, though venturing into the poly tunnel is a nightmare, it has been taken over by very aggressive mosquitoes.

Goats were behaving badly, as per usual, breaking down a gate to get to Alan's prize beans, which we were really looking forward to harvesting (and eating), never mind.

We are expecting enquiries from adventurous and winter-loving people for looking after our place next winter (cca 15th Nov to 15th Jan) while we hope to be in the US, a first time for us in that fascinating and slightly frightening place.

sporty youth

2010-07-15T12:02:00.003+02:00

made picture, thus blog. besides, what else can one do when it is 35C outside? I managed to get up and do a bit - well, not at 5am, but 6. attacked a few weeds and collected tons of cucumbers from the greenhouse.
Alan is feeling and looking better, so last evening we picked the apricots - unfortunately two of the trees did it differently and all the fruit fallen and finished without we noticing it... but the ones we picked were nice and a good few kilos... sitting in a basin waiting for their fate... which won't be jam, I think, just eating...
You can see our brave (mad?) bi(tri)cyclists, the 5 Stable guests. They rented the bikes from the nice Pecs company we mentioned before, and did lots of going around in the immense heat of the day... but they dipped in the brand new Siklos baths and seem to be having a great time. One of the girls arrived with a wheelchair and crutches - she tried to make the kamikaze slide of one of the Budapest aquaworld just a bit faster and landed heavier than expcted, twisted both ankles - she is the one in the front seat of the tandem - you can see that her feet are still terribly swollen - she so far refused resting them - "not on holidays" - she says - "when I'm back to work I'll rest them"...
We have quite a few "last minute drop in" guests who did not book through the internet sites, but contacted us via e-mail or telephone. Strange. A couple of such people arrived this morning, their e-mail only was spotted after a fairly late breakfast. Lucky I made the beds, bathroom and toilet are done at the moment by Alan.
While Mei is working flat out for hours now, preparing a proper chinese meal, which we'll eat for a late dinner tonight. Hm... well, pictures of that will have to be on the next blog. And now, let's think up something difficult to do for Zoltan's lesson... the next (last chance!) exam is looming... 9th of August if I remember correctly.

full house!

2010-07-11T21:20:00.002+02:00

We have 12 guests, our maximum so far, I ordered 25 kiflis for tomorrow's breakfast. We have 5 english youngsters in The Stable and separate groups of 2 and 5 polish people, all happy, I imagine especially the compatriots who were taken to the Dark Dog and are watching the world cup final there on Pali's outside screen. The other guests arrived later or declined.
It is very hot, there is already some emergency alarm and people are warned to drink enough liquid etc, and it'll get hotter.
Alan has a nasty attack of the annual allergy, that happens when he collects hay in the heat, when he already has been feeling for some time the funnyness around the eyes. He started to take the stronger tablet, bit of self medication until we can see the doc.
otherwise we are upto the neck in beetroot and cucumbers, and Alan says we are having a search party to gather the onions at 5a.m. sharp, so that the temperature and the light is bearable for him. We'll see, how the Man of the Cool Dark of Manchester that Cannot Bear the Sun will cope, poor thing. I milked the goats this morning, and to my surpise I managed ok, I don't think I've done them yet this year.

cool morning news

2010-07-07T08:12:00.000+02:00

cool morning here, we had rain and was a humid
under thirty yesterday, which seems being a clear under thirty today to get ready for real heat again tomorrow. Made nice cake with raspberries as well as rhubarb in it!! Got tons of basil frozen, mange tout and everything except tomatoes, they seem to be a bit reluctant this year never mind this is the randomness of nature.

bday and stuff

2010-07-05T21:46:00.004+02:00

that was last Tuesday, very pleasant meal in the Minaret where hitherto had not managed to get to. Or dared to, as it somehow looked always sparsely peopled. But it was great - true, not many diners, but some, lots of trees all round, good service, nice food and not too expensive - hm - am I becoming the restaurant writer upper - maybe. Anyway, my harcsapaprikás was superb; (veggie people, jump this next part) Alan's veal sat on a bed of prunes in red vine, and we tucked into some foie gras for starters. Absolutely nothing to complain about.
Alan asked what I wanted for my bday, so I sort of jokily said: a laptop, and to my amazement it was taken seriously, and we might pick one up in the US when we make it there later this year all being equal... but it has to do for the next (rather round) bday, too, being a bit more pricey than usual ones.

Been to Bp to fill in some period without mum carers, had a lovely rest, for 2 days I did nothing but ate, read, talked to my mum, watched Wimbledon. (What crap finals never mind). A Hungarian lad won the junior cup, he has a difficult name with lost of u-s finishing with a -ics.
Struggled through the Zola book (The Earth) an other not-at-all idyllic description of village life... so I earned the prize to read the McCall books now, such a pleasure, they are just so bloody heartwarming, and real-feeling inspite of that...

Mustafa gave me a lift home, which was a tad more comfortable admittedly, than the bus. Which reminds me - can you help me to find for him a suitable girl for marriage? he is a lovely, intelligent chap, good husband material I'm sure, and he is well off... he suddenly decided that this lonely businessman's life is not enough... the lady has to be in childbearing age... any ideas how to find somebody, when he hardly ever lives what can be called social life? He speaks French, English and 2 types of the languages of Algeria. Loves dogs, music and reading, probably in that order.
I wonder on which web place did Pete find Bouli.

Two pairs of guests from England and from Sydney, all stayed extra days, which is nice, but yesterdays lot from Spain failed to turn up, which is always worrying... have they got lost and ended up in darkest Croatia?? We left the lights on, walked down to the last bus... Too much to drink in Villány? I enquired via e-mail, no response yet. They must have guessed that I forgot to vac the carpet in the living room...

Mei is processing and picking as well as clearing the paths nicely, it was basil and more mange-tout today.
Alan started to milk the goats at night, too. He opened them the top field where they can champ on what left of the lucerne and tons of other goat delicacies; being goats, they are convinced that they are there illegally and they jump panicky from one morsel to the other. Clover's belly was bigger than when she was pregs with 3 little goats.
I'm sure tons of other fascinating stuff happened, but I just cannot recall them at the moment... pictures show Mei fighting with vegetables, flower tub and our first success with roses, more bunchy than Julianna's professional beauties...

Aside

2010-07-04T21:46:00.000+02:00

Just a little aside. It's surprising how disconcerting it is having asked the current WWOOFer, who's command of English is not the best, to pitchfork some hay into the loft, to find her some little while later looking worried holding a bucket and a somewhat startled chicken. (alan)

Engeland Engeland

2010-06-27T15:56:00.004+02:00

As I type the big match started - hope they manage some play rather than the boring seatshop they produced so far; if they again play so timidly, I definitely won't watch it, too frustrating, especially after the splendid game Ghana played with the USA.
Pali took Alan and Mei to the Dark Dog, where he's got a big screen set up - but it is inside, and I couldn't face the smoke and a big pro-Germany crowd.
Anyway, after about 1 (one) dry day we had more rain dammit.
Managed to do cca a dozen jars of black cherry jam, though, so I feel better on that score. Also Mei fought her way through the chinese cabbage lot and they are either cooked ("rakott kel" style) or frozen.
We have a dozy couple of guests, who managed to end up in Szekszard instead of Pecs, and arriving a day late here and sitting in the front of the house for a couple of hours, not realising, that the gate was not locked and mei was waiting for them inside... but they insisted that they'd had a lovely time, meeting the villagers out there... We had two roundabout calls on our mobile about the situation (we were shopping in Alan's fav ironmonger's and chilling out in Pecs). Mei managed to get them inside eventually, whereupon they went to bed and slept for the rest of the day...
Alan constructed the framework for the solar shower and placed the watertank in that dangerous height... so, come the next heatwave, hopefully it'll be ready.
well, what else? Can't think of anything reportable...
after posting this I went out to tidy the other house, replenish toilet papers etc when noticed that all the gengstergoats were out, luckily just on the lane. You should have seen me!!! By myself I chased all 7 of them back, and they are now locked in their pen the bastards. Alan will have to put a strand of the electric fence on
the "normal" fence they now learned to destroy. If anyone thinks rural idyll, forget it! This life is frenetic and full of baddies, luckily so far they all have four legs - round here.

back in nearly full fettle

2010-06-21T21:13:00.003+02:00

after another visit to the GP and another - very expensive (4500HUF with the insurance = £14 for seven tablests) I only had 2 coughs today. I took Lois's advise and did as little as I managed.
... it is again cold and wet, the same seemingly endless rain returned, and it must be horrible for all those people whose house is flooded, mostly in the Eastern part f the country, but we have fields here with new lakes on it, and Zoltán has frightening stories about cellars collapsing in Palkonya and houses becoming inhabitable.
This morning we went up with our lovely new Taiwanese wwoofer, Mei, to pick some raspberries and black cherries but we were beaten back by really heavy rain that caught us; we only managed a crumble-full. So anyway, managed (well Mei did the work) to totally clean and tidy the freezer room, which was in a mess, and worried me for some time. But come hell or high water, we will go up the hill again tomorrow, I want my black cherry jam, I don't let this horrid rain rot the lot.
Besides my hearty coughs it was rather quiet here, not much else to report. The loveliest news are that Szonya and Drew are coming on the 28th of July with an oz friend of theirs, and they are staying for nearly a week! And on top of that Martin and Sharon are arriving on the 17th of September! Sharon only be able to stay 10 days, but Martin is staying till 6th of October! So fab! We have to think about planning our trip to the big US in November - not an easy project to get all the dates and people coordinated.
Alan got himself a second hand scything machine for a good price and he is quite chuffed with it so far. Should have made a picture, it looks rather impressive.
Our wireless internet is working, alas not from the guest house, too many thick mud-brick walls in between... but people can internet and skype away from other rooms of this house and even can sit outside with their laptops but have to leave the doors open.
Picture show Cattoo under the Damocles log that keeps the awning awning.

and now it's too &%$**& hot

2010-06-12T21:35:00.002+02:00

... and I have a mega cold. I nursed a bad cough for weeks - my sis dragged me to the doc and I had a course of antibiotics - sort of got better, and a couple of days ago in Budapest I really went down with very sore throat, and a very nasty leaky type of cold, which still persist, though I had a good night sleep without sweats and coughs, maybe it is over now. I haven't had a cold since we've been here, so it's a shock to the system in every way.
Meanwhile while I am climbing through piles of tissues, it turned -really- hot, in some place of our county (Baranya) there was 37C.

So while some of Hungary is still under water - the Intercity train to and from was hours late, balancing between continuous newly formed bodies of water directly next to the rails - we are getting dry here already. We have 2 Irish wwoofer girls and we found tons of peas ready to pick in the upper field - and the soil cracked like if it was not raining all spring.
Our new cherry trees had not a lot of cherries - less than last year, but they had no skin-damage like Nora's, very beautiful.

A tired, and probably very dehydrated pigeon landed on the fruit drier while I wasn't here, it is from Croatia, I just sent off e-mails for the local pigeon racing people with the code we found on it, I hope they'll com for it. Meanwhile it is eating and drinking and calmly watching Gus watching it, Alan made it a comfortable little run.

Oh, our "author" left, so we won't earn our nest-egg, but we are not particularly sorry as such.

Mustafa decided, as he cannot at the moment sell his house with profit, he'll invest in it tons of money, and starts a very un-green business of exotic flower cultivation. Well, good luck to him, hope it'll work out. He plans to employ people, which would be good for the village.

Meanwhile the football world championship started, Alan is watching with Pete, the Dutch next door neighbour, and he reckons England would do so much better if I joined them shouting and getting excited... so there I go. Pics show the leeks I talked about last time and the pigeon.

ark, anyone? + amazing Urán város

2010-05-31T09:50:00.003+02:00

yes are having this wwoofer-less and guest-less lull (till next Friday) with lots of rain. At least until today it was quite warm with long sunny spells in between downpours. But it was raining heavy all last night, still doing it now, and it is much cooler (15C).
Lucky that some hay was collected, bodza (elderberry) flowers picked, with Pali, some of the (badly rain damaged) cherries picked. I thought very busy birds cut into the cherries, but it turns out that after a lot of rain sudden growth of the fruit makes the skin break. Damn. Still tastes nice but if not eaten straight away, they rot in hours. managed to find about 4 jarful of healthy fruit to bottle. never mind.
We now have the sacred bodza syrup recipe, and it includes melted sugar (caramel) which was a first for me. It' become one solid dark brown lump that I thought would never dissolve after being chucked into the big 100l barrel where the bodza flowers are soaking, giving out marvellous aroma. But it did, in a few hours even without stirring.
Sold a boy-goat and it seems we'll have buyers for the rest, except for the beige one Alan decided to keep.
We harvested the leeks Alan was looking forward to eat with chicken and bacon for about a year. Frozen some and done a 4 days portion of soup/stew - I am not all that impressed, but Alan is enjoying it... last lot today...
Also premièred a new pudding "máglyarakás" that turned out just fab, if I may say so... Alexander and Mustapha/Tahar had some, too, and there were no complaints from the first (well, he is on the quiet side, especially as we cannot communicate due to lack of shared language) and there was praise from the latter.

I should tell you about our last Wednesday's alternative theatre experience it was just amazing. It was "Uran-town Walk" starting from a very pleasant bar in the middle of this concrete jungle,
originally built for 15K miners.
Adventurous pairs like us were released every ten minutes with detailed routplans printed in Hungarian as well as often a bit confusing English, down to the last bush and the colour of the houses we had to pass. En route we visited 4 of the flats in these blocks of flats 4 floors high on average. Surprising amount of greenery and playgrounds, but even more car parking areas. Some interesting statues, fountains and friezes
in various phases of dilapidation. We had a young enthusiastic actor introductory guiding in the role of a 60s architect alternatively enthusing and disparaging about the building program of that time.
In the flats we had a tragi-comedy of young couple trying to swap their tiny space to a bigger one in the old stalinist times; and old full-sized puppet-old-man a la muppets commenting grumbly on tv-clips showing old Hungarian children cartoons and the lateness of the Pécs building programs; a creepy sensory experiment and a peep in the life of a youth local community radio station. Excellent. It was all too hectic to make pictures...

dry compost loo - as promised

2010-05-25T17:13:00.003+02:00

... very soon indeed, hope the explanatory figure makes it all clear!
meanwhile it is a perfect day here, hot with a breeze, one just sits under the awning with or without reading matter, while the other one is breaking his back upon the hill cutting hay... but one is not feeling guilty, one is recuperating and will pick cherries and cut grass around the grapes later on, honest... and I did wash 12 sets of bedding! And cooked new potatoes with parsley and pork steaks for lunch, and made lots of tea...

flush

2010-05-24T15:07:00.004+02:00

We had our record number so far last night - Melitta's crowd of 9, 2 Finnish guys and the permanent resident, 12 guests! We have no wwoofer at the moment until the 4th of June. Now that everyone'd gone except Alexander, it will be rather quiet for 4/5 days if I remember correctly, which is unlikely - I even forgot that Zoltán was supposed to come in the morning today - being Whitsun bank holiday - rather than in the evening.

But breakfasting so many was - challenging, as nobody sat outside to the proudly presented garden furniture, and it was - it still is a beautiful day. Everyone seem to adore all varieties of our goat products from the fresh milk to the cheeses.

The bogrács venison pörkölt do went off quite nicely, the atmosphere and the food was good, on Saturday night. Dodi had worn the official chef apron, giving a very professional aura...

My sister was here earlier in the week and insisted taking me to the doc, so I am now on antibiotics and improving steadily, which I hope I would have done anyway eventually - in spite of the wonder palm-leave extract tablets Pali made me take.
and my new teeth all work done - all mine, I've got the receipt to prove it - are an improvement.

And I got a good story from Martin - when they were walking home from the Shop with Sharon (Gainesville, Florida) a car slowed down and stopped next to them, and when Martin went there thinking they want direction, they pushed a $5 into his hand. It took some time to work out - they thought they were homeless, as they were walking...

The early cherries from Nora's are more or less ready to pick - the birdies tasted them so must be good, that is the job for the next few days - but I think they won't be nice enough to bottle or freeze - only to eat a lot. We'll see.

Pictures show tipsy Finnish guys after their visit to Palkonya open wine cellars day; drinking water for recovery, and Alan's dry compost toilet, which is ready to be used - and has been indeed used on this busy weekend, so there were three toilets altogether - Alan will explain how it works, allegedly soon, watch this place.

siberian berries

2010-05-14T19:34:00.003+02:00

yes, didn't take long to harvest them... less than last time but slightly bigger fruits and they do have a, ahem, familar shape, or is it my lively imagination? They taste fairly nice, on the tart side.
The goji berry bush is trying to take over the raspberries, I have to fight them back. They had no berries on whatsoever last year, but they seem to be an aggressive plant - probably a weed in Tibet...
We have tons of lettuces, Alan of course planted them "in waves" but they insisted on growing in the same time. We have the beautiful reddish-lilac coloured with the wavy leaves that you just cut the leaves and they grow back. The green variety of this is my favourite. We also have rocketsalad (or rucola) it's really grown on me. Otherwise this year is a bit patchy, the sweet corn is not showing, but peas and beans are good.
We had 3 French people last night, they also joined us for the salad evening meal, and I received 4 kisses from each of them, I think they had a good time even though we had a bit of a problem communicating them being from the older generation when English teaching was not that favoured in France... But we were not exactly fluent in French either... Also we had full room in the Old Stables first time, we had 5 students, Erasmus exchange youngsters from the University of Veszprem, who decided to have a look round before heading back in a couple of weeks to their various homeplaces (Poland, Greece, Bosnia). Well, they loved it!! They were sitting outside merrily till late night, and said this morning, that they were very comfortable.
I am still coughing, I went down to see the local doc, but managed to just miss him at the Thursday surgery. I don't want antibiotics, unless my lungs' effected, but then I should have fever and poor appetite, and no such symptoms...
I am reading the Stieg Larsson Swedish crime stories "Millenium" and though fairly entertaining, I don't think they are outstanding, never mind.
I pushed discretely a couple of our Richard Dawkins books into easy reach of Alexander, got no reaction, but I don't think he reads much in English. I had to re-allocate bed for him as the stables were booked, he'll move back next week. He hasn't paid yet, he says he'll have money in June, and everyone think we are a bit mad, but I do think he won't do a runner... he can't really with all his stuff...
We had a pleasant meal on Wednesday in another new place "Crystal" but weren't well organised and forgot to get half the things we meant to in Pecs. Well, we did remember some...
Alan whitewashed the fruit tree trunks in Nora's garden and Gazsi insisted to mix in some anti-fungus stuff. This seems to be a Hungarian ceremonial thing. We couldn't find any useful properties for this procedure, the relevant websites say, this is a defence against the sun! I wasn't aware that trees could get sunburnt.
Got a proper letter fro Carolyn, and her life is totally back to normal, which is such a relief. She just had a holiday in Italy, and talked about Pecs in Sienna!

resident author and sore throat and more restaurant write-ups

2010-05-09T14:30:00.004+02:00

yes, we have Alexander, who means to finish his book right here, paying hostel rates for ages and ages. As we have problem communicating - he's German with little English and an ambition to learn Hungarian, we haven't a right lot of ideas about the book, but it must be revelatory as if we understood well, it is about evolution and god, not necessarily in that order. He seems to be not using any research - he finished a whole chapter yesterday - all by hand, but he is expecting his computer delivered any day now. (I'll ring up our broadband people about wire-less access)
he seems to be happy in the Old Stable.
My sore throat got worse. I was supposed to have a surprise date with a skeptic list visitor from Boulder, USA, arranged to meet him in front of the theatre, (I was looking forward to this body emerging from cyberspace) but I felt so rotten, that I had to cancel. He knows it is not a chicken-out. It was a wise decision as he travelled with a baby relative, glad I didn't pass on the nasty virus or whatever I have. I haven't had a cold since we are here as far as I can remember, must have been the running in and out of the cool house into the hot outside.
Alan is still in a near workaholic state, weeding well into the evening.
The UK election was much more entertaining than the Hungarian, not to mention that the fascists got a lovelt thrashing, not like here. Though, if they had proportional representation, like here, there'd be a few of them in their parliament, too - and if in Hungary we didn't they would have no MPs here, as individually none of them was elected. So whatever the voting system, it is not the fault of fascist being elected, it is the fault of the main parties who too keen to jump on the bandwagon of immigrants/roma bashing, legitimising the topic and the "blame-culture"...
(and there was chaos and queues, just like here...
but in Hungary they let everyone vote eventually...)
anyway, enough of that, but if you agree, let me know...
Alan is off to watch Újpetre football team getting beaten (and often also beaten up, these local matches tend to include scenes from a P.Howard novel... Alexander is writing his book and listening to old LPs on the old recordplayer in the verandah of the other house; lovely hostelguests - a Czech and a Polish girl who are talking to each other in French - as they've just attended a French Literature conference in Pécs, are visiting a Hungarian professor, there is peace and quiet, only broken by my nasty cough...
more of Alan's restaurant critique corner:
Rundo

Citrom Utca 16
on the corner opposite the post office.

While you're about it, nip into the post office and have a look at the little postal exhibition towards the front of the beautiful building the roof is richly decorated with Zsolnai tiles.
The Rundo has always been fine for set meals and from the look of what was on offer I would have had the schnitzel type deal that was on offer, however they had just run out, as we arrived well passed the lunchtime rush . I had the mutton stew and it was chewy. Éva was happy with the beans set meal, a bit cold though.
The place itself is a bit Spartan for my tastes on the inside. However, the urinals have little goal posts with a hanging ball you can aim at. A good reason to drink more beer.

Rating 5, and probably worth a second chance.

Corso

Kirly Utca 14 Next to the theater, a lovely chocolate box of a building. You can sit in the square out front and enjoy the folk dancing , which you can join in, on Wednesdays evenings in the summer. All good reasons, not that you need one, for not going into the Corso.

It gets a mention in a good food guide, I can't remember which one but the fact that its got one should have been a warning. My pint turned into a glass. Eva's white wine and soda was bubble less and warm. These delights served by a couple of look alike Zombie Android waiters. The food though tasty enough listed alarmingly towards bloody nouvelle cuisine and I hate leaving a restaurant still feeling hungry. Not cheap. Don't go!

Rating 2, I would have given it a one but there is a big window you can see the kitchen through. Tends towards pan European cuisine.

Fiaker

Felsőmalom utca 7.

Sometimes good in the past but tends towards dishes that involve cheese. Things with cheese in them mostly aren't really Hungarian, this includes Hungarian cheese.
Pleasant enough cellar restaurant.

Rating 6

Stark stork story

2010-05-05T21:21:00.003+02:00

seems ages since I blogged, but my motto is: only do it if you feel like it; and one can only be in the mood if one is not busy or tired, and I've seemed to be in one of these positions lately, with sore throat an'all... weather is very close and humid the last few days, which doesn't help.
we're sure not to have storks again this year, we had a late male staying for a few days waiting for a female to find him, but alas, no luck. Never mind, maybe next year. Also there are very few swallows we chased off some sparrows from their nest.
We had a fright, Gus was not around this morning, and Alan just spotted him as we had a last looking out for him before leaving to go to Pecs for our usual Wednesday off. He was galavanting on the top of the path with the loose dogs of the village, and seemed not too keen coming home. He must have sneaked out in the dark last night when Alan went to turn off the sprinkler.
Milking and cheese making now is becoming quite a routine, hens are laying nicely, Alan is doing a good job weeding and planting. (and he assembled the new pullied cloth drier, yippie)
After the usual suspense (will -anything- grow this year?) things are coming up (I mean besides weeds). The lola rosso lettuce in the greenhouse is nearly ready for cuttings. There are beautiful big pumpkin plants coming out absolutely everywhere where, we have to treat them as weeds.
We found a lovely couple of people in Pecs mending, lending and selling bicycles in a leasurely fashion in one of the ancient
shady courtyards of the main walking street. They will let our guests rent their bikes, they'd even deliver them to Kiskassa for a dinner! For about €10/day for a bicycle, it is a good deal.
velosophie.kulturlab.org
Zoltan is having his exam next Monday - he's in a bit of a self-confidence crisis, lets hope it'll pass in time...
We'll watch the British election on BBC24 tomorrow - more trepidation...
Pictures show May-trees, street-scene from last week,(Pécs had a dance fetival) and the view from the spot where I sit reading and daydreaming when I should be doing something useful.

we've survived Thatcher after all...

2010-04-25T21:24:00.003+02:00

Yes, Fidesz got the 2/3 majority, Orbán and the head of state Solymos (a Fidesz man) both looked a bit shaken... Well, unfortunately there'll be a lot of disappointed Hungarians... The MSzP has barely 10 more MPs than the fascists, who have 47 MPs (fortyseven).
As only 57% turned out to vote, that Fidesz majority is not as huge as it looks. And spring is here, life is beautiful...

Anyway, back to goats. Alan had the usual fence-problems, little goats jump through the electric fence and then anxious mothers bash through whatever... Well, let's hope the more enforced setup will work better. When the fence works, goats are not much work. But when it doesn't... I went up with them for a couple of hours on Nora's grass - keeping them off the fruit trees can be a challenge. I made pictures...

Washing machine broke down - my fault, I put it on the 90C cycle for the milk filtering cloths, and that was too unusual - some bits burnt out... Anyway, with the gentlemanly help of Pali we have a new washing machine - if by any miracle the old gets fixed, it can be installed in "our" place. which would make washing a bit less adventurous (which in this case - good) and as I chose the cheapest washer, I also picked up a basic microwave oven for the guests. Pali took me to see Kata's school in Pecs - it was about the nicest school I've ever seen, even though it is enormous. It seemed that the kids didn't want to go home...

Bookings are coming in a bit more steadily now and the weather has been decent for a few days.

Martin was 30 yesterday, it was belly-dancing festival and village dance day, and we had a ticket for the Pecs National Theatre for Leányvásár (Victor Jacobi operetta) and expected four guests from Slovenia. As I had more opera/operetta experience I volunteered to stay home, Erika went with Alan, even though she's seen this performance once already - but it was good enough for that. Alan was very enthusiastic about it, had a good time. The dance and the whole show was all highly enjoyable he said.

never mind...

2010-04-18T15:04:00.004+02:00

Fidesz was duly voted in and they'll probably get their 2/3 majority
to be able to change the constitution and stuff like that, but the fascists will vote with them anyway. "My" LMP will get to parliamant - remarkably for a 1 year old party, they voted into the house with just short of 8% if I remember correctly, however, from their actions so far (rather then the rhetoric) they'll vote with Fidesz, too...
However, my bolshy letter was published without editing in Népszabadság, which cheered me up more than it should...
(included in Hungarian)

The weather was horrid, wet and cold, we are a bit worried about our sowed seeds. The sweet corn and the red lettuces and some tomato are showing in the greenhouse however.

We had the bogrács do on thursday, basically a thanks for Ann-Valery and Annais, who've just left this morning and were lovely in every possible way. There was trifle, made out of tinned strawberry rather than the usual tangerine, and it was a success. As was Dodi's venison pörkölt which was enforced with beef, and accompanied by a big potful of nokkedli produced by Timi. There were 15 of us, which is quite a decent party, everyone had a good time, of course! It was spitting, but not a cold night.

Next day, on Friday evening, the girls took me to the Pécsiest Cafe in Pécs, where there was a gig by an international set-up headed by a chap from the Tom Waites band, who's name escapes me. It was very enjoyable blues/funk stuff - except for the slow numbers I didn't care for. Girls were very tired due to being worked hard by some heartless wwoofers-host, so we didn't stay long. Alan stayed home, looks like being a heartless wwoofers-host is also very tiring...
We have a lovely couple hostelguests spanish-czech-slovak-hungarian mix, and they decided to call their workplace and stay an extra day, on top of the 2 they booked, as they are enjoying here... they braved goat-milking as well as my food so far.
I made the first 2 batches of cheese less salty than usual, as expected it being consumed before letting it mature. It was received as positively as I remember from the previous cheese-making season.
I'll take some with me to Budapest for my usual few days visit tomorrow. Alan will probably feel very lonely after such lively company, and he'll have to manage the goats, milking and cheese making on his own. Phonecalls would cheer him up, hint, hint...
Pictures show the inevitable cold comfort cats, and the bogrács party.

here is my published letter:

Heller Ágnes azt írja (ápr 3 Hétvége) hogy "Nálunk csak a liberális demokrácia ...új",
pedig ez csak nálunk új. Mindenhol máshol az a neve, hogy kapitalizmus.
Ha egy párt magát szocialistának hívja, akkor ne csodálkozzon amikor
neoliberalis gazdaságpolitikájáért jobbról-balról utálják, hiába tűzdeli
pánikszerű következetlen adakozással.
A fasizmus törvényszerű mindenhol, ahol a demokratikus baloldal kipusztul.
A szocializmus úgy lett definiálva, mint a demokrácia eddigi legmagasabb foka.
Na ez az, ami globálisan új lenne.
Minden más a kipróbált régi piac rendszer, ahol jobb esetben is csak a beszéd
szabad, a többi magántulajdonon alapuló káosz.
Ahogy a régi szakállas mondta: szocializmus vagy barbarizmus.
Igencsak nyilvánvaló melyik fázisba menetel az emberiség, amely nem elég értelmes
ahhoz, hogy tanuljon a múltból.

Durant Éva, Kiskassa

outings

2010-04-11T14:20:00.004+02:00

The oz hostelguest stayed an extra day, 4 altogether, and we had a nice couple from Slovenia. Hm, times are hard, if guests are detailed on the blog - but, lets stay positive, this is still pre-season, and quite cold.
We had a decent spring day on Thursday, when we went with the wwoofers and Vic and Maggie to Gyűrűfű, the "eco-village". We did the requisite walk around in the surrounding wooded countryside, very pleasant. The village was about 6 houses, built in the place of the old village that became empty in the 1960s. It was interesting to (not) see how the mud-brick houses totally disappeared into nature in 40-odd years.
The newly built modern mud-brick houses were designed in the old style - maybe a bit too much swiss, had grey water filtering and outside dry compost toilet, a few solar panels and nicely built "kemence" (local form of hand-built fireplace/oven structure that can heat the whole house).

By the way, our dry compost toilet is ready, that is, the paint is drying. And the master says, that more functional that that one in the eco-village, as ours has a proper ventilation system.

Otherwise, besides the further progress of sowing and cheesemaking, there is nothing new to report... oh, there are elections today, it seems that the biggest vote goes to:.... those who won't be voting locally at least, loads of people I met in the village said re-phrased: "Why should I care which one of them is stealing my money". Which has a lot of wisdom, but it'll make the fascists' statistics look even worse than it probably will be.
I went with the LMP ("Can be different politics") as it was a bit greener and a bit more antifascist than the others...

More goat-kid pictures - made by Anais - you cannot have enough, can you? By the way, they can jump down the hill, climb up to Nora's roof, so are into all the usual antics...

Easter Sunday

2010-04-04T15:10:00.003+02:00

yes, we had the usual egg-search this morning, 90 nicely coloured easter eggs were hidden for the grand total of 3 toddlers! The front loan was shorter this time by the geese enclosure, but there was still enough place to hide eggs. It is a bit sad that the number of the kids were so much down - there are at least 3 more eligible youngsters, their families must have been visiting elsewhere... The busy wwoofer girls helped at the communal egg-painting yesterday afternoon as well as baking beautiful French cakes for all the other people accompanying the egg-searchers. Mici and one of the other goat kids (affectionately called Pörkölt by Alan) were duly produced and stroked by all who were not too shy.

Picture shows Nora's grand-daughters stroking Mici.

On another one you can see wwoofers in a relaxing moment...
this is all part of the book I should be writing: "How To Make French Women Fat"... the girls reckon I am succeeding...

And the one that looks like a painting was made when we went for a walk with Alan just at sunset the other day.

I just thought interesting to mention how our kids are spending their long weekend - Szonya is staying in a yurt in Wales, and Martin is watching the Shuttle launch in Houston... opposite parts of human history...

The first cheese is in the hanging stage. We had a couple of milking mishaps; the bucket being kicked and the little goats opening the latch to their mothers... but everybody is getting into the routine now.

Our first hostel guest to book into the Old Stables arrived - an oz traveller lady from Sydney - and we got her to stay in the end room for the same price - it is too cold at the moment to sleep in the stables. (was 4C the last few days at night, though gone over 20C during the day).
She's staying for 3 days, she's walking Bonzo as we speak. She's having the €3 dinner with us tonight, wwoofers should be back by then, they are discovering Villány and Siklós this afternoon.
We'll have tomato soup, Anna's rolled pork steak stuffed with spicy sausage, mash potatoes and mixed pickles. There are shop cakes, French cakes and mákos-diós noodles for those who can manage...
It seems that I didn't talk about food for ages...

6 boys

2010-03-29T20:21:00.007+02:00

Yes, new goat sorting: 6 boys 2 girls... never mind.

... well, blisters... you can see Anais's hard-worked hand! The thick layered winter goat manure has been all cleaned out... hard work! Loads of stuff planted now in the poly tunnel, onions outside, even the top field is ploughed for sweet corn, Alan did a bit for Tahar, too, who decided to do a bit of gardening.

The "Old Stable" finished, got a fantastic carpet for it yesterday from the big Pecs sunday market, which was fun. Those adventurous guests decided not to be adventurous and cancelled "plans changed we are not going to Pecs" hm - maybe they've read my last week's harsh comments?? Who knows. There are some other bookings - our largest group so far - 10 bicycling Hungarians on the Whitsun weekend.
We also have some weird enquiries such as for a Rumanian group of - 50! Some websites seem to take the data from the ones where we are registered, but not quite accurately...

One of the little goats has gone today, to the owner of the (probably) successful billygoat, as per our agreement. Tonight will be the first separation of the bigger kids - so there will be a real milking tomorrow!

And when wwoofers walked back from the pub yesterday, they found a poor little piglet, only a few days old, in the middle of the foresty bit, far from any farm. It seems, that some stupid folk decided to leave the poor thing there. The girls hoped to warm it up and suckle it from rubber glove, but I'm afraid, it was too far gone - probably it had some sort of birth defect, too. So that was a bit of a non-happy ended excitement. I'm glad I didn't make a picture of it at the time when I thought we are going to own a piggy again...

I couldn't load the pictures yesterday, so the blog is posted a day later, the stable is even neater today than on the pictures, with the blue beds made and more books on the shelves.

The dry compost toilet is in the making, the siberian berry bush is flowering, the figs seem to be feeling a bit sorry for themselves...

busy busy

2010-03-23T20:59:00.002+01:00

Anais and Ann-Valery are lovely and diligent wwoofers, already done tons of good work; Anais did most of the hoeing with the little cultivator, they planted onions, shovelled compost for flowers, swept the high walls off those silly black spots - looks freshly painted, and did lots of goat-herding. 13 goats - 5 adults and 8 kids - quite serious! They (the little goats) had second day of learning all about the electric fence, so far the lesson is going rather well - no mishaps that I expected - 8 panicky little ones at the 8 possible directions - but there is still plenty of chance for that... They are a lovely sight - the girls did about a thousand photos, I put some up next time - or can one get little-goat-photo overdose?

Got our first milk today - just getting them into the habit again. Without the nightly separation only Carolyne has milk, she's the one with only one kid.

The main heavy lifting (Pali's freezer) happened from the Old Stables - but tonnes to do to get it ready for those adventurous guests who booked for the 1st of April. If it turns out to be too cold for them they can stay in the main hostel house.

We were very pleasantly surprised to find "medvehagyma" - well, 4 plants growing - up near the top of the field near the fence at the fruit-trees - the most "foresty" environment we could provide. Still, we were told it can only grow in the Mecsek!
The 4 years old sorrel patch is doing well, and the mysterious Siberian berry has more leaves than any of the other bush-like things.

Unfortunately Pécs looks like an untidy building site, even the main square looks more like an obstacle course than the centre of the Capital of Culture - it is just embarrassing, I'm afraid -
maybe it is becoming an open secret now, and that's why bookings are a bit thin on the ground... Still, we had a lovely chilling out in the new Exo-tea place, nice cushions and nice music; on Sunday afternoon with the wwoofers and Marta, who was visiting, while Alan watched Ujpetre win (at last) 3:1...

maybe spring

2010-03-19T20:29:00.003+01:00

today it was balmy again at last - been to Pécs to do the usual messing with banks, looking around the market etc.
Yesterday was a long day - Pali got us back from Budapest on his pick-up including some furniture of aunty Edit, that'll give some extra comforts to our guests we hope.
Sorry for not blogging last week - was busy to get ready for Budapest and other things - some dogged start to spring cleaning, for example. So many windows, such low level of enthusiasm about cleaning them...

Alan started planting, tidying - we are still miles behind with stuff this year, but from tomorrow we'll have help - we are expecting the first brave wwoofers of the year, a couple of girls from France. We have hostel booking for the Old Stables for 1st of April, we'd better get hyperactive...

Cables are coming to the village next week - there'll be two weeks of heavy digging and powercuts - and the new concrete posts will not add to the beauty of the village never mind.

pictures show all 8 kids - the favourite is definitely tiny Mici, who took a liking to Alan, who uptil now meant extra food, so she
jumps up to greet him every time - and ready to sneak out to be puzzled by cats.
also, the avalanche of 10th of March, when a few tons of snow dropped from the roof, luckily not bringing down any tiles.

and Bonzo, trying to be big, without success, and the cats new eating place, I am so pleased they decided to frequent us again.

... update

2010-03-08T13:55:00.002+01:00

bit sad, but we lost one, of the first pair to be born,
it was bleeting a lot, but it was so big - must have had an internal problem afterall. We feel a bit guilty - we just thought it was sort of a stupid kid, being so big and nice looking, couldn't be anything wrong - but alas, this morning, it was no more - well, let's hope that's it, the little one is running around, sucks from both mothers.
Pictures show the two smallest and then together with the third of the triplet.

counting goats...

2010-03-07T17:31:00.003+01:00

well, if you must know... 9 (nine) and those are just the new ones!
The last two was born to Clary a couple of hours ago but - weird - we spotted her feeding the little runt, before delivering her own lot. All three of the triplets seem to be fine, that tiniest is the only proper white one and is about half the size of the ones Caroline had. Is still a bit wonky but seems now very likely that succeed in the survival business, as is the backish sibling that was very wobbly to start with, but recovered much faster.

So - at the moment we have more goats than hens! But this won't last, as we are getting our new lot of factory rescues tomorrow, Alan got out the little tractor out to bring them home, and he'll have to get some extra hay and straw from Mr Zöld as with so many goats and such a long winter, we are running low.

We had the annual international women's day village quiz, there were a bit less people than last year, but still decent numbers and again, it was a good atmosphered, merry occasion - and, of couse, our table won again...
Picture shows Clary's triplets, the big one suckling, the little ones panting after a suckling exertion; a moment from the quiz, and the dogs keeping an eye on Cattoo having a late breakfast...

... and 3 more!!!

2010-03-05T15:55:00.002+01:00

... and all three off Clover - though two of them are little and wobbly, I'm afraid, triplets are not really good news for goats. Well, we'll see how it goes. The little ones managed to stand up, but are still wet and without help can't feed.
All in 2 days! Which means it wasn't Miska - but the little white loaned-for-a-week billy that looked so useless. Miska kept himself for Clary, who's the only one left to deliver her little one(s).

... and more!

2010-03-05T10:35:00.002+01:00

newsflash!!

2010-03-04T16:33:00.002+01:00

2 brand new little goats to Carolyne!!!
no pics yet as they need peace and quiet says the master.
They were already up and feeding happily when we discovered them
about 3 hours ago, on a miserable English-weather day.

really preggie goats...

2010-02-28T14:30:00.004+01:00

we took them out to graze on the path in the last few days, as the weather is picking up, and they are rather big - I hope you agree. They seem very peaceful lately, the usual bullying is absent, maybe they are considerate to the others' hefty disposition...
so, exciting times, hope we are not so sadly wrong as last year...

Blogging day is now settled to be Sunday afternoon, having a bit of peace and quiet here, Alan safely shifted by Pali to his Dark Dog, and there is a league-cup cup final, so he'll not be back till 7 or so.
Pali is not smoking and he cut down on his drinking, and he sticks to his resolutions rather impressively.

We have our "spring fatigue" at the moment finding hard to get going. Managed to clean up next doors' and make most beds, but the windows, doors etc still need a good going over, maybe the thought of spring cleaning causes spring fatigue...

Alan fixed his first solar warming wall thingie, made out of beer cans, he should talk about it really... will get pictures with the nice new to us wicker chair and bed-side table I got today from the big Pecs sunday market, where Mustafa was kind enough to take me. Mustafa and Tahar managed to get their residence extensions at last, thus the better mood. I had a thoroughly enjoyed and fruitful walkabout.

The other picture next to preggie looking Clary and Clover is
the hailstoning from a weird summer storm we had a few days ago after a sparkling day of 20C+.

more of Alan's reviews - we've been out an about a bit...

Korhely

Just off Kiraly Utca

This place has a sort of South American feel to it. There's straw on the floor and you are encouraged to throw your peanut shells, from the bowls of peanuts on the tables, onto the floor. The peanuts were in the past free but now there is a small charge, so tie your elephant up outside.
I had the Viagra, and before you get any ideas, its a dish of pork stuffed with hard boiled eggs and horse radish. Very tasty if a little hard to digest. Cost about £6. The beer, my favorite Pecsi larger at 600 huf. a half liter. Decent service and an interesting enough place if a little, OK a lot, contrived.

Rating 7

BACCHUS PINCE

Pécs Irgalmasok utca 6 – 8.

It dosen't look much as you make your way up the slightly univiting passage and down a set of steps, but if you like cellars you'll like this. Just the arching of the brick work is worth a look if you're into bricks, that is.
We didn't really give it a fair trial as we both had the set meal, as here there were a choice of about 6 dishes for this cheap and quick option. Mine was deep fried pork with rice and sweet pickled cabbage, the starter being a bone soup. The soup was a little salty but the food was fine and you can't really complain when the cost is about £2.25

Rating 7

I'll go back and try again to check it out further.

back to sunny Kiskassa

2010-02-21T14:24:00.003+01:00

well, today at last - past 20C when the thermometer got direct sunshine... But there are giant mounds of dirty snow everywhere. Anna said they worked their arses to the bone (??) to shovel all the snow in front - quite a long pavement we have. In Hungary you are expected by law to keep your part clear, and in the village you do get the stare if you not on top of your act - even if it is still snowing (in which case - what the point me think).

Anyway, our trip was really good, everything worked this time, even the Manchester weather managed to hold off it's worst, thought it was cold and sleety even snowy. Extra thanks for Eira and Sms who showed a comfortable and good time to Pali and Erika, who really seemed to enjoy themselves; they ventured into York and Liverpool on their own, and of course joined the Saturday pub crawl and curry in Manchester, amongst other programs. A big thank you to people who made an effort to see us - Frank from furthest away, but was lovely to see Paddy and Ann after a good few years.

In Budapest, where we had a 3 days stay before our flight, we managed to find a snooker table for Alan - if only 3/4 size; seen Auntie Edit - she still busy making great drawings - and little Feco, who has smiles and interest well past the 2 and a half months baby standards... Also, we went to see Michael Moore's Capitalism - very good - we are ready for that proper democratic control bringing revolution, please, get on with it...

Pictures show the very pure white village we left before our trip, and some Manchester shots and the Tim Bobbin in Milnrow, that is just "The Bobbin" now and is a bar, not a pub.

Oh, by the way, the goats look extremely pregnant, - but they looked that way last year... maybe they are a bit more that way now - or is it wishful thinking?? They are happy, as are the other beasts, Anna's Jozsi took good care of everything for us.
And, and... we have hostel bookings!! Also we'll have our first wwoofers of this year, too, in a couple of weeks.

pre-trip stuff

2010-02-06T15:28:00.003+01:00

yes, we are off to Budapest on Monday, and to old foggy Albion on Thursday.
I present Dodi's pictures, he's the ex-drummer of Kispál és a Borz, as I mentioned it before, he's got a very olde worlde peasant house in the next village, and is very enthusiastic about cooking authentic Hungarian outside couldron meals for guests who are interested in such local curiosities. He is a very good cook, we sampled his hospitality a good few times, the food superb, the atmosphere leasurely and merry... jamming is included for the surprise number of musicians among the guests...

The fascist meeting went satisfactorily as such - only the sad candidate turned up on his own, and was "run out" of town; the eight people who turned up were from our council and not of a nazi-sympathising nature; he could not answer questions, claimed not to speak for the party and was gone very soon indeed. Appearantly, Erika, our post-lady councillor gave him a good piece of her mind - pity we didn't know about this "action", if it was indeed a planned one.

Dodi's pictures show a wintery Kiskassa, 2 from his house, one of the Pécsdevecser church, and Alan with one of his geese.
so, unless I blog from Milnrow, tara for a couple of weeks.

hybernating plus fascists first local lurking

2010-01-31T16:21:00.003+01:00

I meant to make more beautiful snowy pictures for today's blog, but the camera batteries need re-charging as it turned out.
I add Alan's restaurant write up instead - should get some pictures for those, too.
We didn't do much at all besides Alan doing some parts of the solar water warming thingie bits.
We watched the tennis (oz open) with the last final today, ate, read, slept gave English lessons...

The fascist Jobbik party is holding an electioneering meeting in the culture house on Wednesday, I found their flier yesterday in the postbox. I rang up the mayor to ask what is going on, and what a concerned citizen should do about this violent and hate-mongering bunch. (There will be parliamentary elections in Hungary on the 11th April).
He said he was worried, too. However, the legal situation is, that the village council can only stop either all or none of such meetings of legally registered political parties. He said, they already had a meeting in Ujpetre, which was ignored by the population there, they had to close shop and go home. Which is a pleasant surprise, as Alan met in the pub on his Sundays out a few people who were fooled enough into thinking that they were supporters. So, as the mayor wants the village to see all the
"proper" candidates, he allows the meeting, hoping that they will be duly ignored here, too. Also, he checked that they are not bringing heavies, only the candidate and his campaign-mate are coming, and the candidate is a nice and quiet chap, Tamás says, has no idea how the fascists got him to join about two months ago.
We decided with Alan to pass by about 30 minutes after starting time on Wednesday, and if they'll have more than 3 attendees, we'll
stick stickers outside about "rosszabb = csak gyűlölni" or something similar. Or if anyone has better ideas...

so here are Alan's further pieces:

Fordan Center

Bajcsy Zsillinszky Utca

This is primarily a pool hall and as such is not bad, couple of hours pool and and few beers about £12. There is also a restaurant which has recently been tarted up. Unfortunately the food, which was good has gone, to be replaced by pizza. I had my usual ham and mushroom and was underwhelmed. For about £4 you get a greasy Pizza, end of story.
They have Pilzner Urquell on draught for about £1.75 a half liter.
Good for pool or if you've really got the munchies.
Alas no snooker.

Rating for food 2

As a pool hall 6

Talking of Pizza

Kiraly Pizza

Kiraly Utca

Excellent Pizza for about the same price as the Fordan. Local beer that's passable.
The pizzas are good and you can sit outside in the summer and watch the people going up and down the walking street.
Really if you come to Hungary you should try Hungarian food but everyone gets the occasional Garfield moment.

Rating 6

Florian

Florian Ter

Probably one of the best meals I've had in a long time. I had the Venison accompanied with the medium house red, also very good. I kow's what I likes! It was about £7 for the main course, moderately expensive by Hungarian standards but well worth it. I can't remember how much the wine was, I wonder why? It wasn't, however, expensive.
The place has the feel of a local cafe but is none the worse for that. Tucked away up some back streets it seems a good example of traditional Hungarian cooking.
No I don't have shares, but if any came up I might buy some.

Rating 8.5

dental blues

2010-01-18T11:33:00.004+01:00

it's over and done, The Big Dental Job I was worried about for the last few years and postponed it and postponed it... well, it was a smaller trauma and cheaper than feared long live the lovely Dr Radnai of Pécs! Though I still feel like if something bashed me in the mouth with all those injections and hammering but I am enormously relieved that it is over, and the other silver lining is, that as for the last 4 days I'm eating healthy and liquidised food, I lost 2kgs already!
I discovered new wonders, I put all the left over kiwis from xmas with some bananas in that until now underused kitchen utensil, and I got something much nicer than a milk shake without any other ingredients. I have to stop eating icecream, my throat hurts...

It's snowing again, less than 5cm, but winter lost it charm now, seems too long, even though I remember those record warm days in December... I know it's all weather and food again - but unless you want to know the list of our reading matter and the TV and DVD and radio programs we consumed I can't think anything else to add.
except:
Anna's big pigs and some future ones, strictly in the big pen only, might continue as a feature, against our resolve - but we lost some bargaining power, as we'll need her help when we'll be away in February (yes we've done the on-line check-in; all those people who haven't yet forgot us - we'll be in Milnrow 11th - 18th of February). But the freezer I mentioned previously is filling up with lovely lean pork steaks and hurka.

the promised pictures are the new green house in front of the wine press room, and the top of the (full) rain water collector tank.

if Alan adds more of his findings (we've been to the bar Coffein) on one of the dental days) I will add it to this blog. But they'll be eventually on the web site, too.

Pécs is now officially Capital!!

2010-01-11T19:35:00.003+01:00

Yes, and it was on the telly, very impressive opening program.
http://english.sina.com/life/p/2010/0110/298872.html
The prime minister said, this year not only Budapest, but Pécs
is also the Capital of Hungary, as well as the Cultural Capital of Europe. So there!

I honestly'll do the picture of the new green-house-ish bit
Alan and Martin made, I also forgot to report the grande work
of clearing the polytunnel, taking off the old plastic, so it is ready now for the brand-new one which was bought, and delivered by the kind help of Dodi.
Anna's smaller pigs now have gone to piggy paradise, and I am still waiting for a share of piggy meat, now that the freezer has been duly cleaned and re-packed which resulted a lot of space in it, and some idea about its contents... so that's where all the carrots were, at the very bottom!
I also forgot to mention, that we had a guest over xmas - she arrived on the 23rd of December and had partaken in most of the festivities, she was of the best type - she paid -and- she insisted helping with the dishes, even did with Alan some outside work, and was enthusiastic to do lots of searches about goat fecundity issues...
She left on Saturday, she is staying in Pecs now, she needs some medical help, she has some complicated issues, let's hope all turn out to be ok, best wishes.
We still feel a bit dozy and lazy, and why not. Alan manages to do a few jobs a day - fixed the light in the cellar and in the small room in the guest house.
Also he started on this new project - of which the first instalment follows below!

(Alan:)
It occurred to me that a good excuse for visiting all the bars, restaurants and places of ill repute in Pecs would be to do a guide for visitors, after all it is a European Capital of Culture for 2010.
In consequence, I'm over the year going to put together a totally unscientific and personally biased account of what I think is good and what I think is not.

A good tip if your on a budget is to look for boards outside restaurants, (etterem). These advertise set meals, usually a soup and a main course. Typical price ranges from 600huf (£2), to 900huf.

Number 1
If you were even contemplating going into either of Pecs's Golden Arches of doom, please don't. Hungary is justly famous for its food. Give the environment and your digestion a break, go somewhere real.

Number 2
The Murphy's Pub, Kiraly Utc.a Close to SzechenyiTer (Square)
OK its a fake English Pub, moderately convincing at that.
A little expensive, (by Hungarian standards)
In the summer I like to sit outside and drink the Pecsi Lager, (about 500huf for half a liter, just under a pint)
I've always enjoyed the food, good portions and well done. Average price about six to nine pounds for a main course. I recently had a chicken pörkölt (stew) which was excellent). However Eva had a spicy chicken salad which she said wasn't spicy and Martin had Gypsy steak, (cigány pecsenye) which he said was not sufficiently garlicky. The chips where good though.
They tend towards panüEuropean cuisine but the Hungarian section, though small, I like.
The service is pretty good, they speak English and German to supplement your smattering of Hungarian.

Rating: 5 out of ten as my bench mark.

(hm - maybe we should accompany these write-ups with pictures...)