David Rozgonyi

leaving so soon?

2011-01-22T13:03:00.000+01:00

Two months in Colorado sped past like the weather systems there (mostly COLD and SNOW....ugh). Visiting our families was a warmer experience, thankfully, except that whole driving 70 miles four or five times a week from one city to the other and back and forth and .... I calculated the total distance over two months exceeded the outbound leg of our motorcycle ride from Hungary to Spain! And boy, was it nice to get home!

And then, six days later, before the jet lag wore off, I realized that our plane tickets to Qatar and beyond left four days earlier than I had recalled. Ooops! What followed was a mad scramble of outfitting, getting meds and antimalarials, paying bills, arranging neighbors to watch the house again and transport to Budapest.... But all that's done now, and we're just counting down the last hours of this icy cold winter until we get to balmy Doha (75 degrees) and then boil-your-brains-Bangkok (97 degrees and 100% humidity) a week later.

Packing for this trip is, well, a trip, because I haven't ridden my backpack for a few years, since the last time I was in Myanmar and Cambodia, in 2008. Since then, the trips have all been either living out of the VW, or atop the motorcycle, both of which offer a far more relaxed approach to packing.

Being on the road for three months plus out of a backpack is actually much more liberating than knowing you'll only be gone a week or two. For a short trip, the temptation is to bring too much to avoid time-sapping chores like laundry and buying toiletries. But you and I both know there is no way to pack three months into a single little bag, so no pressure! I've got two of my trusty lightweight cotton button-front short sleeves, a pair of shorts, a pair of light canvas slacks, swimsuit, teva sandals, and no socks or undies anywhere in sight! A camera, a toothbrush, a few dozen passport photos, a book.... what else do you need? With a little time and washing powder, ain't nothing can't be done.

On a disappointing note, playing to my romantic sense of meeting old friends in far-flung lands, we were meant to intercept not one but two old pals somewhere in Asia, but sadly, neither were able to make it happen. Which is a damn shame! These are some of my very favorite places, and I would have dearly loved to take them in in good company. Of course, Erzsebet is the best company, so I'm never at a loss for that!

Tentative route for the first few legs:

1) Qatar: Qatar Air flies without backtracking from here to Asian destinations, so I jumped at the chance to not only NOT have to fly three hours in the wrong direction to change planes to fly three hours to be back over Hungary, but also to fly one of the best rated airlines in the world AND take a few days in a new country. It'll be a short sojourn, the plane landing at midnight and taking off again in the morning three days later. But Qatar is practically a microcountry, and there's an inland sand sea forty miles north of the capital which we'll check out. In Doha, there is also a fantastic Islamic history museum, and a huge souq to wander around and revisit some of my Arabic culinary favorites.

not my photo, but it'll do until I get there....

2) Bangkok: A few days to adjust and to savor the deliciously backpacker Khao San, get back to our favorite dive of a hotel, eat some durian from the wandering durian salesman, get plowed, and arrange for Myanmar visas and tickets.

khao san road, 2008

3) Myanmar! We had been tossing this back and forth, but we've decided to go for it. It's about the only place left in Asia without any tourists, so a month of respite will be lovely. Plus, we'd love to revisit some of our earlier haunts and check out one or two new ones. But just wandering for days around Yangon is one of the best things, too!

yangon, 2008

That's all I know. I'll try to update and post pictures every week or two, except in Myanmar. Internet is very difficult from that country, so the blog will likely suffer, but it's for a good cause. Wish us luck, and see ya on the road!

Pecs to Pyrenees Part Who-can-remember: Last Legs and Coming Home

2010-12-08T17:27:00.000+01:00

So it's come down to coming home. After only a few weeks on the road, we've covered a grand total of eleven countries and a whole lotta miles on the motorbike, all with no accidents, no malfunctions, not so much as an inconsiderate peep from her even through some hairy mountain passes, days of sleet and rain, days of flat out throttle up hill and down. I've heard it, I've lived it, now I'll say it: If you want a bulletproof motorcycle, you could do a lot worse than a Kawasaki. And for the value for money, I don't think there is a better one anywhere.

After Rome and the Vatican and our agrotouristic adventures in Giove, we cut a swath through Umbria and made for San Mario, the final tiny country to knock off the travel list. The drive was uneventful and gorgeous.

I posted pictures of Umbria the last time, so I'll just leave you with this one:

a break from the usual view of the buggers

San Marino is as far as I can determine a country comprised of exactly two things: a castle, and a parking lot. Or rather, a system of them. Thankfully, we were able to roll up to the very base of the fortifications, and jam the Kwaki between some scooters at the head of the line. I asked these friendly boys to look after her.

i'm tasking you with watching his bike, ya got it?

They seemed to like my chutzpah or friendly banter or whatever you'd call it (stupidity? lameness?), and off we went. There are a few winding streets, quiet and peaceful:

a typical street scene: regal architecture and black merc

but a whole lot more steep stones flowing with folks. All the shops were selling tchotchkes (boy, i'm really busting out the yiddish today!) or ice cream or utterly delicious crepes, of which I sampled one.

more typical street scene

Escaping the crush, we got out onto the ramparts and soaked in the view.

i could look at this all day

mmmm, more ocean....

had a drink, and then decided that that distant ocean (see above) looked too good to miss out on stuck waaay up here:

san marino

with our respective treats

Rimini was just a quick blast downhill, and we made it with plenty of time before dark. Unfortunately, both of us are rather allergic to crowds, especially on beaches, so we didn't take a swim. I couldn't really see the water from the sand to find it.

beach at rimini

umbrella forest

kite salesman, or extreme enthusiast

But we had a nice dinner of fresh fish on the strand, amid a line of endless little hotels and restaurants. The restaurant was empty (we eat pretty early for Italy), and the kindly restaurateur generously allowed us to smoke, even though it was a smoke-free establishment by law (just-a throw the butt outta tha window if anyone comes in....) After, we took a constitutional along the breezy promenade just as the sun was setting. All in all, a very fine way to end a trip. And by the next night, we were sleeping in our bed at home in Pecs.

And so ended the Pecs to Pyrenees 2010 Motorcycle Adventure! As I type this from chilly northern Colorado, where we've been for the past month and will be for the next one too, I am reminded that the ride was beautiful, exhilarating, and very very warm. Except when it wasn't.

Just like life! L'chaim! And fee sahitkum, too.

2011 South East Asia Ramble

2010-10-29T11:47:00.000+02:00

After we return from the US in a few months (Nov - Jan), we'll rest in Hungary for two weeks, trimming trees, doing some winter wine and vineyard work, but then it's off again! And to someplace much much warmer, for a goddamn change. Nine countries: Qatar, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia. Here's the route so far. I hope it isn't too ambitious for three and a half months!

Some highlights we're hoping to get in:

1) Our wedding rings are silver filigree with lapis lazuli melted between the swirls. Like so:

love that knuckle hair.

They were made in a stilt hut in a little village by a Burmese silversmith, and I've never seen another pair like them. But as you can see, chunks of lapis have fallen out over the years. Well, I saw how he made these, and know he could reblue them for us. If only we could get them to him. So that's what we intend to do.

2) There's a very cool project I've been supporting for six years now, ever since my first visit to Cambodia. They're called Sustainable Cambodia, and I'd like to see their model village, and meet the little girl (not so little anymore!) who I've been sponsoring all this time. Check them out--they're great, honest, NONRELIGIOUS folks--and sponsor a kid today!

http://www.sustainablecambodia.org/

3) A whole lot of motorbike rentals. I'd love to fly Ripley (our Kawasaki) over, but I'd be terrified about theft the whole time.

4) Motorbike + active volcano = FUN! Mt Merapi is a target on Java. Unfortunately, it just this week decided to blow its top. We'll see if it settles down by then.

5) Two long riverboat rides: The whole western coast of Myanmar from Yangon to Sittwe; and the Mekong from Luang Prabang to Kratie.

5) Beach beach beach, wherever, whenever. There's no shortage!

I'm getting exhausted just looking at it, but here's what we're thinking...

2011 South East Asia Ramble Route

View 2011 SE Asia Trip in a larger map

Pecs to Pyrenees Part IX: Umbria, Old Men and the Chupacabra

2010-10-27T13:09:00.000+02:00

With another set of travels upon us in six days, I thought I'd better get this blog up to date!

I'm just going to start this entry with my favorite shot of the whole trip, quite possibly one of the best landscapes I have ever managed to capture. It was taken on a beautiful slow roll south from Florence toward Rome. Our goal was to find a village to crash outside the big city and make unencumbered daylight dashes. On the way, the countryside became drier; the vineyards were replaced to some extent by rolling fields. The sky was blue again at last, the sun hot, the aromas of the countryside filling our helmets and hearts. Here's Umbria:

talk about falling in love!

There was this guy who built a sculpture garden a long time ago in a hilltop village called Bomarzo. We're talking 1552 here. Only he was not a happy guy. In fact, the death of his wife left him quite heartbroken. So instead of creating beautiful sculptures, he created the Parco dei Mostri: The Park of Monsters. They're also HUGE. Try this one on for size:

There are several dozen in a similar vein, set in a beautiful shaded forest. I imagine at night they'd be quite creepy, but during the day it's a popular local picnic place. There is a link to the official site in English for the interested; you should certainly check out the photographs of the rest of the monsters....

The village we picked was called Giove, about forty minutes north of Rome.

Giove

me at the overlook

B at the overlook

Giove was unremarkable except for one thing (and even this is probably unremarkable in Italy, but it was the best example of it we've ever seen. There was a small main street that ran beneath an ancient fortification / church. Opposite was a little trattoria or some such with minimial food and wine. On both sides of the deserted street, a row of benches, and a few tables in front of the trattoria to round things out. At three or four, old men would start to trickle up the street. A pair of them here, a single oldtimer hobbling up from there.... in no time flat, every bench and chair was occupied by an old man. I counted as many as forty per night. They started gossiping, laughing, playing cards. About ten minutes later, as though playing musical chairs, men would rise from one bench and drift over to another to occupy the still-warm place where the old guy who was now shuffling over to one of the tables had been sitting.... They made room for us straight away, and seemed like a friendly lot. Absolutely no English was spoken, but I did glean from one dude that he liked our bike (they had seen us roll into town the night before), and had a collection of several dozen himself. We tried to buy them drinks; they refused, but bought us drinks instead. We sat and smoked and drank wine and listened to the latest Italian gossip for hours each night, and it was an absolute delight. I mused about taking a series of mugshot type photos of them and doing something with the images (each face was so different, so weathered....), but Beth talked me out of it. It would have ruined their night and ours, so we stuck to smiling and sipping. But I did manage to sneak a shot of them while pretending to shoot Beth before the fortifications. Can't see much, but it's better than nothing.

see? already getting suspicious! With 30 more on the other side of the street, that's a rumble you want no part of!!

They were great, though, and one of the highlights of the trip. We stayed several nights at a "agrotouristic development" just down the hillside from the meeting place. I put agrotouristic in quotes because it was as near as I can tell a painter living with his wife who loved to host dinner parties for his friends (not guests) and happened to have a spare room around back. Still, it was dirt cheap and very pleasant! Nice guy, too!

see how friendly he is?

The combination of hearty wine and pitch dark, steep, unfamiliar country lanes led to some funny stumbling around. Not on my part, of course:

boom goes the paparazzi!!

And to a possible chupacabra sighting:

that's a brush with death right there, dude

From here, we would duck into Rome and the Vatican. I'll save that for the last post, because there's a whole stinking heap of art to post up! Cheers!*

*and don't let the chupacabra get you! When you hear that woof in the night, run!!**

** and watch out for those Italian longtimers, too.... they'll gossip you to death!***

*** and here's that link to the Park of the Monsters! http://www.bomarzo.net/index_en.html

Pecs to Pyrenees Part VIII: Tuscany

2010-10-10T11:29:00.001+02:00

Leaving the wine country of the south of France was a small sorrow mitigated only by the knowledge of an even better one coming up: Tuscany! Cutting a path along much of our outward route, we followed the path of least distance. We slept in a deserted and I must say somewhat freaky old town called Beaucaire, beneath Avignon, where a cold wind was blowing along the Rhone riverfront, rattling debris in the gutters and chilling the sweat on our backs. What few people there were in the huge warren of windy alleys, all male, were huddled in packs on street corners, and half the shops were shuttered. A shame, too; it would have been a nice town otherwise. We got out of there fast the next morning and shot along the coast toward San Remo and beyond.

Our first Italian sleep was in the postcard pretty town of Portofino. A glass of whisky (house) ran 25 Euros on the harbor. The scene was, at least, commensurate:

click to expand

the dead rhino sculpture, not so much....

While we had drinks and dinner, a monster yacht backed in to the bathtub-sized harbor. A long hour of maneuvering later, it managed to tuck its 150+ feet away between the little fishing boats. Curious to see who the owner was, I was pleasantly shocked when what looked like an ancient and slightly mummified Mayan queen dripping with gold and serene in her throne was carried down the gangway by her "boys". Okay, the throne was a wheelchair, but the gold was real, and she looked regal as they pushed her all around the harbor front until she'd had enough and they carried her back to her floating palace. The fish plate for two was almost as magnificent; the wine, a localish Chianti, was positively decadent.

By the time we got underway to Florence, the weather had turned sour again, and it was only the protection offered by our full gale suits and even fuller vocabulary of expletives that got us to Florence in one piece. We wasted no time checking in at place near the heart of the town, stashed the bike in a nearby underground garage, and began roaming the city we had really come all this way to see.

Why Florence, amid all the other treasures of Italy? Elizabeth has a deep and abiding love for Galileo, you see, and when she learned that his desiccated finger was on display at the Galileo museum (along with his telescopes), it had become the must-see of the trip. I was happy to oblige; I'm not so course as to ignore museums entirely in my perpetual quest for wine and beer and beaches and fast turns. And it was fascinating, not only Galileo's stuff, but the several floors of primitive science equipment, astrolabes, alchemists' cabinets, sextants, the works! It was very exciting, and that most rare treasure in Florence in the summer: lineless and almost empty! Believe me, when the Uffizi has a wait time of four hours, it was a genuine treat to walk in off the street and be browsing within literally one minute. Maybe less.

We spent several days in town, and one of the other highlights (no surprise) was a walk into the hills around the city to view Galileo's house. A good two hour hike in the rain, but the views of the hills, dotted with estates and cypresses, olive groves and overgrown gardens along tiny stone-walled lanes, was worth every pant.

that's his house straight above the gate

Finally, we located it. No one answered the door, but we discovered from a passerby that Galileo's daughter's convent was only another mile down the lane, so off we went. This time, I wasn't taking no, and prepared my bribing pocket with a handful of twenties, and prepared my face with a big shit-eating grin to complement Beth's small, sad face (Galileo always makes her cry). Ring ring, nothing. Ring ring, a man's voice in Italian. We plead for a while--can we come in, two minutes, I pay you, Mary Celeste, Mary Celeste!--he mutters "no" and hangs up. Rule Number One of traveling: you can't bribe someone if they can't understand or see you. As we debated what to do, a door creaked open in the courtyard five minutes later and a priest came nosing out into the rain. He chatted with us, and before I could do something uncouth he said the building we wanted was next door, owned by a private family, and they weren't around. We thanked him, and left.

On the way back into the city, we emerged above Michaelangelo's Square. This is where all the postcards of Florence are shot.

see?

I usually find at least one place in every country I visit where I could see myself living for a longer term, and Florence was most definitely it (even without knowing what lay ahead, and it proved true). There are far too many pretty scenes I could post up about Florence, so I'll just have to close this post by throwing a bunch up and see what sticks.

Pecs to Pyrenees Part VII: Southern France

2010-09-30T13:59:00.001+02:00

Where were we last time.... trickling out of the bluey embrace of the Pyrenees and heading into the French wine country! Being budding viticulturists and well-blossoming oenophiles, driving around the vineyards in this part of the world was an intoxicating experience. It has been noted by more than one person that Beth's and my life consists pretty much of hurrying from one place to sit/rest/relax/drink coffee/wine/beer to another as fast as we are capable in order to maximize the available time in the new place to sit/rest/relax/drink coffee/wine/beer. It was a fair enough assessment. In keeping with ourselves, then, we took our time stopping for our frequent coffee breaks in villages and squares wherever we could find them. One was prettier than the next.

see? how pretty is that?

The highlight of this leg back through France was undoubtedly Chateau de l'Hoste. It was nice enough that I'll even plug their site at the end of this post.

How did we end up staying at an 18th century French chateau? Well, we drove around and around one day looking for the smallest village in which to sleep. The day ran out, and I saw the sign. I was prepared for the hit in the wallet, and knowing what to expect, we rolled up confidently and took the last room they had available. Can you blame us? The place was stunning!

The fun started as we pulled up. You've seen a photo of the bike loaded up in this blog. Add a few thousand miles of dirt and bug-spatters (same goes for our jackets and helmets), and the somehow irreproducible roar of the bike, and it becomes a head turner, especially when squeezing itself between the parked Mercs and Beemers at a bona fide French Chateau! But we were on our best behavior, there was one room available, the young woman managing the place seemed to like us, and of course I could pay. So that was that.

We cleaned up, wandered around the grounds, wrote a little in our respective notebooks. And then it was time to get a little refreshment on. Dinner was served at tables scattered amid the trees that surrounded the house, and soon enough a middle-aged man came trotting up with a broad smile and a wine list. The sommelier was an extraordinarily friendly guy, either a Frenchman raised in England or an Englishman raised in France. He was obviously intimately familiar with the wines of the region, and he deftly talked me out of a bottle of generic French Merlot in favor of a grape I've never heard of before. Malbec was the name, and the Cahors region was apparently quite famous for it. The prices weren't exactly down to earth, and I expressed doubt. He simply said: If you don't love it, I'll buy the bottle back. Well, how can you refuse an offer like that?

Needless to say, or I wouldn't have spent the time on the setup here, the wine was one of the best I've ever tasted. He told us about the grape: rough, filled with character, very very dark. Indeed, the region has been trying to lobby the EU into allowing another category of wine, just for them... not rose, not red, but black. That's right, black wine. And it was, like a hot sun setting behind a goblet of violet ink. To soften it, this particular blend had 20% Merlot and 10% Tannat as well, and the combination was like a velvet slipper kicking you in the side of the head. Cahors is famous for the grape, but you can get a good Malbec made in Argentina these days as well. In any case, as budding winemakers, we were unable to come to terms with the flavors and texture before we came to the end of the bottle, and so we were forced to order a second. For professional tasting and evaluation purposes, of course. And let me tell you, we learned something about Malbec, my friends. We learned a great deal. For some reason, though, I just can't quite recall most of it just now....

By this time, dinner was being brought out. I think mine had three different kinds of gooseliver preparation, as well as an amuse-bouche and other nibblies. Beth ordered an ice cream. At a French chateau, this is what an ice cream looks like:

Idiots. The treble stave has five lines.

Now, I don't like ice cream. I mean, it's okay, but as a general rule, I just say no. That said, this thing looked almost good enough to eat. If you want a better review of it, along with ice cream from every country we passed through on the trip (eleven), then click over to Erzsebet's blog and read all about it.

http://erzsebetgilbert.blogspot.com/2010/09/2010-golden-scoop-european-ice-cream.html

It was a wonderful night, a very rare luxury but one that I vehemently do not regret allowing myself. And the next morning, we took some Advil, strapped the bike up, and rumbled down the lane, heading for Tuscany, where I'll pick up next time. And until then, go find yourself a bottle of Malbec, and tell me how it goes down!

The Chateau de 'lHoste:

http://www.chateaudelhoste.com/en/

Pecs to Pyrenees Part VI: Spain

2010-09-12T11:23:00.000+02:00

Originally, we had intended to set a course from Andorra to Barcelona, and then down and back along the coast before returning to France, but our aforementioned conversation in Soldeu gave us a new heading. I had always been a bit leery of this part of the trip: Costa Brava isn't exactly off the beaten path. Over coffees (or was it something stronger??), the plan was evolving minute to minute:

Let's go to Bilbao!

No, Pamplona!

Have we got time to duck into Portugal?

Idiot. (fair enough, I admit)

Wait, why not along the foothills to the Atlantic, and then up the Acquitaine coast?!

Well, whatever, we seemed to have decided to hang a right from Andorra, not a left, so that was enough to get going. The rest, I assumed, would unfold organically.

It wasn't a particularly all-encompassing visit to Spain; okay, not at all. But the roads were beautiful and deserted, the mountain slopes beckoning from their irresistible cloaks of distance and dust, the Spanish/Basque/Catalan towns charming to a fault. Each seemed to have two things in common: a church bell tower that was missing the steeple, and a ruined fort overlooking it from the dry hills.

not kidding; they were all over the place!

here's another one

foothills of the pyrenees

this is what's called being "artistic"

This part of the country is the poorest and least traveled, or so we were told. After seeing it, I'd believe it. But lovely, lovely.... We rode on and on and on through this parched dreamscape, running out of daylight to end up just shy of Pamplona, in a town called Jaca. The first thing we noticed was the huge fort beside the old town.

The second thing we noted was that the empty grassy moat was filled with deer! At least twenty (you can see two in the photo above), including this beautiful buck:

twelve points, I believe... honey, did you pack my crossbow?

With ice creams and camera in hand, we circumambulated it with our usual reverence for ancient stone things. After walking for ages among the grassy flats that surrounded it, meandering among families sunning themselves after dinner and entirely ignoring the herd of deer, Beth paused, scratched her head, and said: Am I crazy or does this thing have five sides??

I hadn't noticed, except that it was taking a surprising amount of time to do the lap. I suppose a body feels when it's gone too far for what it had been expecting. In any case, a satellite image proves her right:

see?

Jaca's old town was the usual atmospheric jumble of crumbly facades and narrow alleys.

okay, not so crumbly

wait! ah, there it is....

Heading back into France over the spine of the Pyrenees the next day, we enjoyed coffee in little alpine villages like this one called Borce:

The villages (communes, actually) were set amid sweeping green valleys emptying out from the high country behind us:

It was coasting country, but soon, the land flattened out and we could smell the must on the air. Wine country. And not just any old wine country. Serious wine country. Their grapevines put ours to shame.

mechanically box-pruned, as I learned later! of course they're neater! (cheaters)

Being budding winemakers ourselves, we were needless to say tremendously excited to be rolling through the South West wine region of France. On and on through Gascony, Armagnac, Cahors the road unreeled, bringing us ever nearer to Bordeaux, to inspiration, illumination, and big-ass reds.

You could start a novel from that last sentence. Really, what more does one need?

Pecs to Pyrenees Part V: Andorra

2010-09-08T09:37:00.001+02:00

The steady, inexorable roll toward greater and greater heat and sun was pleasantly interrupted by the rising land coming out of Perpignan, on the sea almost at the Spanish border. Climbing into the foothills of the Pyrenees, the road took us beside lovely little villages like Ille-sur-Tet, where the streets were so narrow the motorcycle had a hard time navigating. We emerged from the warren into a tiny little square of sun-blasted cobbles, peeling paint, a few little balconies, and a little restaurant. Not knowing where else to park, I rumbled up to one of the two tables outside and killed the engine.

The peace and silence was leavened only by the burnt smell of old stones and mortar coming from some sort of fortification that comprised the fourth wall of the square. After a few hours of the vibrating, roaring wind-tunnel, it was a sweet relief. I rarely (okay, never) eat anything before dinner, but here, uncharacteristically, I ordered a lunch of Catalan vegetables with octopus from the kindly elderly proprietress. Perfectly seasoned, tenderly cooked, lovingly prepared, it was absolutely delicious, and the perfect shot of energy for the hill-climbs to come on the way to our resting place for the day.

While eating, we met a French couple who took one of the only photographs of the two of us together of the entire trip.

Thus fortified, we carried on toward the mountains growing ever larger before our bug-spattered visors. The air grew cool and crisp, and the road began throwing loops. Oh, nothing bad at first, gentle sweepers between little hillocks, but then it got all crazy until we ended up with this:

that's the warmer! the real stuff came next!

The drive ended up being so exhilarating, the stretch of coastal road from San Remo to Monaco fell to second place. Finally, after a number of hours of this, we crested some sort of pass, saw the sign that said we were in Andorra, hi-fived, and headed for the nearest place to sleep. We were exhausted!

ha ha! i win the game of twisties!

We slept in Soldeu, which was basically a ski town hibernating over the summer. Pretty place, lots of lushness, lots of deserted rooms and tables awaiting the falling snow. Thanks to this, our hotel room in Soldeu was the cheapest of the trip!

main street

view from the hotel

The bargirl at the hotel had a doctorate in linguistics and kept me plied with my precious white beer, the guys let us use their computer in the hippest, cosiest, emptiest little bar I've ever seen, the proprietress spent ages rerouting our plans for the next day through Spain, telling us where we should go in Basque country. We walked around a bit, absorbed the views and the crisp air, imagined what it would be like festooned with Christmas lights and icicles. All in all, everything about the place was charming and friendly, and although I haven't skied now in a few years, the old bum in me (I once skied something like 70+ days in a single season in Colorado, one on, one off!) really really wanted to return when there was some white stuff on the ground and test myself against these pretty slopes.

lovely place, this Andorra....

But then, since this was a whirlwind tour thanks to those evil little grapes back home, it was time to go. At the crack of dawn I packed up the bike, which itself requires a half-hour head start. The routine goes like this:

1) Sigh

2) Remove the disc lock (a big egg-shaped chunk of metal that clamps through the rear disc brake, preventing the wheel from turning)

3) Remove heavy chain lock from front wheel and coil around whatever part of the bike is free

4) Take bike off its side stand, and put it on its center stand

5) Key in ignition, unlock front fork so I can...

6) Install tank bag via a strap that goes around the front fork of the bike, and adjust the four magnets that hold it tightly against the gas tank.

7) Install the two squares of sheepskin over the seat. I sewed loops of nylon webbing around the seat, and the pads get tucked into these upside down and then flipped over the edge toward the rear

8) Hang both panniers from their clips on the metal frame on either side of the back of the bike

9) Wind both thin metal bike locks around panniers and lock them to the frame

10) Cover both panniers with their waterproof covers

11) Wrap both panniers with a long bungee to keep the covers in place

12) Ratchet down the big yellow tailbag with a nylon ratchet strap

13) Strap tent bag to top of tailbag with bag's own velcro handles

14) Cover the tailbag and tent with the pacsafe mesh lock thingy

15) Add two bungees across the tailbag to tighten pacsafe, hold the tent, and to provide a place to tuck water bottles

16) Have a smoke, spray the chain, check tire pressures, find place in map and slide it into map pocket on the tankbag, pull on gloves, jacket, put in earplugs (or MP3 earphones), remove sunglasses, put on helmet, put on sunglasses, tuck hair-bun into helmet, get papers and wallet into an easy-reach spot in the tankbag, mount the beast, knock it off the center stand, wobble around, start the engine, tell Beth to hop on, reduce choke, and say bye bye to Andorra, and hello to Spain!

a break for some pruning

2010-09-06T17:04:00.001+02:00

Just got back from a great few days work at the vineyard. Did a little pruning! Do you like it?

first, off with their heads!

second, out with the posts!

sweet simplicty

I decided to drastically reduce my grape-load for the next season. Ten rows were simply too much for me to handle, at least while maintaining any semblance of life outside the vineyard. So, this is the start of my new, self-imposed grape-austerity measures designed to improve flow and to reduce workload to a bare minimum.

It was a backbreaking couple of days, but great in that I knew the more work I threw in, the less work I'd have to do for as long as I own this little place. Ahhhh.....

Tomorrow, back to the trip! I believe we'll be going around Andorra, Spain, and Basque country, so see you then!

Pecs to Pyrenees Part IV: French Riviera

2010-08-31T15:23:00.001+02:00

So, where were we.... ah, yes, leaving Noli behind on the Italian coast and heading into more windy roads and hot hot sunshine. The drive from Noli to Monaco along the tiny twisties was one of the three best bike rides I've had in recent memory (the others being the road from Stoliv to Kotor in Montenegro, and the ride up to Andorra a few days after this one, coming up in a post soon). Perfect radius turns, not many cars (but absolutely chock full of more scooter hooligans than you can shake a clutch lever at, which suits me just fine), sea on one side, rock face on the other, through little coastal villages and the occasional yacht haven... it was spectacular. Even Beth, who was still a bit shy leaning hard into fast turns got quickly accustomed to the thrill of the ride (all within the professional safety boundaries of my advanced rider certification and training, for those who may read this and become concerned, parentally or otherwise! :) and was soon throwing herself against the centrifugal forces tugging us left and right, left and right, over and over and over and over like a champ. After the miserable last few days of sleet and torrents and icy winds, it was blissssss.

Any traffic jams in the towns were quickly ameliorated as usual by the wonderful concept of lane-splitting. Perfectly legal here, lane-splitting is simply pretending there is a tiny lane wide enough for a bike running along the center line of two-lane roads, or indeed, along either side of the cars. The car drivers know what you're doing, so they leave plenty of room so they don't get their precious steel cages scratched, and the scooterists are simply mad. Mad, I tell you. But as a former scooterist myself, I'm pretty good at the madness even on a fully loaded road hog, and with the larger engine, we left even them in the dust.

Finally, four or more hours and a few coffees later, we pulled into Monaco. The second smallest country in the world after the Vatican, it was our second microcountry of the trip. What can I say? Rich rich rich, a huge casino, overpriced yet strangely bland ice cream--in short, a quick break, then back on our way.

yup, that's the whole thing right there

We found ourselves north of Marseilles in the afternoon, and decided to check out Aix-en-Provence for the night's entertainment. Boy was it a nice choice! Big, circular old town with labyrinths of lanes and squares and heaps of people, NONE of whom seemed to be tourists. We got a room, stashed the bike, showered up and headed into the throngs to find the two most important places in any new place: a place to drink, and a place to eat!

Now, I had been slurping at the red wine pretty constantly and lovingly over the past few months, but after the long saddle days, I suddenly felt the Thirst (yes, capital T) for a good wheat beer. Anyone who knows me knows I'll go to stupid lengths to acquire this beverage if I have developed said Thirst, and we slithered all around Aix looking for a glass. Nope, nope, nope. I guess the French aren't too big on kraut beer! But at least we saw a whole lot of the old town!

Eventually I inquired at at bustling a little local pub beside a square full of churches. I asked: have you got any Weissbier? He said, in excellent English: I sure do, but it's gonna cost ya.

Say again??

Dude wasn't kidding. A US size beer glass is .375 liters; a Hungarian bottle is a generous .5 liters. What he handed me was some child's toy, a play beer coming in at .25 liters. The price for this precious little Belgian wineglass of wheat? Five Euros and some change! Crap, what to do.... of course I bought one. And a second. Which made the rest easier to swallow, so to speak. Luckily, the fellow didn't total at the end, but rather after each drink, or I would have passed out for all the wrong reasons. Beth stuck with wholesome, local red wine, because she believes beer tastes like socks. Thankfully!

Aix also had a mind-blowing array of sweet shops, all of which Beth took advantage of! Read more about that on her blog, when she gets around to posting her Ice Cream (and Sweets) Tour photos and stories! You can find it here: http://erzsebetgilbert.blogspot.com/

Go and dig her for a little while! I'll be back tomorrow with Andorra, Spain, and those lovely, lovely Pyrenees!

Cheers!

Pecs to Pyrenees, Part III: Escape from Hell, and the Italian Riviera

2010-08-29T09:43:00.000+02:00

There is nothing quite as beautiful as the first sight of a glinting, glittering ocean pooling on a swiftly approaching horizon, the contrast of blue against blue. The scents of salt and cypresses, the prickles of fear-sweat drying under your heavy waterproof rainsuits.... Yeah, the sight of a coming ocean of seawater is even more delicious when the previous few days were spent beneath torrents of icy freshwater on a steaming bike.

Coasting out of the mountains a little sooner than we had planned, all was right with the world again when we found the twisty two-lane that runs between villages (and not-so villages, like say, Monaco and San Marino!) along the Italian and French Rivieras. We found the beach at Savona, 30 miles outside of Genova, and started trickling westward toward Spain.

Often, and despite our best intentions, we spend long days in the saddle. Every morning, we wake and tell one another: ok, now today we should stop no later than one, okay? Okay. But then, we can't sleep because we got to bed early the night before, we rise at five or six, what else to do but answer the call of the unseen and unknown by hopping on the old beast and rolling away from wherever we had been resting? And then, who wants to stop at one or two in the afternoon?!? There's so much more to see!! This may be a holdover from my childhood, when my parents would take me on vast, all-encompassing US roadtrips for three months every single summer. From Big Bend to the Dakotas; from Miami to Yosemite, and everywhere in between, I have seen every Best Western and La Quinta Inn, let me assure you! Plus a lot of cool stuff besides. I loved every minute, except the first few, when my father would kick us all out of our beds at four am to get on the road while the getting was good. You'd think he was reenacting his old Libyan escape each morning or something. Hurry, hurry, they're coming, dammit! So there you have it: the archeology of my deep-seated need to "make good time."

Well, because of the aforementioned sleet and so forth, this driving day had been horribly long, even ending as it was by two pm. So we banked joyfully from turn to turn, inspecting villages and determined to pull into the first good one we saw now.

not a raincloud in sight!

A few passed without attracting our interest. But then, a wall of stone facades facing a crowded little beach, a little strip of bustle between endless rocky coves. Hmm....maybe, maybe... But something's missing.... Then, off to the side behind an arch, I saw it: an alleyway! I love alleys. I love the narrow corridors of buildings. I love old warrens, unexpected corners and hidden squares, echoing footsteps, crying cats, smells of frying fish or the ocean from which they came. I love it all. And so I photograph a lot of it. Sadly, as I've discovered in crowded ancient cities around the world, you can't really capture it. It all ends up looking the same. Which it most assuredly is not. Very frustrating, but what can you do but try?

nope, not quite

well, getting warmer i suppose

aaargh!

Walking around places like this is almost like a physical representation of navigating one's own quiet thoughts: they meander where they will, turning upon nothing more than a scent or a quick scene glimpsed out of the corner of the eye through a doorway just passed. Walking/Thinking; maybe I'll coin the term.

just watchin' life with my smoke and my fresco...

bluesman, or so he claimed

I discovered a most excellent Italian tradition here: if you order a glass of wine, it will come with a plate of food. The better the wine, the more food. So, I ordered a five dollar glass of red, and got a plate of olives, a basket of breads and flat crunchy wheat products, a plate of cheeses (three kinds), bruschetta with basil tomatoes, shrimp (yes, a bowl of cocktail shrimp), all in good quantities, too.... it was nuts. I had been burned in Brazil by this whole free cover thing before, so I asked about it. Nope, gratis. Excellent! Three glasses of wine and three different cafes later, I was nice and full!

People seemed to vanish from the beach when the sun went down. I can't imagine why: it was hot, calm and beautiful. And utterly uncrowded, in short, a perfect time for a dip!

poof!

where'd they go?

I don't know if I mentioned it or not, but Erzsebet had devised a scheme by which she would have to, and I mean have to, sample an ice cream from each country we visited. Including the tiny ones. So, here she found a few representative cones of gelato. (Hey! What flavors were those two cones in Noli, doll??)

sacher (chocolate and orange marmalade) and creme castellano! Hey, why are you asking??

And, since in response to my politely yelled query, she actually bustled over from the kitchen and consulted her ice cream logbook (yes, she maintains such a thing), I'm putting this one up too:

ha!

Bon appetit, baby!

something just for you

2010-08-25T09:45:00.000+02:00

“Can you believe we’ve done it? Can you believe we got away?

He looked a little crazy as he whispered it into her ear, as he had whispered it at random intervals at the terminal and on the long plane ride and the longer bus ride and the even longer night that separated the two like a kind of death. A young man in a worn shirt and brown shorts; a scruffy and slim young man with a small beard and square hands and impossibly large ideas in his head, he whispered it through slit lips, though fingers and fists as though afraid to show the teeth behind his grin. “Can you believe we’ve done it? Can you believe we got away?”

The first minutes of their newborn lives had expired in the rooftop bar above their cheap, clean room, open to a vast and sucking sky, and there he had whispered it again as they had spied on the shadows in the alley below for time enough for the moon to slip four hand-spans across the alien firmament. Humid air gusted across a skyline made almost entirely of silhouettes, and a bell on the river was tolling across a broad, empty street—the channel bell on the river these Americans had come to see.

“Mekong, mother of mercy, the Mekong, baby, right there. Do you hear that bell, or is it just in my head?” He thrust away from the balcony, unaware that the muddy water in the near distance was not, in fact, the Mekong, but the Tonle Sap, along whose slanted concrete shores hundreds of transients laughed away the night. In his single-mindedness, he looked like a communist, a man who would kill to save the bromeliads. “I have to go and find out—”

“No. Not now.” They had just gotten into the steaming city an hour before; they weren’t yet acclimated to this. “Look there.”

“I don’t see anything, Augustine.”

A naked bulb swung from a vendor’s cart directly beneath where the young couple stood. Its faded orange light came and fled in seizures and ticks, Phnom Penh’s electrical nervous system breaking down. “Those men, the shadows. The smell of the wind.”

She said this last with the deliberate loudness of one hoping perhaps the act of categorizing might serve to control her own growing fears about this country made thus far almost entirely of darkness and smoke, or perhaps to attract the attention of the girl working the nut stall below. Several times Augustine had tried to give a wave to girls around her age as they had shuffled from corner to insulted corner, but none had glanced up.

Now, in the dust of the following afternoon, the first afternoon of their new lives, he was whispering again—can you believe it?—rubbing the sides of his face and beard with his palms and spitting the words though his knuckles. In country for less than a day, his shirt was unbuttoned and slipping about his glistening shoulders, and there was a long crease running down the side of his face, the fading evidence of heavy, turbulent sleep. “Can you believe we got away?”

The anonymous lane upon which they stood curved away through thick screens of vegetation, the trees crowding it and cutting out the sky. Augustine took her eyes away from the place where the rutted surface turned into mottled shadow and faced back the way they had come. She saw the stone bridge over which they had just passed, a half-dozen cots clustered beneath a fig, slender brown men loading an oxcart with rattan, the banteng gazing balefully at the ground. Impressions of sleep, a rest without end, suffused this lazy Cambodian tableau, the cloud-break immobilized on a horizon like a shard of glass, and Augustine yawned. The sun here rose and fell like a metronome of hot yellow oil, and created a division of time that seemed more appropriate than the spurious accuracy of clocks. She knew this without knowing she knew it, and she shook her head.

“After our first night in Phnom Penh, I wasn’t so sure what to make of it. That guy at the bar was starting to wig me out.”

The young man ejected a laugh into the air. One of the workmen paused, shrugged, returned to his task. “Daddy, or Mister-man-with-the-plan-for-adventure-through-starvation?”

“The first one. Running around that place with his wife and daughter, flashing that desperate smile. His wife’s eyes were so distant. As though she knew one day they’d disappear.”

“Those people, those tourists—”

“Shh, not so loud . . . ”

“—they come here, use these people like they were some kind of food. Parasites, that’s what they are. Don’t even have the courtesy of being symbiotic. But as for disappearing, isn’t it interesting that it was to be us all along? The quiet faces in the corner?”

“Well, I had fun listening in.” Augustine yawned again, through her teeth this time because the strength had fled her arms to cover it. The bus had left little opportunity for sleep—every pothole and washboard stretch had clapped teeth together and banged black-haired heads against windows—but the endless sweep of stilt-huts past her open window, the air warming from the damp chill of the early morning, the smell of the fires and incense from the shrines that guarded every dust-bound crossroad, had left in Augustine a kind of joy, or the anticipation of it, at least.

It was what she needed, she told herself suddenly, as had become her habit of late. At nineteen, she was almost six years younger than her man; her life, the part of it that had come before him, had been vague and unsatisfying. It had to have been so, otherwise why would she have been dressed in her oldest blouse and a cotton skirt that already bore a tear, these worn sandals on her feet? Why else would her head be swimming with these curious visions, her chest full of this steaming jungle? Six months in Norway, sure; six months in India, perhaps—that was Augustine’s idea of adventure. This? This was something of another magnitude entirely, something with which only the person panting beside her could have come up.

“Well,” she brushed the hair from her face, pulled a strand from her mouth, and asked her husband, “What do we do now?”

Incredulous, he pointed toward the bower of dried reeds before them. The swirls of mist thickened and spun into the shapes of hunched animals, rendering the path beyond with all the clarity of old dreams. “What a question!” He kissed her face, a quick come-on and then a linger of soft lips on softer skin. He pulled away before she could think to return it. “We go home! Oh, baby, can you believe we’ve done it? Can you believe we got away?”

_____________

That was a sample of the revised first chapter of my newest, now-really-almost-finished-but-still-needing-a-good-edit-slash-editor manuscript, Two Dolphin; the opener of the novel, if you will.

For the rest of the first chapter, click here!

To read the whole thing, you'll just have to wait until I find the right editor and get this thing out there! Unless of course you want to do the legwork for me? Nope?

Didn't think so....

Ah well, cheers anyway! And happy reading!

Pecs to Pyrenees Part II: Austria, Lichtenstein, Switzerland

2010-08-24T13:29:00.006+02:00

So last time I left you with sweet dreams of humanoid wood and metal creatures--ventriloquist dummies come to horrible life, if you will--in the wild estates of cold, moist Mount Grimming.... Having narrowly survived the grotesquery, we packed up our camp and headed west toward and Innsbruck, and the high Austrian Alps beyond.

We thought the rains would hold off, but disappointingly soon after Schloss Helbrun, still winding around Salzburg, the first indication of rain for a motorcyclist (what the hell's happening to my vision?) appeared. Being light sprinkles (no, not us, the rain; I understand grammar rules but this is a BLOG, MAN! :), we pulled into a petrol station to discuss what to do. Bikes, or rather, their velocity, amplify rain effects, meaning that a light sprinkle while smoking at the gas station turns into a bit of a tropical storm at speed. Still, after petitioning a number of locals (reaching waaay back to my old semi-conversational fluency in German), and getting a consensus that it was impossible to ascertain if it would continue to rain, so maybe it would stop, I decided to push on without rain gear. Our normal riding jackets are waterproof, and the sidebags, while fairly easy to get into, aren't that easy to get into. So you see, it was a logical decision.

And twenty minutes of riding later, huddling under an overhanging tree by the side of the road and frantically getting the big rainsuits, shoe covers, tank bag cover, out and fitted, we were on our way!

The scenery, as you can imagine, was stunning, at least when the clouds broke for a few minutes.

even colder and moister than before

occasional yellow door

Let's see, how did I describe the driving last post? Something about a 70 MPH slip'n'slide in fingerless gloves. I'm just going to cut and paste it, because I think I hit it on the head:

Think riding the 800 pound beast wearing minimal safety gear and carrying your most-loved one on a slip-n-slide at 70 mph across some really high mountains with lots of turns, tunnels, and trucks on all sides and a good, freezing rain to keep things interesting. For eight hours. With fingerless gloves....

Did I mention the gloves were soaked through? Yeah, it was no fun. The worst part was (and maybe you don't consider this if you're not a fellow rider) is that helmets have no wipers. My soaking wet left glove slapping at my visor while the other is clinging to the throttle and braced against the wind, the turns, space and time itself, is the only wiper I have. On a particularly charming stretch, in a hot tunnel, my visor fogged completely, despite a lot of antifogging technology. I flipped it up, and my sunglasses fogged up too. Fine, I pull the glasses down a fraction and peer out from over them, but just then, the tunnel ended, and rain dashed against them and turned them temporarily opaque. But the worst part was Ripley does not have heated grips, and my hands, especially in the upper passes, were frozen around the controls. Seeing as how half my brakes and all of my clutch are up there, I didn't care for that one bit. This, by the way, is the reason all bikers wave to each other: we know intimately what the other has been through!

This part of the area is littered with tons of tunnels, many of which we took out of desperation: a tunnel provided a break from the rain, the constant swirling crosswinds, and yes, even the cold; the alpine tunnels were often almost hot (although that might be a relative thing). Seriously, we'd see a gaping black hole up ahead, scan eagerly for the plaque that detailed its length, and cheer when it was over 1km. Some were ten or fifteen miles long, and those were a special treat, let me assure you.

Finally, night falling, the rain pouring and pouring harder than I can recall, certainly harder than I have ever ridden around in (although there was this hailstorm on the plains of Hungary year before last that was something else...), we see a sign for Vaduz, Lichtenstein, and my plan to visit all of the really really micro countries got underway! Vaduz seemed more like a little suburb than a capital city, but maybe it was just the rain. Then again, maybe not: this was the view from the back of the hotel the next morning!

so that's where all that damn clanging was coming from all night!!

After a fine night's sleep, we rose with great hope that this new day would be a dry one. NOPE. We rode off into a steady, cold drizzle. In case you're wondering how the thick sheepskin does in rain, the answer is: brilliantly! Your body covers most of it (as long as you put it on in a dry place, which we did, and take it in overnight), and sheep get wet too, don't they? That's a little good news, at any rate. The forecast sure wasn't.

So off we go, heading into the higher Swiss Alps, when it hits us: Italy is much warmer than this baloney. So we hung a left and started making tracks south. With every passing kilometer, it got blessedly ... COLDER. And wetter. I could sense tremendous views all around, but all around was only this:

any twin peaks fans raise your hands!

nice riding weather!

It got colder and colder the higher we got, until we belatedly realized that before we got out onto the sweet Piedmont plains, Piedmont meant "at the foot of the mountains", meaning we had to get over them first. On and on, until finally the air temperature was a few degrees above freezing, and I was sure I'd see flakes any second. With our minimal winter gear (a thin sweater for me; a thinner jacket for Erzsebet), we were fucking freezing. Finally, finally, I can't take any more, and stop at a little roadhouse. With shaking hands, I scull a cup of boiling coffee, and point to the map: How long until we start going downhill??

The guy says drei. I say was sagst du, drei? He repeats it. Three.

That's right, my courage had given out just shy of two miles from the top. After a lot of relieved laughter, we got underway. After this bend, a ten mile tunnel (piping hot!), and then the road flowed downhill like a river, so consistently that I could have coasted into Milan:

sweet relief

With the throttle jammed open, every minute raised the temperature. We stopped for a shot in clearing weather...

i married a spaceman!

... and eventually, somewhere in Italy, we got out from under the clouds into brilliant sun. We kept our sweaters on till we found the water just outside Genova.

ahhhhhhhhhh!

Trickling down the coast a little, heading toward San Remo, we found a little town called Noli. I'll save that, as well as the French Riviera, for next time! But I'll leave you with this shot, which makes me want to go back there right now....

Noli

Pecs to Pyrenees 2010: Hungary, Slovenia, Austria, Switzerland

2010-08-22T10:04:00.001+02:00

Finally, the time came to leave again for someplace new. Or, in this case, for eleven places, six and eight of them new for me and Beth respectively. In my case, I'd been around Slovenia, Italy, France, Austria and Switzerland before (Beth had lacked only the two last Alpen countries), but for both of us, Lichtenstein, Andorra, Spain, Monaco, the Vatican and San Marino were as yet unexplored. So let's go exploring! On two wheels? Even better!

The morning of the first annual Pecs to Pyrenees Urban Motocross was a sweet, if short lived, relief from the rains of the past week. Waking at the not-unreasonable hour of five, prepacked from the night before (indeed, the week before), we rose to a bright, clear, cold southern Hungarian morning. Throwing down a coffee and stuffing a few last minute essentials into whatever spare space there was on the bike, we hopped aboard, revved her up, and drove off along empty streets.

Even packing with some experience of traveling light, the variety of countries, climates and economic conditions, not to mention motorcycle-specific gear, meant that the normally perky little Kawasaki felt a bit bloated and hoggish. Packing had to be divided into categories of: Clothes (one set for me, one set for Beth, each in its own waterproof compression sack, consisting roughly of three easy to wash shirts, a skirt/shorts, flip flops, Tevas, swimsuits, a few undies and a few socks, sweaters); Riding gear (riding footwear, jeans, gloves, long underwear, jacket, helmet, earplugs); Riding emergency gear (tools, headlamp, first aid kit, chain lube); Wet weather gear (full rainsuits, shoe covers, tankbag and pannier covers, two pocket umbrellas); Camping gear (tent, two mini sleeping bags, two mini air mattresses, micro-towels, little battery lantern); Toiletries (shampoo, conditioner, shaving cream, sunscreen, bug spray, tooth care stuff, misc); Technology (cameras, chargers, cords, phone, MP3s, USB cables, batteries); Paperwork (passports, ID docs, motorcycle papers, insurance papers for both us and the bike, maps, a novel each, notebooks (at least five by my count)). And I'm sure I've forgotten a few things besides. Whew!

darling, have you put on some weight??

A few features perhaps interesting: tent strapped to top of Big Yellow; removable super-plush sheepskin seat covers bought at local market for five bucks; no fewer than six locking devices (disc lock on back wheel; chain lock wrapped around back left luggage rack; two thin bike locks securing panniers; spare thin bike lock around handlebars to secure helmets when leaving bike; Pacsafe metal mesh locking Big Yellow to bike); cool tank bag that is securely fixed to the gas tank, but unzips to form a backpack with all your important stuff already inside, like papers, wallets, phone, MP3 player, camera, water, maps, etc.). All bags were re-waterproofed, as were our coats and shoes.

Each side bag weighed in at around 20 pounds, the tail-bag was another 40, the tank bag another 10, plus passengers and the bike herself (who is named Ripley, you may as well know, either for Ellen or Tom, your choice), so we were around 800 pounds rolling down the road. But gyroscopes are magic (the two wheels acting as two giant ones whirring at wonderful speeds), and once I got used to it, throwing the old girl around in the twisties became second nature. Two new pieces of kit made the first day (intentionally long to cover a bit of well-trod ground quickly) a special pleasure: sheepskin seat covers, and soft foam earplugs. Beth declined the somewhat distracting earplugs during the first hour and a half on the highway, and when we hopped off to get gas and tank up on coffee, she looked like she had gone a few rounds with a playful bear cub. Our average and legal highway speed here in Europe is 130 kph, and the Kawi, being an enduro, has minimal wind protection, so even with new full face helmets (another indulgence for this ride), the wind noise at 80+ miles per hour was exhausting. Not so for me; operating within my delicious cone of silence, I felt quite relaxed! So I jammed the plugs in for her, and problem solved. The sheepskin was a blessing as well: a few other trips had taught us that even a few hours straight on the narrow seat left the backside weeping (kinda nasty thought, I know). But the sheepskin meant that eight hours later, we were still perky as rats in liverwurst! Which, I'm sure we can all agree, is a far better way to be, rats and liverwurst being adorable and delicious respectively (or concurrently, depending upon the location).

In any case, we raced across Hungary to the west, crossing over into Slovenia to avoid border stops (both countries being within the Schengen area) and taking a right at Maribor up into Austria, heading toward Graz. Our destination was a group of campsites in the Grimming range of mountains near Salzburg, for Beth had found a crazy estate called Schloss Helbrun whose dreamy aristocratic grounds were filled with water-powered automatons! The camp was nice enough, a little cold and surprisingly moist in the mornings, the village was precious, and the food and drink superb. But it was the landscape around the camp that couldn't be beat. View first thing in the morning? This thing...

mount grimming, cold, and moist, like I said

typical little street of Bad Mitterndorf

maypole??

The next morning, we hurried to Schloss Helbrun. And boy, it is a rare thing to have cool and creepy live so incestuously entwined, or if not "live" exactly, then in an approximation of it, if your life involves endless infinite repetitions of the same little motions and tasks day in and day out until your joints wear out or your water supply dries up.

not enough that he looks this way, but wait till you see what he does next!

eewwww!

this one was about four meters wide by three tall, complete with a water-powered organ to mask the terrifying, repetitive clank clank clank of the thousand-odd little buggers trying to come to life!

the saddest lion in the world

"Swirlie, With Flowers," Rozgonyi circa 2010.

Next up: the most harrowing day of my entire motorcycle career! Think riding the above-pictured 800 pound beast wearing minimal safety gear and carrying your most-loved one on a slip-n-slide at 70 mph across some really high mountains with lots of turns, tunnels, and trucks on all sides and a good, freezing rain to keep things interesting. For eight hours. With fingerless gloves....

Crap, I just blew my next post... ah well. I survived to type this, so I guess there wasn't much suspense anyway. There'll be pics, though, so come back soon!

Cheers!

new short piece up with the Lost Girls!

2010-08-21T11:39:00.002+02:00

Just a heads up that a little Greek piece of mine went up at The Lost Girls site! Cruise on over and take a read if you like!

http://www.lostgirlsworld.com/2010/08/ta-delphinas-part-i/

Thanks for reading!

Tales of a Female Nomad

2010-08-19T10:02:00.000+02:00

No, not me (although I did just get back from a few weeks on the motorcycle, from Hungary to Spain and everything in between; photos to follow soon!).

But I know a lot of you (okay, some of you) have seen the recent movie and/or read the book by my wife's nominal doppleganger Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love. Well, an old friend of mine wrote a book about her own experiences a few years back called Tales of a Female Nomad. Rita Golden Gelman spent some fifteen years on the road all over the world, starting at the age of 48! Now I've got nothing against EPL, but if you liked it, do yourself the favor and grab a copy of Tales of a Female Nomad. This is one great book by a very brave, funny and intrepid woman. To some extent, it changed my life; maybe it'll change yours?

http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Female-Nomad-Living-Large/dp/0609809547

driving without a license

2010-07-30T19:41:00.001+02:00

So the last time I tried to leave Hungary by road, we were stopped at the Hungarian border, as usual. I presented them my US driver's license, which is valid across the EU, and my international driver's license just for good measure. For ID I decided to use my Hungarian ID card (coupled with a good, fluent Hungarian howya doin') so my US passport doesn't get filled up with needless stamps; I've already had to get extra pages sewn in once, and am running out of room already! I suppose there could be worse problems, but hey, everyone's own problems are the worst in the world, according to them.

Well, they didn't seem to like this one little bit. How did I get a US license? Do I live in Hungary? Do I own property? How long have I been here? And why don't I have a Hungarian license??

I learned a while back, during an illegal U-turn in Budapest, that having a foreign license can be a good thing here, when the trainee of a pair of cops who stopped me asked his mentor: "What can we do with him?" "Nothing. Fuck it. Let's go." You see, the license is US government property, much like a passport, and cannot be confiscated overseas without a damn good reason (read: court order). So, no nothing for me, and I was able to go on my merry way. Not that I habitually commit infractions, or even habitually drive. Score one for me.

Well, those border guards a few months back were really determined to score one for the home team. They held us up for a full hour, checking the validity of my US license (or just sitting in some ill-equipped concrete backroom smoking and frowning). When the customs official finally returned, he questioned me at length. He explained that if you reside in Hungary for longer than six months, you have to hand over your US license at the Documents Office, and get a Hungarian one. I explained that I wasn't ever in Hungary for six months at a stretch (it's true: last month I was here barely 3 months!). He told me since I own property, it doesn't matter. I told him that I spend a number of months in the US each year, and need the license there. He told me since I'm also a Hungarian citizen, it doesn't matter. I told him he had no authority holding me back with a valid US license, and could do nothing about it. He said: I'm glad you know Hungarian law better than I do.

I assume he was being sarcastic, but he handed me back the licence and let me get back on my way to Sarajevo.

But I've been thinking, now that another trip is almost upon us. There is a logical problem with this whole setup. See, the US license is valid indefinitely within the EU; Hungary chose to join the EU a few years back. The license is US government property, and cannot be confiscated. As long as it is in my possession, I am legally able to drive. Further, as I'm also a Hungarian citizen, I cannot legally be ejected from the country under any conditions or circumstances. Diplomatic immunity? Not quite, but I think I've got a pretty strong case for vehicular immunity, at least as far as my license goes.

We'll test it in a few days, when we leave again. Wish me luck. I may need it; we're still behind the iron curtain's rusting remains here, or so it sometimes feels. Or I suppose I could just implement Plan B, which is to speak only in hearty US 'Merican English, hand over my US passport with a smile, and pretend I've never even heard Hungarian let alone speak it.

I think it'll depend on how ornery I feel at the time.

2010-07-18T12:59:00.000+02:00

Well, we haven't gone on the ride yet (see below post), but it's coming soon! In the meantime, we've been enjoying an unseasonable heat wave here in Hungary. And by enjoying, I of course mean sticking to our clothes and chairs and motorcycle seats, losing a wine-bottle's amount of sweat each time we venture forth from the house, and in general hiding like vampires behind thick stone walls and inside wine cellars.

Think I'm joking? Here is my MP3 player after I mowed the grass between the grapes.

even the MP3 player is sweating!

While hiding out in the wine cellar, I found this thing. Ugh... it was about two inches across, and I have no idea what it (he? she?) is.

care for some wine?

The grapes have had it tough this season, and not only for us. All of our vineyard neighbors have had problems. The massive rainfall of the last month promoted all sorts of mildews and fast lush growth, which meant far too much leaf density to spray effectively and for air circulation. After much thinning (going through the plants one by one and yanking out or breaking off excess growth), the powdery mildew was beaten back. Now, this incredible heat has let a nasty little other fungus called peranospora flourish, as well as caused three entire plants to actually die of what is known as apoplexy. I shit you not: the whole plant basically has a stroke and dries up in about a week's time. Very creepy. But apparently, as they assured me at the Pecs Viticulture and Viniculture Institute, it is quite normal. Conclusion: Grapes are in fact pansies!

But real purdy...

remember, 100 degrees, 100% humidity...

What else.... a few days ago, a friend of ours in Kotor told us one of the Serbians wants to sell his caravan!! We've been dreaming of a little camper of our own along the terraces by the ocean since we moved to Hungary, and this one is literally fifteen feet from the water's edge. We haven't decided if we can afford the upkeep (there is a monthly fee for keeping a caravan at this particular place), but the whole thing is so alluring, having a place in Stoliv, that we may have to jump on it. Then we can just roll down on the bike any time we like without carrying a lot of gear or making a lot of plans, stay for a weekend, come back here. Hell, every few weeks in the season, if we felt like it. We'll see....

That's all for today. I'm going to go and sweat a little now I think, followed perhaps by a little panting and then heatstroke. See ya later!

a new ride a-brewin'

2010-06-19T18:42:00.000+02:00

After a feverish bout of work on the house and the vineyard, none of which I've blogged about, I think it's time to break the bike out for a longer roll.... first, though, a little catch-up:

Vineyard: Tons and tons of work, none interesting enough to photograph but hard enough to leave a body sore for days! Basically, we've had the worst rain and storms of the past 120 years in Hungary! Think of a typhoon that reeks of paprika. It pushed over three fruit trees, which had to be winched back into erectness, and gave the grapes both a massive growth spurt as well as a nice starting case of powdery mildew (a big problem in viticulture), as well as fully sponsoring a fleet of mosquitoes the size and density of which could be used as a military-grade weapon. All the grapes had to be thinned, meaning breaking off all extraneous canes, and cluster thinning the berries as well to increase sugar and size of the remaining fruit, and then tucking or wiring the remaining canes into the trellis system. With 450 plants, that took a while! Full props to Erzsebet, who somehow became an expert even to my neighbor's satisfaction. The added air flow and sunlight takes care of a lot of the mildew problem, but then I gave them a good spraying for good measure....

In any case, after the typhoon, the weather turned insanely hot and humid, so we're just saying screw it; I hear Switzerland is cool this time of year! I'm hoping to pick up five out of six of the microcountries on this ride: San Marino, Vatican, Liechtenstein, Monaco and Andorra. As Luxembourg is practically Texas beside these little buggers, so we can say we'll hit all of the microstates in one ride! In between, a few literary landmarks: Hemingway's favorite trout fishing waters (Stockalper Canal, outside of Montreux); Vladimir Nabokov's mausoleum (also outside of Montreux) and Patricia Highsmith's final home (near Tegna, Switzerland). Apart from that, there's the Galileo museum in Florence (with his mummified finger on display), the French Riviera, and a few other places besides. I'm always into weird little independent sovereign provinces, and this ride will have them in spades: The Sovereign Order Of Malta in Rome; Llivia (a city-state outside of Andorra), Campione d'Italia (a commune on the shores of Lake Como); and Seborga (a city-state near San Remo, Italy).

Slovenia, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, France, Andorra, Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, Vatican, San Marino, Croatia, home.... we're thinking three weeks, which is as slow as we can let ourselves be with a demanding vineyard awaiting our return. Here's the route, approximately:

So there you have it! If we can manage to do the laundry list of stuff between now and then, we'll have a blast!

a few shots from a recent toddle back to bosnia, montenegro and croatia

2010-06-13T12:47:00.000+02:00

I've traveled around Bosnia and Montenegro and Croatia I think no less than four times each, sometimes for a month at a time (can you say Kotor??), but I can never tire of the place! So much beauty and vibrancy and shall we say economy? Yes, economy, but I'd do it the same way if it cost as much as Iceland....

old friends

2010-05-24T18:21:00.001+02:00

I'd like you to meet my oldest, best friend from adolescence: Claudia Hammond Husking (sorry, Claud, I still can't decide how to write it! :) This picture could have been taken fifteen years ago in Australia, where we both lived. Having moved to London a while back, she came out to see me in Hungary for the weekend. It was a weekend filled with smokes, wine, vines, a lot of sitting and relaxing, and pulling a downed cherry tree back into some semblance of erection. What can I say? Good times, good times....

Best part was, it was as though no time had elapsed at all since we last saw one another. She still had me bowled over in fits of laughter, but also a new understanding of the world (we had been 14-19 when we had been together last), so politics and work and philosophies of writing and living were mingled amid the recollections of our old exploits and adventures. And you know what? We seemed to have grown closer in thought independently of one another, kind of how twins separated at birth will have both developed similar appetites and tastes. As she well put it, it wasn't even as though weren't even just "not apart" for fifteen years; it was as though we had grown closer without realizing it.

Ah, old friends.... Go find one of yours, and give them a call. I'll raise a glass to that any time!

pathfinder international

2010-05-15T08:59:00.000+02:00

I suggest you check out this very interesting organization dedicated to helping women and promoting reproductive rights and health throughout the developing world:

http://www.pathfind.org/site/PageServer?pagename=About

Link it to your blog or website!

good news from my friends

2010-05-14T15:27:00.000+02:00

My favorite travelers got a piece in my favorite social commentary site! Go check them out, and their website, too. You may even read a tale there from me! Yup, I'm proud to be a Lost Boy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-baggett/the-lost-girls-an-incredi_b_575654.html
http://www.lostgirlsworld.com/

a great and very tragic book

2010-05-07T11:37:00.002+02:00

Anyone who knows me even slightly knows my favorite country, my favorite set of ruins, my favorite religion, my favorite food, my favorite "feel", my favorite place to be and the place I most often wish I was visiting again/wandering around/motorbiking/and yes, increasingly, even living. I've said it ad nauseum: there is no place in the world like Cambodia, and even as modern forces commercialize and destroy much of what I fell in love with on my trips there, the Khmers are, well, Khmers. When I want to complement my old Hungarian neighbor for his incredible generosity, kindness and forgiving nature in the face of some very real tragedies and hardships, I tell him he reminds me of a Khmer. He knows me well enough to take it as the highest form of flattery.

Cambodia is a place that changed my life. I cannot explain it, but it did.

When recently an acquaintance of mine (the original owner of Cyril, my beloved 1977 VW bus! His name is Rob, and he isn't some backpack hippie; he was the principle of a school in Colorado) decided to sell his house, sell this things, and relocate his entire family permanently to Cambodia, I admit I was extraordinarily and uncharacteristically jealous. Not the sort of jealousy that makes one feel ill towards someone with better fortune, but still it was, briefly, a very consuming and full jealousy indeed! I took small comfort in the self-aggrandizing fact that I had given him a copy of my first book, Goat Trees: Tales from the Other Side of the World, as a present when I bought the bus from him in 2006, and the two centerpiece stories (a diptych if you will) were set in and about Cambodia. So perhaps, I may have planted a seed, or more likely nurtured one that was already within that intelligent, sensitive man. Probably not, but who knows? I sure hope so, any way....

My obsession with Cambodia has led me to read and watch all manner of books, histories, documentaries, of that place. Yesterday at the vineyard, I picked up a book written by Luang Ung, a survivor of the atrocities of the seventies there. Written from the point of view of Luang as she was between the ages of 5 and 10, it chronicles the insanity and utter cruelty that enveloped Cambodia like a black bag heating under the sun.

I have seen for myself the Killing Fields; I have spoken with hundreds of Khmers in Phnom Penh who showed me the bullet scars in their abdomens, or their own tears as they told me about how many of their family once was, and how few were left. I have lingered in the torture chambers of Toul Sleng, where dried human matter still flakes from the ceiling where it had stuck thirty-five years ago. I know this history, have heard it from those who lived it. But reading the book last night, I had finished only half before I was unable to go any farther: I couldn't see the pages through tears. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised after all. I wept at Toul Sleng as well.

I finished the remainder this morning before coming back into town, and this is the first thing I've typed since getting back.

Read this book, but beware: it won't let you go.

First They Killed My Father

http://www.amazon.com/First-They-Killed-Father-Remembers/dp/0060931388

first night in a new place

2010-05-04T07:36:00.001+02:00

Fire, flaming fatback, fresh wine, funny noises.... our first night at the vineyard!

A perfect day and night reinforced my smugness regarding the decision to scrape a little money together for this place! As I suspected, the combination of quiet, clean air, sunshine, reflective mental work broken by refreshing bouts of hard physical work, campfires and wine each night, has reinvigorated me in all the right places.... Never have I felt as "dropped out" as I did scribbling in a notebook under the pear tree, reading a paperback, watching the red-roofed city crawling up the foothills in the distance with a glass of wine in my hand. I can smell apple blossoms; I can hear roosters. The sun crawls across the sky and I can feel the gentleness of life eddying around my still form, far from the thrashing currents of any conceivable rat race. I couldn't have asked for a better place to hang my hat and pick up my pen.

The transformation hasn't been easy, or quick, but we pulled it off. With Erzsebet's help, over the past few weeks, the bedroom was decontaminated, cleaned, prepped, painted, curtains washed, floor cut, shrines built, stove cleaned, bed ordered, light fixtures and electrical outlets changed, windows cleaned, furniture already there painted and decorated and collaged..... She's in charge of anything arty and did most of the painting, too. I'm sure her blog will show you the shrines in more detail (http://erzsebetgilbert.blogspot.com) Here's the bedroom; I'll put a few shots of the kitchen and the other room soon....

Sawdust toilet crafted, collaged, varnished, and ....

christened!

(it was GREAT!)

Plenty of time for a little lawn mowing

(sickles are great, but hell on the back, crawling around on hands and knees!)

Once done, getting to work on a new nonfiction project in the best writing chair in the world!

Then it was time to do a little ghost-busting in the orchard.

After the sun set, out came the wine, and the fire, and ....

the fatback! Roasted over glowing coals, dripped onto bread and sliced onions... mmm! I really can't get enough of that stuff.

Yeah, this was a damn good idea....

dandelions are evil

2010-04-21T17:05:00.000+02:00

Four days on the sidewalk after being kicked to the curb, and still trying to spread its seed.

kinda like some dudes i used to know!

a dollar a bottle wine and lovin' every drop!

2010-04-10T17:49:00.000+02:00

Just sitting here in the kitchen drinking the aforementioned cheapest-in-the-world yet oddly delicious red wine, feeling smug not only for my thriftiness but also for defying all weather forecasts and going up to the vineyard anyway, only to discover the day perfect and warm and sunny and very very productive! 9-5, just like a straight job, only doing it for myself and working the land and getting my hands dirty in the best possible way....

First, a little catch-up: I laid the patio yesterday.... it required a lot of deafening stone-cutting first...

but it was well worth it I think:

I'm not smug, I feel like I've been beaten with a rubber hose.

Since this area is where next year's crush and wine making will happen, it was time to clean out the patio that was already there, under the awning. Anti Bacsi had loaded it full with 5 rusty drums of gravel and sand and scrap iron. I had removed the gravel and sand and used them to fill the outhouse last week, but there was a lot else to get rid of. Once done, I could see how uneven the stones were there:

It was the work of twenty minutes to yank them, add fill and relay them. Much improved, though I couldn't get it perfect because of a concrete lip on the foundation of the shed. Ah well...

The big 500 liter mastication vat and the smaller mastication barrels will go under there. Mastication is when after you crush the grapes you let them soak on their skins for a week or two to ferment, monitoring their sugar levels all the while. I figure we'll fill the 500l vat half full or so with red grapes, and use our smaller 200 liter food-grade plastic barrels to masticate the white.

My problem: I have a giant vat that sits empty for 51 weeks out of the year, and a need to cache as much rainwater as I can for the dry Pecs summer.... combine the two and problem solved! After preparing the pad for the vat (giant concrete blocks that must weigh 150 lbs each), I cut and installed a movable rain gutter system to allow me to choose where I want the water to run: either the existing rain barrel or into the vat. Then I can just open the spigot during the dry season and I'll have 500 liters of fresh rainwater at my disposal!

Like so:

Problems solved! Until tomorrow.

But I feel confident that whatever problem I encounter, I'll find the scrap wood and iron and wire and brick somewhere on the property to solve it! Cheers!

a shoddy shelf and a toilet covered with cats

2010-04-07T18:12:00.000+02:00

Dug in new grape plants today, bringing the total new plantings to 45. There are 430 existing plants, a mix of red (Oporto) and white (Leanyka) grapes. Unfortunately, I don't like either of them for wine. The Oporto (Blauer Portugueser) is okay, but if I'm going to be making wine, I want something fuller and richer than that! So after much soul searching (and plenty of tasting), the choices boiled down to a few varieties of red that both Erzsebet and I both love: Merlot, Kekfrankos (Blau Frankisch), and Zweigelt. All are big and bold enough to keep in barrels for a few years to age, and yet fruity enough to drink young (after only 6 months or so). How to choose.... Well, Merlot is sensitive to frost, and is a bit temperamental to grow around here. Kekfrankos and Zweigelt are both easy to grow, but as I stood debating at the market which of the long, bare stems I wanted, the lady gave me a critical bit of news: Zweigelt ripens to maturity a full month before Kekfrankos. Well, apart from riskier early season frost danger, we travel a fair bit, and often get out of Hungary for the winter. If we start the Kekfrankos crush in mid Octorber, then by the time the wine is made and stable enough to leave for a while, it'll be the end of November. Matter settled. Zweigelt it is.

Incidentally, the lady also gave me a bit of advice. During the first year or two, periodically uncover the top of the new planting to cut off any surface roots that develop, or they will take over and the vine will die during a hard summer, having no deep roots with which to quest for water. Well, when I was pulling out the new plantings of the former owner, this is what I found:

The red line I drew is the ground level. Do you suppose the former owner knew what he was doing? Because I don't. Unless he was too drunk or lazy, I suppose. It is clear how if the upper surface roots are not removed, the deep roots never develop, and these particular vines would have died out on their own during the first really dry summer. Thanks, Anti Bacsi. Good thing I'm taking them out, right?

But not at once. The vineyard looks so alluring with the old gnarled trunks that I hated the idea of ripping them all out at once, so we're planting in the gaps, pulling up one and two year old vines, etc. Over five years, we'll swap them all out and you'll hardly be able to tell the difference!

What else... fixed an electrical socket. That was five minutes, so not worth a photo, is it... I tacked together a shelf unit for the cellar, to store airtight items that need a cool place, such as pickles, preserves, or milk...

I know, it looks like crap, but it is sturdy as the proverbial brick shithouse, I swear! Speaking of which...

Erzsebet has been collaging the toilet-chair I made the other day. Here ya go, best for last and all that:

the most beautiful toilet in the world!

Oh man, I can't wait to take a seat on that! :)

the ruler

2010-04-05T08:27:00.000+02:00

I found an odd-looking metal contraption in the toolshed the other day. Erzsebet and I examined it for a while, thinking it could be an odd trellis or some kind of weird support for something else as yet undiscovered (perhaps in the shadowy attic or the cobwebbed cellar).

When our neighbor was out one day, I asked him what it was. That, he said, is a "ruler." Well, he actually said it was a vonalzo, but that means ruler in Hungarian... And it was for furrowing gardens in preparation for seeding! Most excellent, since I had tilled the garden and Erzsebet had made avenues for beds, but no furrows yet for seeding.... With the ruler's teeth adjusted to a decent width of rows, I knocked the whole job out in about ten minutes.

drag and drop, old school!

As you can see, we've gone for a different type of planting system. There are long-row and wide-bed planting theories. Long-row is the old fashioned fifty foot single files of veggies; wide-bed looks something like the above, with avenues and wide beds, but the seeds are planted more haphazardly within the bed, the theory being that having the plants clumped up together makes for easier pollination, as well as better pest and weed control, and increased water conservation through ground shading. So what we have is a hybrid wide-bed, with rectangular blocks of veggies in wide bed arrangements. Hopefully we'll get the best of both worlds....

Currently the weather is rainy and blustery, and we're stuck in the city. But I'm happy. You can tell when you're becoming a son of the soil when you look up at the rain, think of all your trees and plants plumping and your many many water collection cisterns filling, smile, and say "Let it come down."

Either that, or I'm becoming Paul Bowles. But I guess he preferred the desert, and wouldn't have liked to get his hands dirty. Oh, and he wrote a lot. Argh... I've got to get back to typing!

peaches and patios

2010-04-04T07:58:00.001+02:00

My perennial friend and mentor Laci Bacsi's back is killing him. Broken pieces of a metal rod make walking around without pain difficult, and carrying things on his back impossible. Surgery has been postponed while the docs examine some irregularities with his blood vessels. His grapes, however, are heartless little brats whose demands must be answered or they will die. I owe Laci Bacsi for a whole lot of favors. Ipso facto, I had to spray his grapes.

His telek is twice the size of ours, with an equal number of vines but many many more fruit trees; something like 40 assorted varieties in addition to 60 apple trees beautifully espaliered on wire like so:

(courtesy of the great newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald; I couldn't find my own shots of his trees)

Yesterday was a beautiful sunny day, and we went up around 8 am to work. I had arranged to go over to Laci Bacsi's place around 10 for about 2 hours of spraying the grapes, which are the most vital to protect, especially if you drink wine like water. The backpack sprayer is a hand-operated contraption that weighs about 50 lbs full, and requires constant pumping via a lever on the left side and aiming and spraying on the right. Think Ghostbusters.... But for two hours, it isn't so bad.

You can guess where this story is going, so I'll keep it short since it makes me tired and itchy and a little bit sting-y just to think about it. After the two hours, the grapes were done, and he says:

"Maybe you could give that little pear tree a bath too?"

"Sure thing!"

"Now, since were over here, those cherries could take a shower too. Oh, and the quince! I love my quince jam..."

"Yeah, right on, who doesn't...."

"This row of plum trees won't take but a sec... but be sure to get the top branches, would you? I'd hate to have to chop them out."

"No, that would be awful... well, I really have to run now..."

"Have a cigarette...."

(about to be executed; at least give me a blindfold, oldtimer?)

"Um, what are you mixing up in that huge bucket, Laci Bacsi?"

"Just a little wash for the apples. Off you go!"

Fifty trees later, dripping in pesticide because I hadn't worn gloves or glasses and his sprayer leaks (but who cared because it was only supposed to be a few rows of grapes, right?), I was done. So why then was Laci Bacsi vigorously mixing something neon blue into a bucket of water??

"Just made a little special treat for the peaches. They love this. But don't worry; there's only ten of them."

When I was done with the peaches, I veritably threw the sprayer down and blasted back to my own place on the bike, where I promptly sprayed my own peaches, and built yet another patio.

the sound of the bees is deafening!

since my own back was a little sore from spraying, Beth carried all the stones for the patio!

And after we got home, a good hot shower and a few glasses of wine with our delightful Netherlands expat friend Jurgen rounded the night up nicely! And best of all, after he got home, Laci Bacsi (who as you may recall is my neighbor here in Pecs too) knocked on our door with a grocery sack of his own last year's apples, along with a solid pound of liver paste, just the kind he knows I love....

Ah, repaying favors. A really great feeling. Really.

Especially after your hands stop burning.

"rustic" is the excuse for anything on a farm

2010-04-03T06:16:00.000+02:00

That's right. Anything.

Need a planter but have only a stack of broken bricks? No problems; it's RUSTIC!

Need a toilet but have no running water or septic? No problems; cut a hole in a chair and it's RUSTIC!

Need an outdoor table and sink but only have some iron bars, a sheet of diamond-plate, and an ancient livestock waterer you found in the attic? No problems!

now isn't that rustic?

This contraption will have a downspout leading to the shower's seep pit, and a water feed coming from above tied into the blue shower keg in the below photo. One of the compost bins is located just to the right of it, and the toolshed patio where the winemaking crush will happen is just behind the camera. The sink will be perfect for laundry and dishwashing, plus washing veggies and chucking the refuse in the compost bin at the same time. Before bed, toothbrushing and face washing. During showers, a table for holding towels or clothes. And during the crush, a place for chemical sets and hydrometers. All without spending a dime!

Damn rustic.

And now, awake at 3.45 this morning, ready to go! For todays helping of backbreaking labor, I've promised to help one of my neighbors spray his grapes. Carrying a 50 pound backpack of sloshing liquid up and down rows in a vineyard isn't easy with a sore back, and that's just me! Imagine what that's like for my 70 year old neighbor!

After, I'll try to finish off the prep work for yet another flagstone patio, this one as an extension of the backside of the tool shed. Scalping wet clay with a shovel whose blade was made during the Depression gave me sympathy for strip miners:

It is doubtful I can get the flagstones to sit perfectly level, but you know what? I take my patios the way I take my coffee: a splash of milk and two heaping scoops of rustic.

See you at the chiropractor!

always something new to learn

2010-03-31T11:35:00.003+02:00

No matter how good you think you're getting, there's always something that could be done better. For instance, last fall, I hand-tilled 80% of the vegetable garden. Nice and deep, turning shovelful after shovelful of rich, black soil over.... It was fine work, and yesterday I decided to quickly finish off the job so the many hundreds of seedlings growing in flats on our dinner table in Pecs will have a home in the next week or two. I tilled it up, no problem. Only problem: while enjoying a congratulatory cup of coffee and preparing to leave for the day, the former owner and a friend came up to prune a neighbor's grapes. They zeroed in on the garden like vultures on a carcass.

"What do you intend to do with that?"

"Um, leave it till next week to rake it into furrows, I suppose..."

"Those clods will dry like concrete, son."

"No, look over here! I did it this way last fall, and the soil is easy to rake... My wife's been doing it all morning..."

"It's not winter. It's spring. The way you leave it when you go home today will be what it will look like at the end of summer."

Apparently, while it is perfectly acceptable to leave big clods during fall tilling, spring tilling requires immediate sculpting into furrows or wide beds or what have you. The clods are frozen apart over the long winter, you see, but the wind will dry them out in spring. Saved yet again, we raked it out in ten minutes flat, easy peasy.

Then my other neighbor comes rolling up with his little dog. Checking on my grapework and tree pruning. The grapework is good enough, but the trees are still too bushy for his taste. I thought of telling him maybe his mustache is too bushy, but refrained, and promised to get right on that. As soon as he left, so did we!

Postscript: Motorcycle ride home, on a beautiful road cutting through the pasturelands and between fish ponds... Yellow and black speck careening toward me out of the sky, and then pow! A wasp slamming squarely against my throat at 60 MPH. The last time this happened, last year, I nailed a hornet with the inside of my thigh (yes, I ride in shorts too....). I was in heavy traffic, so I couldn't scrape the dying thing off, and the place where it ended its life swelled to the size of an orange. Naturally worried that this would happen on my throat (which I needed that night to enjoy some locally made liver paste I had been very much looking forward to), I hustled toward civilization at top speed. But no need to worry, apart from the feeling that I was getting a slow-motion tracheotomy for twenty minutes, no other ill effects were observed.

The rural education continues!

rickety old farm ladders, uncountable trees, blue skies and pruning shears

2010-03-29T11:54:00.000+02:00

makes for a fine day, don't you think?

My neighbor kept coming over and telling me I was sparing them too much, that you can't feel sorry for them! So I didn't (only a little)...

the soil that dare not speak its name

2010-03-26T18:40:00.000+01:00

I'm talking about nightsoil. Composted human feces. Black gold! That's what occupied me today. And I mean all day. From 8 am till we knocked off at 4.

The ahem facilities at the vineyard consist of an ancient outhouse. I have been wanting a nice "modern" sawdust composting toilet, which, in conjunction with the newly constructed compost bin out back would provide a sustainable, easy system of waste removal for not only personal waste, but also other scraps and material that aren't suitable for the standard compost pile, such as meat scraps, etc. After a lot of research telling me this was safe and actually somewhat fun (satisfying, at least), I decided to plow forward with the scheme.

Incidentally, behind the toolshed and adjacent to the outhouse, there were four oil drums filled with sand and gravel. Rusting hulks with the bottoms missing or otherwise destroyed by the inexorable march of time....

I couldn't imagine what I'd do with them, or how I'd get rid of them. While scratching my head about the best way to clean out the filth made by the old owner *(he wiped his ass with newsprint as far as I could tell; perhaps he was a book critic?), Erzsebet, on break from painting the bedroom, said: Why don't you just fill in the hole with something.... How about all that sand and gravel??

Eureka! Tearing into the outhouse with all the enthusiasm of a pit bull on a poodle, I went to work. Off came the seat, the various trimmings, etc, to leave me with the frame:

The amount of plump black and brown spiders in residence was truly astounding! After the boards were all gone, we were left with a concrete pit a meter cubed, which I promptly filled with rusted pails and scrap metal and anything else I could get in there (incompressible stuff so the flooring wouldn't sink later).

You can just make out the former owner's signature on the back wall of the concrete. Delightful! Must be all the "noble fat" in his diet (technical term of course, at least in Hungarian, referring to pure backfat from a pig).

I started shoveling, and shoveling, and shoveling. Sand and gravel, gravel and sand. Load after load, the oil drums emptied one by one. And wouldn't you know it? I used up every scrap in all those waste barrels down to the last cupful and it was the perfect amount! I compacted it well, added four big concrete pavers and some bricks to frame it up, and voila! A nice new room in which I'll build a composting sawdust toilet!

So, the routine will be as follows: Buckets with lids under the new toilet frame, with proper seat; bin of sawdust (which as you may recall I was drying out the day before) for cover material. I assure you it is utterly odorless in use. When the bucket gets full, maybe once every two weeks if that, I'll dump it into the new special compost bin:

There, thermophillic reactions will bring the temperature up to 150 degrees briefly, killing all bacteria. Of course, we're both healthy (although I've eaten enough crazy stuff in places like China and India that you can never tell!), so there should be no problems. In any case, once the bin is full, it is capped and let sit for a full year undisturbed, while a new bin is started on its backside. After a year, what comes out will be thick, rich black humus, smelling like potting soil and perfect for all manner of garden, vineyard and orchard uses.

So, once again, can I offer you a home-cooked meal sometime! It'll be a gas, I swear.

another gorgeous day

2010-03-25T17:44:00.004+01:00

Telek life is slow, peaceful... Maybe that's because it also involves a lot of digging, and there's no energy left for walking fast after.... Today's chores were: installing a lock on the toolshed door; planting 20 new grapevines; starting construction of a compost bin; digging a half-dozen new holes for more grapevines; getting two big bags of sawdust and spreading them to dry; washing off the walls in the next room to paint.

Although it is backbreaking work, I discovered the pure joy of digging in the earth today. It was a click of the mind, a kind of sudden seeing beneath the surface. Birds are starting to sing; bees are making their first real forays; roosters are crowing. Smoke from others on the hill burning their cane prunings both scented and colored the air a shade closer to summer, and reminded me strangely enough of Asia, where the smell of woodsmoke can always be found on every humid gasp. The knowledge that what I was doing would provide me with a sustainable, local, and delicious hobby and source of tipsy laughs around a campfire for decades to come filled me with a sense of pride and purpose. Even if the writing isn't going well enough, or fast enough, it is impossible to feel bad after a solid eight hours of shoveling warm, dark soil. Raise the blade, thrust it in, twist to loosen, get down on your knees to scrape the earth out with your bare hands... after a while, there's nothing else, and while you're doing it, that's practically zen.

And after, a bird shat on my arm. Apart from the fact that in Hungarian folklore, getting crapped on by an avian heralds good fortune, when I wiped it away, it was the cleanest spot on my whole body!

planting the little grapelings... unfortunately for them, after a proper planting, they look like the next shot below....

planted so only one bud sticks out of the ground, and even that is covered up by a mound of dirt. The new cane / trunk will grow up out of the earth from there.

the beginnings of the compost bin.

See you tomorrow, when I will be finishing the compost bin and shoveling out the outhouse into it. Yes, I'm making nightsoil! I'll be shoveling out the dried dejecta of an old Hungarian man and reusing it to fuel my veggies next year. And it shall be rich, and delightful, just like its name.... Come visit? Dinner will be delicious!

unpublished story up on lostgirls

2010-03-23T18:02:00.000+01:00

A new unpublished little tale put up by the wonderful Lost Girls. It's fiction, but like all fiction, every word is true...

Hope you enjoy!

http://www.lostgirlsworld.com/2010/03/lost-boy-of-the-week-david-rozgonyi-part-1/

http://www.lostgirlsworld.com/2010/03/lost-boy-of-the-week-david-rozgonyi-part-2/

barrels sulfured, new rootstock trimmed, walls painted...

2010-03-21T16:15:00.001+01:00

A lot of good work done today! Explanations / post expansion to follow; I just wanted to get the pics up so I can take a shower!

painting just some of many miscellaneous wooden shelves and cupboards

burning sulfur wicks in all the empty barrels to prevent them from going sour

pruning the roots of new rootstock prior to planting

big fish, small pond

2010-03-18T06:59:00.000+01:00

So almost the day after we returned to Hungary, it was time to enter the wine we made with the help of our generous neighbor Laci Bacsi for the Pellerd Regional Winemaking Competition! We siphoned off a bottle, carved a cork by hand (because for some reason we didn't have a proper one!), and hustled on down to the local school that was hosting the submitting process.

There were a total of around 100 entries from the region, half red, half white, with a rose and a fruit wine thrown in here and there for good measure. Frankly, although our wine already tasted quite smooth and very good, we didn't think much of the contest beyond fun; after all, it was our first year of winemaking.

But we didn't count on Laci Bacsi's expertise standing behind us. So what do you know? We took home the gold in red wine! (Arany is "gold" in Hungarian; look it up if you don't believe me! :) Not only that, out of total points, we came second overall in points, missing out on the top score by a mere 0.1 point (18.8 vs 18.9)!

Not bad for first-timers! Wait until this season though... I brought back from the US boxes of winemaking devices, instruments for measuring acid and pH and sugar and the works... Not only that, we'll be doing extended maceration/cold soak, proper yeast instead of wild, oaking, fining.... Can you say OCD?

the year of the vines

2010-03-16T12:03:00.002+01:00

After being back in Hungary for two weeks, I've finally found a little time to start on my immense checklist of writing tasks for the year, starting with getting this old bird back on track. There should be more than enough material to make it slightly interesting: apart from the writing (which I can't really talk about; I don't have anything to say to anyone about writing!), this is the Year of the Vines. I just declared it that, and it is irrevocable.

As I've posted, Erzsebet and I bought a small vineyard and orchard thing up in the hills beneath Pecs. We plan to do a lot of farmy stuff this year in addition to a lot of writing work in between. On the to-do list:

1) A huge veggie garden. Here is a part of the plot. I composted and turned much of it over last year, but didn't get to finish. There's another 30% behind the camera, as well as another 50% again scattered around the rest of the property for oddities like a rank of artichokes, asparagus bed, and corn.

We have in our entry at the house in Pecs a hundred or 150 seedlings sprouting in pots, ready to go in a few weeks, as well as seed ready to go directly into the soil. Among the goodies: Two kinds of tomatoes (including black Russian Krim); two kinds of tomatillo; two kinds of Thai hot chilis; jalapeno chilis; habanero chilis, ancho chilis (yes we like chilies!); eggplant; cucumbers; spaghetti squash; wax beans; soy beans; zucchini; asparagus; artichokes; brussels sprouts; cabbage; chinese cabbage; lettuce; spinach; carrots; broccoli; cauliflower; sweet white corn; basil, dill, cilantro....

What can I say? It's gonna be a bumper harvest!

2) Miscellaneous improvements: There is some room to put in a half dozen blueberry bushes, and to trellis train and expand the blackberry patch to maybe six or eight feet! Installing a proper compost bin, fixing up the outhouse (paint, seat, lights, not to mention um cleaning out the dejecta of the previous owner; thankfully long-dried!).... Extending the outbuilding to make the fall grape crush easier. Laying two small flagstone patios (one in the orchard, the other in the strawberry patch) for sitting and reading and thinking and napping in the shade...

2) Chickens. Just as soon as I build their coop next week or so, we're getting four or five young layers. We love eggs; we eat a lot of eggs. A chicken produces an egg a day for the most part, so five chickens should provide for all our egg needs and then some. I've planned the chickens to have a fenced run under the orchard, rotating them first on one half then the other. I've been doing my homework, and it turns out that chickens are excellent in orchards for major pest control, so how exciting for all the trees!

3) Bees. I had 3 months in the US to study up on these little princesses, and both Erzsebet and I fell in love with them (on paper at least). Such an amazing community, not to mention helpful for pollinating the gardens, trees and grapevines. And honey! Even with one hive, it is easily possible to harvest 50 or more pounds per year, all with minimal effort. Basically, they take around 30 hours a year of "work", tops, and survive the icy winter without any problem or oversight. Most amazingly, we spoke with the head of the Pecs Honeybee Club (yes, there IS a club for everything). He ordered us not to buy any gear, instead he (or a friend) will GIVE us an old hive and a swarm for FREE. So we're going to get that done in the next few weeks too.

4) House. We've been putting in full days cleaning, preparing to paint, etc. The house is very robust and fairly small, so it doesn't need much. But it'll have to be just so if we are to spend several days and nights a week up there writing and puttering. We've ordered a new bed, and the rest involves a few coats of paint and not much else. Revamping the outhouse, I suppose, but you don't want to hear about that!

5) Vines. Oh, the vines. I can barely type these words because of the pruning.... 430 plants in ten rows, and me, a beginner. One of my neighbors (Laci Bacsi) has been teaching me how to do it. Frightening to see how much he cuts off, constantly grumbling about how the "oldtimer" must have been growing canes instead of grapes; never mind that the previous owner is not a day older than Laci Bacsi. But even with freezing temperatures still, it is a very odd sort of peaceful work, standing on the hilltop beneath the rushing blue clouds, four layers of clothes (and three layers of pants) and the wind still manages to tickle your back as it whistles through the heavy, rusting wire trellises, snipping over and over and over in a meditation.... There are three rows left to do; maybe tomorrow! During the year, they'll need monthly spraying as well.

6) Orchard. Same as Vines, above, but taller and ladder-intensive. Haven't even started yet.

7) Later will come canning and preserving the harvest, making a new batch of wine (about 400 liters this time), eating our chickens (yum! and aw...). And the fall fertilizing, composting, turning over the garden.... And the honey harvest... Whew! By the time all that's done, we'll be ready to hit the skies and check out Colorado again.

8) I also have a laundry list of Volkswagen repairs, so I'll be parking the old boy up there for the summer and wrenching away under the walnut tree.

And in between all of this, you say? Writing! But of course...fiction, nonfiction, essays and blog posts! Let's hope I'm half as productive as the garden!

And between even that? We're making this year the Year of the Vines, so we haven't planned any great treks to exotic places, but we will take a few short trips around the neighborhood... Kotor, Moldova, Poland, nothing more than a week or so each on the motorbike.

And yes, between all of the above, we're hosting guests left and right! My parents, Erzsebet's family, my dear old friend Claudia from my Australian days, and perhaps a few more....

It's gonna be a great year!

transferring wine from Laci Bacsi's cellar into carboys to transport to our cellar

Laci Bacsi, the winemaster, prune-master, everything-rural-master. He's going in for back surgery in three days, and was up with us helping prune instead of doing his own apple trees...

We'd be lost without his guidance.

Thank you old friend, from the bottom of my heart.

great new site for some amazing girls

2010-03-01T15:13:00.000+01:00

They left their jobs, left their lives, three girls lost in the world, traveling wherever their hearts take them.... sounds nice! I have been a long-time fan of their old blog, but they recently relaunched a much slicker version, which you can find here:

http://www.lostgirlsworld.com/

There's always a lot of good stuff to see, so check it out! If you take a look on March 3, and you might even see a story there from yours truly!

human powered porsche

2010-02-26T17:31:00.000+01:00

i would totally take one of these! The future is now, man!

homesickness when you're home??

2010-02-10T17:05:00.000+01:00

So i've been in the states a little while now with family and friends. Well, mainly family; there somehow hasn't been as much time for old friends as I had thought there would be. I hope they forgive me!

Thoughts of writing and gardening fill these icy days... a plan is taking shape:

I was thinking of how many artistic folks pay through the nose to get to a writing retreat where they have peace, quiet, wandering around in some crumbling rural setting, working in the morning, gardening in the afternoon, building a campfire at night... and we're lucky enough to have just that, plus wine. So, when we get back, we're going to move out to the vineyard. Well, not exactly, but we're going to try and spend at least four nights a week up on the hillside, and come into the city far less. There is electricity but only a bucket-well, a gas stove but only cylinder gas. No internet, but I do have a wireless modem for emails at least.

The last four months, my writing output has dropped off, although I have been planning several projects. Starting in March, it's time to get down to business! A rigorous schedule of writing four hours a day (one hour per larger project I'm working on, plus one for short fiction / marketing / correspondence), then the day will be mine. I'll have a near-limitless supply of puttering among the vines, veggies, orchard, cellars to keep my hands and body occupied with what I call (with only a trace of a smile) wholesome, unpretentious labors. Fixing up the cottage, painting, making furniture, pruning canes, fertilizing, tilling, walking a few miles down a dirt path to get into the nearest village for some emergency eggs.... Not to mention VW Bus repairs, of which there are a plethora. He did go 8000 miles from Hungary to Cyprus and back just a few months ago! Scraping his underside for rust will never be so pleasant as when I do it laying in the long grass under the big walnut tree by the picnic table in the front yard, a little music, a little coffee, after a solid morning of productive writing work, and before the sky goes red, violet, black above our heads.

For better or worse, I intend to blog daily here about what we've gotten up to, with plenty of pics. I know it's been done before--the urban doofus moves into the country and has all manner of hijinks involving hayseed neighbors and gophers--but it hasn't yet been done by ME, so that's all the justification this narcissist needs.

And in the meantime, I was browsing a few pictures of our actual city home of Pecs, and thought I'd share. It sure is a pretty place! In fact, since this year, Pecs was nominated the 2010 Culture Capital of Europe, there has been an insane amount of activity; they're redoing the streets in marble. I kid not. It's going to look ten times as beautiful as even this:

Fancy a wander?

See ya among the vines!

a good website

2010-02-02T02:45:00.002+01:00

http://rachelswords.org/about/

word frequency cloud of my latest novel, two dolphin

2009-12-28T16:43:00.001+01:00

leaving time again

2009-12-12T10:51:00.000+01:00

Well, the winter is here, and we're off to Colorado, because that's where you want to go to escape the cold. Family, friends, old haunts, sushi.... We can't wait! But before we go on any trip, especially a long one like this, there is always a lot to do. As usual, we attempt to compress it all into the last two or three days.

1) Packing: We'll be hanging out with family and friends, so it's an easier pack than usual for sure. Warm weather gear, since Colorado is a goddamn deep freeze. Why can't our families live in Barbados??

2) Shutting down the house: Our house being filled with ancient old thick stone goodness with a warm cellar, we don't have to worry about pipes breaking or fires, so that's a load off the old noggin. Still, all appliances unplugged, breakers turned off, gas off, water off, storm shutters bolted down tight. Fridge emptied, food given away to neighbors. Full cleaning (ugh) and a quick thanks be to god that it's a small house!

3) Vehicles: Winterized, batteries removed, gas tanks topped up. Bus disabled for theft protection. Motorbike chained down to withstand a tornado and covered up safe and snug.

4) Vineyard: Neighbors alerted. The old owner and I have a deal by which I let him store the wine that he made this year in the wine cellar, about six barrels worth. He still has a key to part of the house and the cellar, so he'll keep an eye out until we return.

5) Travel Insurance! This one is perverse: We gave up our US insurance when we moved here, but as US citizens traveling to one of our "home countries", we are effectively ineligible for any typical travel insurance, even though we've been living in Hungary permanently, and I am in fact a Hungarian citizen as well. Or rather, they'll happily take your money, and if you don't need to use the policy, well then it works fine. The fine print tells you otherwise, though. Finally found a great policy by IMG Global, made just for expats. They sell it in one year chunks for not too much money, and it covers the entire world including the US (with the caveat of residing outside the US for at least 6 months per year). It's great because I'm sure we'll head out somewhere in 2010 anyway, so we won't need to get anything else.

6) Bills: Set to automatic bank withdrawal, or prepaid until we return. Garage prepaid until we return.

7) Neighbors: We have three other families who live in our enclosed courtyard, so the house is always well-guarded. Gave them keys, emails and phone numbers, mail instructions and emergency cash for the inevitable stray weirdo Hungarian bill that always seems to show up when we're not here.

8) Dental checkup. A cleaning costs 25 bucks here; a cavity filled is about 35. There's a reason Hungary is the dental tourism capital of the world! All clear, thankfully.

9) Airline tickets reconfirmed and special meals ordered. My perennial choice? The Hindu meal! Always delicious Indian food with no beef, which I don't eat. Plus, even if you love the regular meal on an airline, it always pays to order something from the special menu, as it is served first.

10) Airport hotel booked, car service booked. The flight leaves at 6 am, we have to arrive at 4, and we live 4 hours away from the airport. Do the math, man! Hence, hotel.

11) Manuscripts backed up and uploaded to the all-powerful googal god. I've been incredibly lazy the last month, but even so I have a short story, a novel outline, an old novel I am trying to rework, the one I just finished, and the new one I want to make some progress on. Plus the nonfiction project. Ugh. Why do I suddenly feel like I'm drowning?

12) Prescriptions filled. Swine flu shot--okay, that was a month ago, but we got it pretty much because of this trip, since the US is still the swine flu headquarters of the world (I think it's opened an embassy).

13) Emergencies: The house has actually been shutting itself down the last week. The kitchen sink drain broke, the central radiator heater pumping unit is leaking and the pilot light doesn't seem to like me either, the washing machine has been overflowing for some reason, one of the kitchen circuits keeps throwing the breaker, or maybe that's the microwave breaking down... in any case, I'll have a bit to do when we get back!

And it's going to be amazing to return to Pecs, too. Being the 2010 European Cultural Capital, the city is awash with money, which translates into every single sidewalk, street and square in the old town being torn up and replaced with marble steps and fountains. Half the old houses are being resurfaced, new streetlights installed. The whole place is almost shut down with frenetic construction work, dozers and cranes and scaffolding. Unfortunately I learned too late that the city was offering to contribute to homeowners who reface their houses, which would have been nice. As it is, we got a new street lamp outside, and new cobblestones for our front archway. Still, the city is slowly pulling on a fancy new dress, and she will be stunning.

very cool way to support women in difficult situations around the world

2009-11-25T08:33:00.000+01:00

http://www.womenforwomen.org/

found video/music artist worth hearing

2009-11-13T14:04:00.001+01:00

I just came across a very cool video artist / musician / I don't know what to call him.... Basically he finds musical clips on YouTube and edits them together to make new music. Here's the first one below, but it isn't actually the best in my opinion. It's worth visiting the guy's page to listen to all seven tracks, plus the "how-I-did-it" track 8.

If you dig it this one, check out the rest at: http://thru-you.com/

house hunting and other trials

2009-11-10T18:36:00.000+01:00

Just a quick update for the dear, devoted fans of my blog, whose numbers I can most likely count on two hands, but I do love ya....

So, the news...nothing. Yup. The wine is in the barrel waiting to be siphoned off into another barrel, the vineyard is somnolent and awaiting a really good cold snap so the leaves will fall in the orchard and I can spray the trees with some sort of kooky anti-fungal winterizer, the bus is stowed and immobile, and it's been too cold and rainy to ride around on the motorbike. So, in a word, boring. Working on an older book I never published, finishing up a short story. Yawn. I'm making myself sleepy.

I suppose one interesting bit of information: my parents are moving to Pecs! I'm not sure when--there's no real rush--but I'm actually looking forward to having the folks near enough to grab a coffee with in the morning. I've been trying to talk them into the old town where we live, as everything is a short walk along pretty streets. The other option is up on the hills around town--Tettye, or Mecsekoldal. The houses there are huge, like US houses, with big gardens and vines and such, and they're much cheaper (per square foot at least) than the old town, but they couldn't walk to see me and that would make me sad. Almost as sad as having to break out a motor vehicle to visit them! I hope they listen to my advice...

Last week, we actually thought we found a great place about fifty feet from my front door, but unfortunately, we couldn't seem to come to terms on the price, and now the owner is selling it to someone else. Ah well. So in an attempt to find someplace for my dad to see this Saturday (he's stopping by the city for a few hours), I've retained not one but two real estate companies on a hard-target search of every available house that would suit the folks. I've narrowed it to two or three to show the Dad, but that's assuming my latest scheme doesn't bear fruit in the interim--harassing people who didn't know they want to sell and persuading them to sell after all! Unfortunately, it isn't as sinister as it sounds; I've made up little business cards with an offer of interest on them, and walked all over the old town tossing them into the best-looking prospects. And boy, there were two that I was drooling over! I won't post pics out of privacy, but damn. Damn. Call me back, guys!!! Especially if you're the yellow house!!! Screw it; here's a pic:

This would be so great for them... these kinds of homes were built around 1750, tall ceilings, big central gardens in the back.... Maybe the picture doesn't translate, but I'm tellin' ya, this one is a work of art. Like I said, buddy, call me. Let's do business. When it isn't my money and it isn't my house, I'm real easy!

Onto a less stressful note, in another month, we head back to Colorado for a few months of family time! I do wish the family lived in the Bahamas or something, because the three feet of snow thing I keep reading about on CNN doesn't sound that appetizing. But I guess the home fires will keep us warm.... aw...

That's it for tonight. I'll let you know how the house hunting goes tomorrow! Wish me luck!

i'd like you to meet my personal savior....

2009-10-30T09:09:00.001+01:00

Those who know me know that I have a habit of yakking on about the writer Paul Bowles at the drop of a hat--his writing, his amazing life, his trendy cigarette holders... I can't help it. He was a permanent outsider, always the foreigner in another's land, and I identify strongly with him on many levels. So, having nothing better to say today, I thought I'd introduce my kind readers to the man himself.

A thumbnail sketch would go something like this: Born in the first part of the last century to puritanical parents in New York, he fled to Europe as a budding composer. He studied under Aaron Copeland among others, and was making a name for himself when he decided he preferred writing instead. In his 40s, he wrote his first and most famous work, The Sheltering Sky, set in Morocco, a country he loved so much he permanently expatriated himself from the United States, and where he lived until his death a decade ago. In between, he traveled the world, hung out with the likes of Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams, William S. Burroughs, briefly owned an island off Sri Lanka, got married to the writer Jane Bowles, and fell madly in love with a Moroccan flute player named Ahmet Yacoubi. He on one floor with his boyfriend, his wife on the one below with her own girlfriend of many years, writing their tales and traveling the world, these two (or I suppose I should say, four) forged a very special life for themselves....

http://www.paulbowles.org/bowlesbiography.html

Many sources lump him with the Beats, but this is not true; he preceded them by a decade. The roll-call of Beat writers paid pilgrimage to him in Morocco, not the other way around. Paul Bowles' biography is as interesting as his fiction, which itself is a breathtaking blend of spare imagery, enough sinister twists to match any alley in Fez, and a humor drier than bleached bones in the sand. I would highly recommend picking up some of his short stories (he was a very prolific short story writer), or one of his four novels. I'd start with The Spider's House, but it's up to you!

http://www.paulbowles.org/

water is cool

2009-10-26T18:09:00.002+01:00

okay, no politicizing, I promise... just a very cool short video about how water behaves. Amazing!

a vineyard of our own, or, how we became peasants

2009-10-22T18:06:00.003+02:00

While our wine awaits racking at our wonderful neighbor Laci Bacsi's place, I may as well fill you in on an amazing development that occurred at the same time. Surrounding most Hungarian cities of any size are "telek"s, which roughly translate to "site" but are colloquially gentleman's farms / vineyards. There are three or four such clusters around our city, Pecs; Laci Bacsi's is located on Szőlőhegy. Szőlőhegy means grape mountain, but it is fairer to say it is a mound of soil rising a few hundred meters above the plains leading to Croatia, southwest of the city by around ten miles. A few kilometers across, Szőlőhegy contains hundreds of teleks, most with well-established vineyards and orchards similar to Laci Bacsi's. Some are very simple (only a field of corn or a vegetable patch), while others are huge, with multi-story primary residences built on hectares of producing land. All in all, the area is extremely pretty, quiet, friendly and it smells great!

After a day of working our wine at Laci Bacsi's place, we decided to ride the motorbike down the maze of little dirt lanes, poking around the teleks and in general just enjoying the fall air. The sky was hard, high blue, smoke from fires reminding me of Southeast Asia, the sounds of life among the forest and from between the rows of grapes everywhere. Down one little road quieter than most, we spied a very old man limping along with a cane. We slowed, said hello without stopping the bike, continued up the road until we came to the end, where there were three teleks side by side. Each just a bit over a half acre, each with grapes and fruit and veggie gardens and little houses and press houses.

We got off and peered over the fence at the little whitewashed house with terracotta roof tiles, the picnic table beneath a huge walnut tree, the rows of grapes past that. A giant vegetable garden was overfull with tomatoes and beets, a double row of fruit trees as far as the eye could see, and not one but two fig trees, one of which was growing over the fence and offering us a sampler of honeyed morsels... As we ate the figs, something caught our eye, screwed into the metal of the fence: a For Sale sign.

Wha?

Just as the fig caught in my gullet, a scraping noise came from behind: it was the old man we had passed. His name was Anti Bacsi, and he had followed us back up the hill. "D'ya want to look at my house?" he rasped, face flushed and leaning on his cane.

Oh yes, sir. Yes we do.

So commenced our tour. The charming little cottage had three rooms with an open atrium, one of the rooms being used as the press house and containing the descent into the cellar. Which was amazing. Immaculate. Huge, tall, cool but not too humid, filled with the delightful scents of fermenting wine. The main room had a table and chairs, a bed, a great old wood stove (with oven), hundreds of knicknacks and dried flowers and old photos and a wall full of framed awards the old guy had won with the wine he made from the property. There was a small kitchen, with stove, fridge, hutch, and another table and chairs.

Outside, we wandered around the property as he pointed out the fruit trees. It was like walking around a nursery. Peach, pear, pear, peach, walnut, cherry, quince, sour cherry, cherry, plum, pear, apple, apple, plum, pear, apple, sour cherry, walnut, cherry, another kind of pear, another kind of plum, another peach, here's a blackberry bush, these two rows are table grapes, try a pear from this tree (it was as crisp as a hard green apple, and as sweet as honey).... 26 fruit trees in all, most with lingering fruit high up where he couldn't reach.

Wine grapes? Check and double check. Trellised, trained and trussed up to perfection (if a little weak from a few years lacking regular fertilization). Five rows each 30 meters in length (100 feet), a total count of 200 thick, 10-year-old trunks. The other five rows bordering it? Oh, he explained, that belongs to the neighbors. They hate wine, so they let me run the grapes and keep the wine I make, in exchange for keeping them looking nice. I'm sure they'll let you do the same... So that made 10 rows, and about 350 plants all up (they're a little more widely spaced on that side). The varietals are Leanyka white and Blauer Portugieser red, about half and half. Enough to make 500 liters of wine easy.

It was getting difficult not to smile broadly and at everything, not exactly the best condition for a prospective buyer....wait, when did we get to that point??? I tried to segue gracefully, mentioning something I had seen on the sign:

"Your sign says the house comes with full equipment. What exactly do you mean by that?" I asked, indicating the gorgeous vacuum tube radio, the wheelbarrows, the rugs, the bed, the table, the gas stove, the fridge... "You mean the wine making equipment, right?" Which by itself is tremendous: a 500 liter fermentation vat; 5 200 liter fermentation barrels; 120 liter wine press; a wine crusher of a size that could be used to crush pumpkins; 5 100 liter oak barrels; 3 200 liter oak barrels; 1 400 liter oak super-barrel; siphons and funnels and paddles and all the sundry equipment the budding oenologist could want. "So the winemaking stuff is included in the price?" I asked again in a whisper.

He shook his head like I was an idiot who couldn't read. "What does the sign say? It says everything!"

But...but the bed? Everything! How about the dishes? Everything! Okay, what about the hutch, because we really like the way it ties the room togeth--Everything!!

He wasn't kidding. The awards on the walls, the old photos, the galoshes beneath the basin--he was planning on giving whoever bought the house a set of keys and leaving with the coat on his back.

The sign had offered the telek for 3 million. "Well, what is the lowest price you could give us if we said yes right now?"

2.8 million. Of course, that was Hungarian Forints; a quick mental conversion (okay, not so quick; it was difficult to think all of a sudden) came to around 15,000 US dollars.

Holy shit. We could scrape it together! Still, it was a lot of dough, so I shook his hand, said we'd think about it, and raced the bike back to Laci Bacsi's place to get his council. He knew the guy, as did everyone around Szőlőhegy; everyone knows everyone there. Financially, it made sense: based on my garage rental for the bus, as well as our average store-bought wine consumption, the telek would give me a break-even duration of ten years and change. Not counting the veggie savings, the orchard savings, selling excess wine grapes, having a place to write and invite relatives to roast pigs... But still, the price... Sitting with a very nice older couple a little later, they assured me that Anti Bacsi would come down on the price. The lady of the house virtually guaranteed it: "I'll bet you a box of chocolates he'll take 2.5 if you offer it." Her husband scoffed, but she just smiled as she filled a sack with egg plants, grapes and figs from her garden as a present for me. "He'll take it, son. His wife hates that he comes up here all day and is toasted ten minutes after he walks in the door... He'll take it. Betcha those chocolates."

I went back to her a few days later with a big box of chocolates. Of course, it wasn't a surprise; word spreads fast on Szőlőhegy. Laughing, she told me she was only joking about the chocolates, and after I forced them on her, she began filling another bag with veggies and figs for me to take home.

So there you have it: a vineyard of our own. We signed the papers a week later, got the keys, and then were promptly hamstrung by a week of rain. But after that, I aerated (turned the soil with a shovel) around every single grape trunk and fruit tree, got 100 kg of fertilizer to spread around them, cleaned up the tool shed.... There were more walnuts on the ground than could be contained by four 5 gallon buckets.

The neighbors are widely spaced, but couldn't be friendlier. Everyone came up the road to introduce themselves on a beautiful Saturday morning. The land across the cul-de-sac is basically a five acre apple orchard with no building, and the owners were out fertilizing. Two families next door to each other invited us to stay for dinner (they had a banquet spread going on, it was nuts!). And everywhere, everyone, no matter the time, holding out wine bottles and glasses. Just a drop! C'mon, taste our vintage! Here's a little palinka; distilled it myself from our pears! If you need anything, call me.... a bucket of apples for you, here ya go... say, would you like to borrow my sprayer--of course you do, here, just hang onto it at your telek. The hospitality is insane. I suppose the cynic in me explains it as everyone wanting to start off on the right foot to have a good neighbor (us), but it really goes deeper than that.

So now we're planning what color to paint the rooms, how to rearrange the press house to be in the outbuilding and moving the kitchen into the larger room, seeing about flooring the attic... what a damn amazing week it's been! And that's how we turned into peasants....

(here's a pic of me in 30 years)

take a break from wine for a second

2009-10-22T07:22:00.003+02:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/21/philip-spooner-video-wwii_n_329446.html#postComment

winemaking 101: part 3, pressing

2009-10-21T08:23:00.001+02:00

Once the wine had fermented to dryness (negative Brik reading, meaning all the sugars have been digested by the yeast and converted into alcohol), it was time to press them. The weapon of choice for the home vintner is called a basket press. It is made of a cast iron frame, a removable basket crafted of thick, heavy wood, a series of wooden spacer blocks, a top plate, and a ratcheting mechanism on top.

In preparation for receiving the pressed juice, our barrel was sterilized. A sulfur wick is attached to a special bung then pounded lightly into the barrel:

Back in the light, the grapes and the juice were bucket-ladled from the fermentation vat/barrel into the press. Simple, clean buckets beneath the spout collected the filtered juice, which would be ferried down to the cellars once the sulfur wick had burned away. Oenology tidbit, and something to try next year: As you can imagine, there are two levels of juice available from this process (actually, three): 1) the juice that fills much of the fermentation vat naturally (ie without pressing), and that flows out of the press immediately into the buckets; and 2) the juice that only flows once the press is used. Free-run and pressed. Many winemakers separate these batches into best quality and second quality, as the pressed juice also extracts far more tannins. One neat trick to do is to make two batches of wine entirely separately like this, and only blend them when the wine is almost ready to be bottled. This way, the winemaker can adjust the level of tannins/acids etc very finely. The third method is used for cask wine or for the so-called "workers' wine" (made for the vineyard help). The pomace (pressed grape skins) is added back into the fermentation tank with a large amount of white sugar, and allowed to ferment all over again. This makes alcohol just as strong as regular wine (it is the sugar that is responsible for the alcohol after all, and you can add as much as you like), but with obviously diluted flavor, color and aroma. Yikes! Alternatively, you can take the pomace and distill it to make grappa!

Working the press is easy at first, then becomes progressively harder. But then, if you stop for a minute, the skins give a little more, and it become easy again, for a while... It is not a process to be hurried. Likewise, it is not a good idea to press so hard the seeds break, otherwise bitterness ensues!

You can see the juice flowing into the buckets. Once a few were filled, we hauled them down to the cellar and filled the empty barrel. Note: The barrel is filled with dense sulfur smoke; the juice is fully fermented and alcoholic. When poured into the funnel, it splashes around in the sulfur smoke, displaces it, and so the barrel ejects a steady bellow of acrid, lung-searing vapor that is really something that has to be inhaled to be understood...Unsurprisingly, it doesn't seem to bother Laci Bacsi. Look at the color of the juice!!

An hour or two later, the pomace was dry, the barrel full (with 10 liters extra in another jug for topping later), and the wine run was done. The pomace is traditionally spread back among the grape vines as a type of fertilizer. You could bounce a quarter off that thing!

My baby!

We snugged a fermentation lock into the bunghole (a water-filled bong-like little thing that allows residual gases to form and escape without allowing wine's worst enemy--oxygen--in to destroy it. Now there's little to do for a few months but wait. Around December, we'll rack off the barrel by siphoning the wine into another barrel, leaving the sediments that will have accumulated by then on the bottom of the first one. That'll get washed out again, boiled out, sulfured, and refilled. Here's where the top-up wine comes in! After this first racking, it'll be technically drinkable, but we're letting it sit for a while, and racking a few times to get it crystal clear. Eventually, I'll ferry it over to our very own cellar, but that's for the next post....

well there goes that...

2009-10-20T07:10:00.002+02:00

our secret refuge has been discovered, dammit....

http://www.smh.com.au/travel/is-this-europes-most-beautiful-town-20091016-h0p1.html

ah well, nothing lasts forever.

winemaking 101: part 2, the crush

2009-10-18T08:39:00.000+02:00

After harvesting the grapes and transporting them back to Laci bacsi's telek, there was a little prep work to do. Cooperage (barrel-related stuff, if you insist on such gauche terms) is a delicate thing. The barrels are oak, and improperly stored are susceptible to drying out and/or being contaminated with a nasty little bacteria that turns wine into vinegar. As a dry barrel absorbs up to 4 liters of wine into its pores, if left empty, this bacteria will turn this residual wine into vinegar, as well as any other wine that is ever put inside that barrel. Forever. Gotta throw it away. And they cost $300 bucks a pop, for the small ones. So, Laci Bacsi is very careful to either keep the barrels absolutely full until next season, or to boil them out and burn sulfur wicks inside once a month while dry (sulfur in smoke or in the wine itself kills the bacteria). At the start of the new crush, he boils the barrels out like so:

This is especially fun as geysers of boiling water are ejected back through the funnel. We sloshed the water all around, and watched as the wood swelled back to eliminate a few leaks from dry boards; after, we set them bunghole down to dry.

It was time to crush the grapes.

The secret to crushing grapes is to use just enough force to barely pop the skin. You don't want to grind them into a pulp with the masticator because then you'll release too many tannins from the seeds. A little tannin is great, especially if you want the wine to age (tannins are needed for long-aged wines), but go chew on a grape seed now and tell me if you want that in your wine! I'll wait...

Oh good, you're back. Here is a masticator/crusher. This is not Laci Bacsi's (who it belongs to is for another post). You can see the two geared rollers that grind up the grapes. The rollers can be set to a certain distance to combat the problem of crushing too firmly. The black paddles keep things moving smoothly; Laci Bacsi's required a wooden paddle, which worked just fine.

Here we are back at Laci Bacsi's, using his crusher atop a primary fermentation barrel. His giant primary fermentation wooden barrel (foreground) is used only for making white wine. Making red in there would stain the white later, and besides, these large plastic fermenters are perfectly acceptable.

We loaded the grapes by bucket, and took turns cranking. A lot of fun! And the smell... or should I say, the "aroma" was heavenly! (Oenology tidbit: "Nose" is the overall smell of the finished wine. "Bouquet" is the component of the nose that comes from the wine-making techniques such as barrel time and type, species of yeast used, fermentation time and method, cold soak, etc. "Aroma" is the component of nose that comes purely and solely from the grapes, and varies only by varietal or combination thereof.) NB: I'm not an asshole; those sunglasses are prescription and I forgot my regular lenses!

After we ground the grapes into the barrel, Erzsebet went through the whole lovely mess and picked out every single stem. Leaving the wine to ferment on the stems will increase the tannins and leave the wine astringent, and who wants that? Well, Laci Bacsi must, because often he leaves the stems on his red grapes, but Beth wasn't having any of it. It took about 2 hours!

After that, we used a hydrometer to measure the sugar content of the resulting must, or juice. It is basically a sealed glass pipe that measures density of the liquid. 19-24 degrees Brix (the special sugar measurement used just for wine making) is the range you are looking for to ensure a decent alcohol content, as it is the sugar that turns into booze. Our must was a little low due to a slightly early harvest, and it came in at around 20. What to do? Chaptalization, that's what! We calculated it would take 3 kilos of white sugar to raise the sugar levels to 22, and we did, and it did. This process is acceptable in most countries for commercial winemakers (except for France, I think), so why not.

After, the must was covered to keep out about two million yellowjacket wasps that absolutely love playing around on crushed grapes. Overall, they were very good natured, and none of us got stung (except for Betyar, the little terrier/dachshund pup, but he was asking for it...).

At the current temperatures, the must will have to ferment for about 7 days, with daily punching down of the cap of grapes that will float to the surface during fermentation, pushed up by rising CO2. Which was awesome! The liquid must began to boiling underneath this foot-thick solid mass of grape bodies. Once a day we came to punch it down with a big wooden paddle. This one below is a few days later.

Oenology notes: There are a lot of cool things you can do in the preparation stage of the wine. One that I really want to try next year is giving the skins a "cold soak." Here is the problem: The winemaker wants to leave the wine must (juice) on the skins as long as possible to extract every bit of color and aroma. However, after a few days, fermentation creates alcohol, which in turn extracts excess tannins and bitterness from the seeds and skins (and any stems left behind). So ideally, you'd like to stew the must for a few weeks even for color and smell, but only a few days (5-10 or so depending upon temperatures) so as not to make it too tannic. Hence the dilemma. If, however, after crushing, you put the fermentation vat in a cool place (ie a celler perhaps?) at 50 or 60 degrees F, no fermentation will occur, no tannins will be extracted (yet), and the skins can soak all they want. A fortnight later, you drag the vat up to daylight and warm temperatures, and the fermentation kicks on. Four or five days later, you can press it, and get the best of both worlds! We'll try it next year for sure...

In either case, once the sugar is all gone (digested by the yeast during fermentation), the must is said to have "fermented to dryness," and it was what we were waiting for. Although you should use sugar content to determine when the fermentation is over (when the hydrometer registers a value of -2; less than zero because alcohol is less dense than water), Laci Bacsi can sniff these things out from long experience. When he said it was ready, we got on the motorbike and flew up to his telek.

It was time for the press...

winemaking 101: part 1, buying some grapes

2009-10-16T11:37:00.002+02:00

Recently, our amazing Hungarian next-door neighbor Laci Bacsi (meaning Mr. Laci, short for Lajos and pronounced "lah-tsee baah-chee") offered us a deal too good to pass up: wanna make wine with me? Now, Laci Bacsi has what is known here in Hungary as a "telek". Many Hungarians actually own these little (1-2 acre or smaller) gentleman's farms/vineyards in the hills and plains around major cities. Sort of a weekender that also happens to usually produce pretty much everything: orchard fruits, vegetable gardens, chickens, pigs, rabbits, turkeys, corn, figs; you name it, they're growing it. While having most of the above at his telek, Laci Bacsi has a vineyard. He also is, shall we say, a prodigious and enthusiastic consumer of his own product. As it happened, he had a barrel empty in his cellar, and suggested we go buy some extra grapes and he'll teach us the secrets of oenology. Finding ourselves recently addicted to red wine (thank Mr. Laci for that one, too), we jumped at the chance to learn from the master, and get 200 bottles of wine essentially for free to boot.

Around the hills here in Southern Hungary, there are a number of vineyard cooperatives who sell excess produce to home wine makers with cellars but lacking producing teleks, or for people who need a few pounds extra to replace lost product during topping/racking of the barrels later. Laci Bacsi took us to a place where they were selling red grapes for 90 forints a kilo. That translates to about 22 cents a pound. To fill the barrel, we needed to harvest around 330 pounds.

Harvesting the grapes is a very fun process, at least on such a small scale. We were given a few dozen white buckets, each with a capacity of about 10-15 kilos of grapes, and a pair of shears. The varietal here is called Kekfrankos, or Blue Frankish. This is a popular red wine grape in Hungary. It grows easily, and makes an excellent red wine without any extremes of flavors or processes required. In other words, perfect for novices! There is something so satisfying and calming about wandering the rows of a vineyard in the autumn...rustling wind, coy lines of sight, country-side aromas of earth and flowers and animals, the sounds of distant dogs, bees, the snip of the old shears and the wet plop of another fat bunch of sweet black grapes into the slowly filling buckets.

Here is Erzsebet and Laci Bacsi working hard. This is called "szuretelni" in Hungarian.

One for me, one for the bucket, one for me....

Weighing a batch of grapes

Here is a thoughtful Laci Bacsi

The final cost for 330 pounds of grapes was around 75 bucks! We threw them into industrial strength plastic bags and into Laci Bacsi's car for the ride back to his telek. Harvest was over; next up? The crush....

a quick update

2009-10-12T19:17:00.000+02:00

I always feel guilty for not updating often enough, so here's a pre-update. Lots of amazing developments the past week or two, which I will formulate into a few posts soon! Working on some manuscript edits, a lot of technical translation work, making wine (which is getting a good long post by itself for sure soon). Oh, bought a vineyard today, too....

Not as grand as I deliberately made it sound just then, but nonetheless, it's a vineyard, and we closed today. Update and photo spread to follow I'm sure!

For everyone who checks this blog, and is reading this now, I love you and appreciate you for doing so, and will write something more interesting soon, I promise. Either that or send you a bottle of wine....

vote for my picture pretty please

2009-09-30T13:42:00.000+02:00

Dear Friends:

A little photo of mine (which some of you might recognize) is currently featured on an MSNBC.com reader's poll for fave travel pic... Would ya consider sending me some love (read: votes)?? Here's the link; mine is the picture of the old Khmer woman with the incense! Thanks!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32904075

last thoughts on figs, tombs, and kotor's famous big-headed guide dogs

2009-09-23T13:04:00.006+02:00

You think you know a place just because you spend a lot of time there, huh? Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case with Kotor. Although I’ve spent a cumulative three months over two years and four visits there, most of my time was spent pecking away at various manuscripts, locked safely within the twenty square feet of space Cyril the bus so kindly provides. I could tell you very exactly the nature of the campsite, where the ripest figs are, which fig tree produces fruit that tastes of honey, or jam, or kiwi (pretty much anything you’d want to know about the fig situation, actually), the length of the walk from Stoliv to my favorite bar in the old town of Kotor (and anything you wanted to know about said bar), the variability of the water temperature and where the springs are... until my brother came to visit, I really hadn’t seen too much else. but with Laszlo due any day to come and visit our personal paradise that we spend so much time yakking about, we knew it was time to dig in and do a bit more for him. And were we ever happy!

First up (after showing him our favorite bar and fig trees of course) was to take a drive up to the top. We had done this once before on a motorcycle going up, and on this trip, coming down in the bus. 25 numbered hairpins plus about 10 more on a road about eight feet wide with the odd logging truck roaring around a corner, it’s a fun drive in either direction.

The view from this road

as you can imagine, is stunning:

There is a tomb of a poet at Lovcen that we had never seen, so that became a cultured target for a day trip. After the drive, the tomb itself was a further 461 steps through a concrete tunnel which emerged at last on the top of a mountain.

The mausoleum of the poet:

There is a pair of small islands in the center of the inner bay. As the legend goes, the islands (at least one of them) was created by the residents of Perast many centuries ago, by dropping stones into the bay after every successful voyage home. They also filled captured vessels with rocks and scuttled them there. Our Lady of the Rocks is the result. You can just see the twin islands in this picture:

We hired a skipper to take us on a three hour tour (chorus: a three hour tour). In the picture below, he's the dazed looking guy with the large cross. You'll have to forgive his expression; he had taken on a number of shots of grappa at 8 am before we got underway. They went well with the pot of beer a priest gave him, as well as the additional several pints in Perast.... The guy in red is my brother, Lazslo, by the way.

And while we're talking about the good Captain Popovich, here's his mighty skiff (a distance shot as he barreled away from the islands to take on a little liquid ballast in Perast):

Back to the churches...only one island is open to the public, the Lady of the Rocks Church itself. Legend has it the islands were built by the locals dropping pebbles (and entire captured and scuttled ships full of them) in the same place for centuries. There is actually more than a grain of truth to this legend.

Inside the church, we found many interesting nooks and crannies, tombs, frescos, silver artifacts, and booty from lost ships:

We also found this man, who just came from a nearby village by motorboat, where he was purchasing a new timer for the church bells:

He was a high-level priest from Subotica, Serbia, who had come (as he had every year for decades) to vacation on the other island ... and he was a fluent Hungarian speaker to boot. He offered to open the private priestly-club-med island to us. He was very nice and sweet and informative, but you could tell he was hoping we'd leave soon because he kept mentioning he was due to leave in two hours to head back home to Serbia. As we were leaving, we saw him, clad only in priestly swimming trunks, racing for the water for his final Kotor swim of the season!

While motoring around the bay, we thought we were being followed by pirates. It was an honest mistake:

Although with that pink parasol (not to mention the metal suspension cage, stage lights, trapezes, sofas on the poop deck and the like), the buccaneer wielding it might have been friendly, kind of like Johnny Depp:

After the ship docked in Perast (after having followed us, as I said, around the bay), I questioned them and learned they were a traveling theater company overwintering in Kotor after a busy season of sailing around the southern Mediterranean! Awesome! The company is called Caravan Stage Company, and they've been doing their thing since the 70s, originally touring across Canada in covered wagons... double awesome! Here's their site for those interested: http://www.caravanstage.org

What else.... readers of this blog from last year may remember a certain big-headed dog who introduced himself to us one day and led us up into the hills to some excellent ruins. He was there again this year, but he's got an apprentice! Not quite as comically cranially overendowed as his mentor, we nevertheless trusted him to lead us to the ruins of Upper Stoliv (from which the earlier picture of the islands was taken):

And here is the target of a massive daily hunt, Kotorian 'green gold' or 'pink paradise' or some other such alliteration:

Once we exhausted the lowest levels of deliciousness, I crafted a fig hook out of a collapsible 15-foot fishing pole by taping a bent tent peg to its tip. Thus, a whole new world of fruity goodness was mine to access... no fewer than twenty a day for five weeks!

And finally, here is yours truly, in a truly abominable pair of shorts. No, really, I adore them.... Those shorts have cupped my buttocks through a couple of years of great travels, including (but not limited to): Cambodia x 2; Viet Nam; Myanmar; Thailand x 2; India; Turkey; North and South Cyprus; Croatia x 4; Bosnia x 2; Montenegro x 4; Albania; Macedonia x 2; Greece; Kosovo; Serbia; Romania; Bulgaria; Hungary; and the good old US of A. And don't they show it! Along with my precious molded-to-my-feet-by-now flip flops, I retired them at the end of this trip. Eventually, I'll frame them as a set, put them on my wall, and when I'm old and gray, I'll slip into them again and die happy.

(See how I'm pointing out something vitally important, and Erzsebet's looking the other way?? Cripes...)

a quick article for ya

2009-09-20T08:48:00.003+02:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/opinion/20friedman.html?

back in hungary!

2009-09-13T18:22:00.001+02:00

The 2009 Summer Grand Tour is officially over!

After a week spent showing my elder brother around our beloved Kotor Bay, we've returned home. In all ways, shapes and forms, the trip was an excellent one: From Hungary through Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Occupied Cyprus, Greek Cyprus, back to Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Croatia, Hungary, with only three minor breakdowns (to the credit of my geriatric VW bus), all of which I was able to repair.

That equals (approx): 7000 miles, 3000 photographs, 50 UNESCO sights, 20 great new friends, 5 months on the road, 2 wonders of the ancient world (Temple of Artemis; site of the Statue of Zeus), 2 new short stories, 1 outline for a new nonfiction project, and one complete outline for a new novel!

I didn't want to come home just yet--we had planned to take a ferry over to Italy and come home the slooowww way, and at one point were talking of going even further--but there is exciting literary work ahead that I'd like to finish before we return to the States in December. New books, new stories, an unexpected chore on the one I recently finished (if I haven't named it publicly yet, I think it's about time I did: Two Dolphin)... and that's just my end of it. Erzsebet has her own work to do, and has so far been far more focused in doing so. I've been flopping around aimlessly, cooking, getting acclimated to a sit-down toilet again, browsing all the high-speed internet I can fit into a day....the latter two often simultaneously, oh my! But tomorrow I start work, that's my promise to you.

Now that I'm not moving for a while, I'm going to try my hand at writing some essays I've been putting off for a while, and posting them here. So for my family and friends, the format might change a bit. I hope you like the new material, which I'll be posting weekly once I get my act together. I'm working to coordinate it with the nonfiction project. Don't worry, though; I'll mix it up so they're always be silly updates mingled in....

Check back soon, though, because I'll be putting up final leg photos and stories from the trip in the next week or so...

Till then, love ya all!