Unslovenely Slovenia

I spent a glorious late summer day in Ljubljana this week, having taken the overnight train that runs through Zagreb on the way to Venice. I haven't been to Ljubljana in over ten years - it used to be a grey, provincial ex-Yugo regional town but has bloomed into one of Europe's most beautiful and trendy urban centers. The transformation is amazing - even the dull panel housing projects have been spruced up and modernised and there seems to be a cafe on every street corner, so you'll never have to walk more then ten meters to find a coffee.
I stayed at the Hostel Celica, which is located in a refurbished old prison, complete with bars on the windows. The rooms, however, have each been redesigned by different Slovenian artists, and as far as hostels go, it was definately the cleanest and most friendly I have ever stayed at. Nevertheless, I hate staying at hostels. I'm mean and crotchety, I don't want to meet lots of backpacking wiggers from New Zealand or Wisconsin and share their impressions of east Europe ("they... like... eat bacon every day!") and sleep next to a dozen pairs of sweaty socks in a room with no desk or chair to sit in. When traveling with Fumie we never stay at hostels, because a private room or cheap pension for two is generally the same price as two beds in a hostel, plus you don't have to share your room with a dozen aromatic Australians.
Up early and went straight down to the Ljubljana main market, located just outside of the old town along the river that runs through the center of town. It is mushroom season, and chanterelles are going for 16 Euro a kilo, while porcini are a whopping 38 Euro a kilo. That's a bit ridiculous - this has been a good porcini year in central Europe. I bought some fresh wild porcini at my local market in Budapest yesterday - they were a bargain at Ft 2000 a kilo (8 Euro.)
Slovenian cuisine reflects the fact that Slovenia is actually located in a cultural and climate hub of Europe: to the north you have the Hapsburgs and the Alpine influence (lots of filling dumpling dishes,) to the west the sea and the Italians (there is pizza and fried Kalamari everywhere) and east and south is the Balkans (meat grilled by people who like blood feuds.) Foodwise, that translates out to a choice between excellent Northern Italian style food and excellent Balkan fast food, usually fried up by emigrant Albanians and Bosnians. Burek, the meat strudel snack that is the world's best breakfast, was everywhere.Cevapcici are my nemisis when traveling in the Balkans: given the chance, I'll usually stick to the cevap and ignore everything else on a Balkan menu. Budapest is just slightly north of the cevap frontier: you can find it on Serb influnced menus at the Kafana, at the Jelen Bisztro at Blaha Lujza, and at the Castro, but cevap is street corner food. In Balkan terms, a civilized place means you never have to walk more than a hundred paces to find a cheap, freshly grilled tube steak sandwich prepared by somebody who is quietly scheming to eliminate the members of a rival family over some minor breach of tribal etiquette. Yummmm!
Apart from the food, Slovenia manages to include at least four different climate zones in the space of a country small enough to fit on your desk. You can go skiing in the high Julian Alps near Bovec, and in forty minutes be eating ocean fish beneath the palm trees along the Adraitic sea. I usually visit Slovenia for the trout fishing. Although the season is still open, I didn't have the time on this trip to wet my line, but on the trip home the train line ran parallel to the Savinja River, which was like having trout pornography streamed into my brain all the way home.Yes, I'll be back, possibly next May. The problem with fishing in streams that flow from Alpine mountains is that the snows melt in June or July (usually the best months for trout fishing) making the rivers flow deep and high, and wading is not only difficult, but dangerous, especially if you are fishing with Claude Cahn, whose fishing style combines the grace of fly fishing with the recklessness of base-jumping. The Slovenes deal with high water by tying huge weighted streamers and nymphs, things that seem like feathered matchbox cars just to get a few seconds of decent drift, and the whole sport gets reduced to a mechanical excercise in nymph fishing using barbless bricks. Of course, the fish are huge. My largest trout ever was a rainbow I caught in the Sava Bohinjka with Claude a few years back, before the age of digital photography...The small Slovene regional towns are worth a visit: any one of them would be a world heritage site if located in Austria or Germany, but in Slovenia cute, well preserved walled towns with a castle overlooking a bend in a river are a dime a dozen. My favorite, by far, is the aptly named Ptuj. Not, in fact, named after the English onomotopoetia for "spitting", this is the oldest city in Slovenia, settled during the Iron age by Celts and known to the Roman as Poetovio. I think this has got to be the most distinctive place name I've come across in Europe, rivaling such towns as Bastardo, Italy, and Fucking, Austria.

L'Shanah Tovah, Y'all!

L'Shanah tovah, everyone, happy Jewish New year, it's Rosh Hashonah and we get to start the whole annual cycle again! I am off to Croatia on short notice... ahhh, passport stamps... wish me luck... but until then, I will be back with more burek photos... and more from Croatia and Slovenia.

Técsői Banda: The Last Kolomejka

I've know the guys from the Técsői Band for almost a decade, ever since Kiss Feri from Ethnophone Records started bringing this amazing Hutsul band to Hungary for festivals. One of the last functioning traditional bands in the region - in the sense that playing their traditional repetoire in their community as a full time job - the Técsői Banda hail from the western Ukraine, just across the border from Hungary in the multi-ethnic village of Tjaciv, known in Hungarian as Técső (there is a large Hungarian speaking minority, and most of the band can speak Hungarian alongside Ruthenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Romani.) Truly a band of brothers (with one in-law, Ivan) the Técsői band are the sons of Manyo Csernovec, a Gypsy fiddler and and leader who was reknowned in the western Ukraine as the preferred musician for local Jewish and Hungarian events, alongside Hutsul music. A couple of years ago some Hungarian film makers started working with them on a documentary, and this week the end result saw its premier at the Urania Film Museum in Budapest: The Last Kolomeyke. The filmakers followed the band around in Budapest as well as in their home village of Tjaciv, focusing on the friendships that grew between Imre Keszthelyi - their local host and manager - Sue Foy (our own amcsi friend and dance ethnographer of central European dance styles) and me - I recorded a few cuts with Técső for our forthcoming new CD, and the studio session is included in the film. As is usual with these projects, the documenting went on and on and on... but then in 2007 the tsymbaly player, Misha Csernovec, suddenly passed away.The question hung in the air whether the band could continue without Misha or not. They persevered, and this gave the director the story he needed to tie the film together. Unlike a lot of documentaries destined for air play on Hungarian TV, this has a real story, and is not just a bunch of national-nostalgic cliches about Hungarian culture (heck, the guys are Ruthenians!) and the end result is a surprisingly entertaining film. Here is a bit of the preliminary trailer:
After the premier, there was a reception at the Nyitott Muhely gallery in Buda. Sue was there along with the crew and a good crowd, and Szederkenyi Miklos broke out an awfully fine jug of black current home-brew... and so a jam session followed. We played through a hour of the usual Maramures/Ruthenian dance repertoire, and then I sang some Yiddish tune with them, and finally, well under the influence, I tried out a new Jewish tune on them. This is how I usually see if they know a Jewish tune - take one from the post-soviet repetoire of Yiddish music, and let rip. This is an old Transylvanian Gypsy horse-trader's tune as sung by Bessarabian Jews in Yiddish - a true staple of indie rock bands these days - I learned last year from the 85 year old Bessarabian Yiddish singer Arkady Gendler of Zaporozhets, Ukraine, but it is based on a relatively new style Transylvanian Gypsy tune.
Bingo! They knew the tune,but in a different version, which Yura immediately called a "Gypsy tune." They ran through it, which led to a boozey medly of other tunes that hang in the grey area between Jewish and Gypsy repertoire in the sub-Carpathian Ukraine region. The last tune of this set is the tune known in the Satmar region as the "Ghetto tune." I learned it from the late Roma fiddler Andras Horvath from the Szatmar county town of Jankamajitis. I have never understood the meaning of the label "Ghetto Nota" since the Roma were not herded into ghettos in east Hungary during the Secong World War, only Jews. It is a classic Gypsy tune in Hungarian, albeit a rare one, but is always played in the context of any jam session which touches on Jewish music.

Slovakia. Trout Win. We lose. Let's have a borovicka!

We have been back from Slovakia for over a week, but for some odd reason I was having problems signing into my blogger account, but by applying a bit of my naive genius (and downloading a new browser) I am back. Our gig was in Sala (Vagsellye in Hungarian) about three hours drive north of Budapest. Sala is a beautiful small Slovakian town about an hour east of Bratislava, and one can immediately feel the impact of the economic changes that hav made Slovakia the powerhouse of developing east European econiomies. Clean streets. Well dressed populace. People have jobs. The towns can sponsor festivals. This is an economy that is working. Compared to Hungary, I was well impressed. About 20% of Sala speak Hungarian (it's next to Galanta and Nitra, two areas with strong Hungarian minorities in Slovakia) but it seemed that just about everybody could speak some Hungarian and didn't mind doing so. The Mayor greeted us in Magyar, although he wasn't entirely fluent, nonetheless, his wife was Hungarian. The whole atmosphere was welcoming and tolerant, which flies in the face of the picture painted of Slovakia in the Hungarian press. I announced most of the concert in Hungarian, which we shared with the very impressive Pressburger Klezmer Band, Slovakia's first ever klezmer band, the occasion being Sala's Day of Jewish Culture. The PKB's exquisitly trained singer Marta Potančoková takes her Yiddish seriously, and clarinetist Miro Lago really knows how to lead a crowd.
On our way out of Slovakia we strolled around the capital, Bratislava, for the afternoon (both photos above are Bratislava.) As European cities go, Bratislava isn't huge, but during the 18th century it was the seat of the Hungarian diet and the most important city in the territory of Slovakia and Hungary. The architecture is a mix of Hapsburg baroque, Communist Mega-Cement Monster, and Post-Modern Yuppie glass tower. The suburb of Petržalka along the Danube banks is the world's largest single settlement of butt-ugly communist style block housing in existence, but even that is getting a clean up, with special companies setting up to rebuild your forsaken proletarian panelak apartment. Anonymous seems to be the design password here. The Bratislava Synagogue, for example, inhabits a boxy building on a downtown side street, without any outward symbols such as a Mogen David to show that it is in any way Jewish. But we didn't come to Bratislava for the history.We came for lunch. Slovakia is probably the last great travel bargain left in East Europe. Beef stew with knedli, the steamed bread dumpling so beloved of Czech and western Slovak cuisine... 5 Euros with dessert.Besides lunch, Bratislava is a great cafe city. The old city is full of cafes and just about every corner of the town has a place to sit and sip. The coffee culture here is a mix of Viennese and Czech... meaning you can order "turkish coffee" which is essentisally cowboy coffee, with the grounds swimming in the cup. Or a Viennese style "mit schlag" (whipped cream) which is actually something nobody in Vienna actually drinks any more.We had left Sala and taken a train east into the highland area near Ruzemberok, to our favorite little Carpathian hidaway at the Bodega, a small in in the tiny hamlet of Podsucha. In Ruzemberok we got our Slovak fishing lisences (national and daily tickets for the stream - in our case the Revuca again... which is directly across the road from the Bodega.) The Bodega is essentially a lumberjack bar with cheap rooms (7 EU a night per person, with bath and TV!) and good food. Cheap food. Take a look at the menu: almost nothing is over EU3.80. This is what I call an affordable vacation.
The local cuisine around these parts is Liptov style: lots of potato and cheese. Classic halusky - potato dumplings swimming in cheese - was EU 2.66, and a plate was enough to keep you stuffed for a day. Potato pancakes (actually giant, garlicky latkes) went down nicely for breakfast alongside a plate of eggs, and for dinner I had a pork cutlet stuffed with cheese and ham, fried in a jacket of potato dough, all for less than the price of a Big Mac in Budapest.For dessert, palacsinta with fruit. A whopping one Euro. Remember: this is a Slovak lumberjack bar we are talking about, not some fancy downtown bistro. Shots of borovicka - raw mountain gin - are still only 70 Euro cents here. This is still the village hang-out, where the grizzly old men gather on sunday mornings for beer and shots while their wives go to church. But if you want a nice dessert, they have them...Fishing, however, was a total wipe out, the first time we have ever skunked on the Revuca. It may have been the heat wave that suddenly hit the region the week before we arrived - the river was pretty low and trout and grayling tend to become inactive when the water warms. The water was crystal clear as well... making it relatively tricky to sneak up on a good run without spooking the fish.There are a million possible reasons why we didn't catch anything... but since both of us are pretty militant catch-and-release fly fishermen, it didn't really matter. It was wonderful to be out mucking about in the Slovak mountains for a weekend with our own lumberjack tavern only a few meters away. We met a few local fly fishermen, and saw two fish, one of which was a huge grayling. The Slovaks are not big on releasing fish - all of them carry creels for taking home their catch. The locals want meat. Personally, I just want to annoy the fish, say hello, and let them go. They are too valuable to me as they are - alive - and in a small stream like the Revuca, which supports a population of wild fish and in which fishing with bait is forbidden, too much pressure can easily destroy the fishery. Most locals near Ruzemberok, however, fish on the Vag, a much larger river which supports trout the size and shape of Volkswagens. Wading in big rivers can get pretty hairy, and requires a set of hip waders, so we prefer the calm and comfort of the small streams.
Usually, by mid september fishing picks up on trout streams, as the trout start feeding before going into breeding mode later in the fall - and like most salmonids, trout don't feed during their breeding periods, when the season is closed to fishing for them anyway.
I tried just about everything... I had tied a load of Fumie's favorite fly concoctions, which she calls the "Dancing Queen" a hybrid beadheaded red-tag nymph in size fourteen... even my bright green caddis flies, usually a sure bet on the Revuca, did nothing. After a few hours on the stream, clambering about the rocks and casting to uncooperative trout, it felt mighty nice to get back to the Bodega for a few of those 70 cent shots of mountain gin. We'll be back, probably in June next year, when conditions are better and the river is higher. At least, on our way out of Ruzemberok, we could get our favorite breakfast at the train station self-serve cafeteria: noodle soup with cowboy coffee!And some things never change (nor should they!) You know you are in east Europe when you see a sign like this:

Slovakia. It's Next to Alaska.

I'll be away for a few days in Slovakia. We have a gig in Sala (Hungarian Vagsellye) with the Pressburger Klezmer Band and then I'm taking some time off to go trout fishing with Fumie near Ruzemberok. So If I am quiet for a few days don't worry - I am still busy processing a lot of things, not the least of which is the American political system... I just want to say thankyou! to the US Republican Party for being such dumb fuckwit blockheads that they have just handed the presidency to Our Man Barak Obama on a gleaming silver platter! Go GOP Fuckwits! For those of you who are US citizens living abroad, I register to vote overseas, and I urge you to do the same. Remember: the GOP is not above stealing an election. I also wholeheartedly support the candidacy of Barak Obama, which is rather easy to do after a week of Republican monkey shines that make me laugh at the idea that these clowns could ever handle a real emergency if one were to come down the pike. Like the last time they tried. Hurricane Katrina. Heckuva Job, George.

Cucumber Season In Depth: The Jewish Pickle Explained

In Hungary, the midsummer doldrums when there is absolutely no news to report is called uborka szezon, literally "cucumber season" because there is nothing at all happening and the newspapers actually run stories about how "the cucumbers are ripening." Although, this being Hungary, the stories tend to be about angry farmers dumping cucumbers in front of the Parliament because they all ripen at the same time and the prices fall and the farmers don't like that, except that Parliament is not in session until September so the farmers have already decided to complain about the apple season instead and dump apples next month, because at least the ministers will be back in their seats then and they can get some desultory TV coverage. Hungary is a simple place with simple needs for simple people. Among my simple needs are pickles. Not the usual dill pickles which you get in Hungary. I specifically need New York Jewish style garlic half-sour pickles, and rather than complain about the lack of decent picklage in Budapest I long ago began experimenting with making my own New York pickles. The model, yea, the holy grail of the New York half-sour are the pickles at Katz's Delicatessen on Houston Street in Manhatten. Readers of this blog already know my attachment to Katz's, the only place in the world where I would not think of complaining about paying $15 for a pastrami sandwich. The sandwich is really only a vehicle for the mustard and pickle. And the New York half-sour garlic pickle is the perfect food for the summer, occupying that vaguely defined space between a raw veg and a salad. At Katz's the tradition is that you should tip the counterman a dollar - he'll cut your meat more generously, but more important, he'll dump a half kilo of mixed pickles on a plate for you. It pays to tip your man at Katz's.Part of the allure of Katz's is the pickles - you can get full sour or half sour, which are the bright green fresh looking pickles seen above next to an example of the world's best pastrami sandwich. Neccesity is the Mother of invention, they say, so I have learned to make my own. Luckily, during cucumber season, you can easily find the ingredients at any Hungarian vegetable stand. Kirby cukes and dill. I don't always like to use dill, but this time I gave it a shot. The results were fine, but my kitchen now smells like Finland, a land where dill and salt are the only flavors I can remember. Wash the cukes well and prepare a brine of coarse salt (it is important not to use fine iodized table salt - which results in a slimey, soft pickle) water and spices. How much salt is tricky to explain - I just taste the brine until it aproximates the saltiness of regular pickle juice that you get from store bought pickles, otherwise I tend to over salt the brine. I add whole black pepper, mustard seed, coriander seed, and a hot chile pepper and then pack the cucumbers in a large jar with about a dozen cloves of crushed garlic. The sectret to Hungarian kovaszos uborka is to stick a slice of crusty bread on top of the brine to introduce yeast into the mix. I usually don't bother, but it speeds up the process and the New York style half sour cure takes only two days this way. You can use dill or not - I get annoyed at the smell of dill lingering in the kitchen after a few days, so I usually leave it out. It's the garlic aroma that I am really after anyway.
The finished product. Not quite as crispy as a Katz's pickle (which I believe all come from Guss' Pickles on Essex Sreet anyway) but close enough. If I could, I would travel to my home town for the New York Pickle Day festival, at the New York Food Museum on Sunday, September 14, 2008. But if you need tips, the Museum had a page of pickle making tips.

Polish Truck Stops: We Like Them. Very Much.

The slop pictured above is the heavenly soup known in Polish as zurek. Zurek is my default cheap meal of choice when in Poland, a thick, sour bowl of fermented wheat bran (the stuff we call cibere in Romanian) with bits of meat, kolbasz, and hard boiled eggs mixed in with some potato if you are lucky. This bowl cost me one Euro at a truck stop between Gdansk and the German border. Is there anything more welcoming than a Polish truck stop? Driving around Poland is hard work - the country is surprisingly huge, and getting from Krakow to, say Gdansk takes about 13 hours of slow, careful driving down the narrow, crowded two lane country roads that serve as the main national highways in Poland.
The Poles themselves are well aware of the shameful state of their highway system. Back in communist times, the Russians and their Polish communist lackies determined that keeping the roads narrow and undeveloped would slow down any expected NATO invasion force trying to reach Russia from Germany. Since 1990, however, there has been lots of EU funding for roads, but only short bits of highway near Warsaw and Gdansk were ever completed. The money went somewhere... but nobody really knows where. Unlike our system of roads in Hungary. In Hungary our previous conservative FIDESZ leadership realized early on that the Big Money was in road construction (especially if the Prime Minister's family owned the gravel pits and contracting firms... these guys definately stayed up late watching the Sopranos.) This is not corruption. This is simply very good New Jersey Logic. It's an old rule of thumb among certain ethnic groups in New Jersey that "there nothing that says ka-ching! ka-ching! like a new four lane highway overpass!" The Polish ruling elite need to learn from Hungary's example. Or start watching The Sopranos.
The basic Polish trucker stop is usually a simple shack located on on a small turnoff along the donkey paths that serve as Poland's national roads. Great big brawny guys named Stas and Janusz, often sporting huge handlebar moustaches, park their eighteen wheelers and wander up to the grill, maybe taking a shower out back (from a bucket shower rigged up to a tree) first to wash the road grime off.

Poles are not avid vegetarians. Polish truck drivers in particular, are not prone to veganism, lacto-fruititarian, or organic bran diets. Poles eat meat. It makes them big and strong, which you have to be if you are located between Russia and Germany (had fate provided Poland with neighbors like, say Portugal and New Zealand, the Poles could have developed in an entrely different, more fragile and graceful way.) As it is they are the toughest kids on the EU block, fair but firm, the kind of nation you want to have on your team when the poop hits the fan...If you are just taking your first break from the last six hours of staring at asphalt, this is what a Polish trucker wants to see. Huge mountains of meat. Pork chops skewered into a gargantuan, unkosher version of shish kebab, huge slabs of bacon, ham hocks, humoungous grilled chicken legs (from real, farm raised chickens, none of that supermarket chicken for our Polish truckers, no!) and great heaping sections of grilled Polish kielbasa and blood sausage.Growing up in the New York area, Polish kielbasa was one of the fondest memories of my mispent adolescence. Since we couldn't get Hungarian kolbasz very easily (short of a trip to the Hungarian butchers in the Yorkville section of Manhatten) my Hungarian Mom used to make do with Polish sausage. Polish kielbasa was also the lunch of choice when I worked on a sanitation truck crew in Hackensack, New Jersey. My garbage crew (six muscular black guys who moonlighted as the Gospel choir of their church and who used to practice singing while unloading huge cans of trash) would often stop on our way to the dump at a kielbasa shack in Garfield, NJ (population 50% Polish, 50% Hungarian) and demolish a few dozen grilled links before nine AM on any given morning.Of course there is more to Polish cuisine than truck stop chow. in Krakow, Fumie led me to the Restaurant Polskie Jadlo, which featured the Golonka Festiwal, a celebration of pig's knuckle in all its greasy, gelatinous glory. Golonka is roast pig knuckle, and it features on allmost every Polish menu. At the Jadlo this little joint of piggy goodness was offered in a dozen ways - we chose to split a big one in garlic and plum sauce, with a huge dollop of horseradish and mustard on the side. Eating these may well be illegal in the state of California, which is why we eat them in Krakow. And mind you, this is "light summer food" in Poland. Since we are all going to die anyway, we might as well know why. If the golonka isn't "mortality on a plate" enough for you, the starters definately were: pork lard mixed with pork cracklings and herbs, spread on thick slabs of Polish rye bread. You begin to notice a theme here, and that theme definately doesn't have anything to do with being kosher. Yes, I know that I will have a lot to answer for when I get to the Great Kosher Meal Plan in the Sky. But, doesn't God love a sinner? Or a fool. I'm not sure which.But fine cuisine alone is not what drew me to Krakow. We had a gig at the Harris Jazz Piano Bar, a lovely little basement venue located right on the Rynek square in downtown Krakow. Our host was the wonderful Gosia Michaelska, who we met in Budapest where she works on Polish cultural exchanges with the new Polish-Jewish bookshop on Nagydiofa utca. It was our first gig with Florin from Palatka, and the crowd - which came for straightforward klezmer - loved the Transylvanian Gypsy stuff we played for them. Fumie took the video below using a special Canon Belly-Increasing Macro lens, so objects seen in the video (such as my gut) may appear larger than they do in real life.

Weimar Yiddish Weeks and Hungarian Jewstock: A Study in Contrasts

Almost a month on the road is about enough for me for a good long while. We did the dance workshops for Klezmer and Roma dance at the Weimar Yiddish Weeks workshops, with guests Florin Kodoba and Sue Foy as dance teachers. We were all worried a bit about Florin as a dance teacher - he is a fiddler and an incredible dancer, but had not really done much teaching of Mezőség Gypsy dancing in his life. Still, he's grown up at events where his villages dances were the object of teaching, and he fell right into the job alongside Sue - patient and clear and breaking down the elements of the incredibly dense Transylvanian dance cycles of Palatka. New York Klezmer Wonder Boy, fiddler Jake Schulman-Ment, joined us for the concert and workshops. Jake amazes me. Twenty four years old and he plays my stuff better than I do - he plays (and teaches) our Carpathian Jewish repetoire and has turned into New York's leading Hungarian fiddler, specializing in none other than the music of Palatka (seen above playing with Florin Kodoba in Weimar.)
The Triumvirate of the Klezmer Dance Workshops, Michael Alpert, festival director Alan Bern (both of Brave Old World) and ethnomusicologist Zev Feldman. I would call them the Trinity of the festival, but, well, you know... it gets kind of uncomfortable using that term. Alan is a rock of patience, managing the demands of the participants and performers like the pro he is... if the man had less musical talent he could have been a rabbi. Or perhaps a sargent in the US Marines.
Michael and Sue Foy backstage after our concert. Never put Klezmer musicians in the same room as alchohol and theater costumes. It leads to silliness that may find its way to the public ("you didn't tell me you had a blog!") and hangovers. The hangovers needed to be kept in control because we had to be up and teaching by ten each morning - no small feat for a musician, given that we (well, not me... that often) were up late each night playing at jam session sponsored by cafes and bistros around Weimar. But we had a dedicated group of string players who asked for in-depth tuition from Florin about the Mezőség fiddle style. This is the only way one can learn this music - notation of the melodies on paper can never come close to the ornamentation and phrasing of a live performance. The trick to the dyanamics of the syle is all in the bowing, and the ornamentation can not be separated from the melody itself - they form one, dense, pulsating musical whole. This is a music that is "learned, but not taught" in its traditional context.After the Weimar week, we tossed Jake and some of his french Klezmer friends into our mini bus for the ride back to Hungary, where we had been asked to play and teach workshops at the MAROM "Jewstock" festival in Monostorapati, near lake Balaton. This festival turned out to be... err.. less than auspicious. After the almost shocking effiencey of the Weimar seminars, the organization of the Hungarian festival was, how can we put this... fluid... actually it was a frigging mess. Our first day was... hopeless... But the organizers are good folks, so this is more of a "buy me a beer, I'll tell you a story" situation. At least it wasn't quite as fracked as the main festival in the neighboring village of Kapolcs, the "Magic Valley" festival. Magic as in "watch the performers disappear when they learn they ain't getting paid" because the festival lost all of its main sponsors months ago but decided to go on. It was, basically, a bad crafts/boutique fair with overpriced beer and goulash, and very occaisionally, somebody playing music.I would have avoided the mess in Kapolcs altogether, but Aron was working as unpaid labor as part of his school project, in which his class worked on media interviews and tech help during the entire festival. I hitch hiked over one day to buy him some decent food. He wolfed down a salad first - his slave masters had forgotten to include fresh vegtables in the student media crew's diet plans - before wolfing down an excellent Serbian plescavica plate from the Kafana Restaurant's tent. He was happy though - he was given the rather impressive responsibility of being the production manager of the student media teams - I managed to do better eating at the small village bar in Monostorapati, where a decent serving of mutton stew with tarhonya (little lentil-sized pasta) ran only Ft 800 (EU 3.25) and the froccs was fresh and local. This is real Veszprem county food - you never get good tough sheep meat in paprika sauce in Budapest, and my roots are from Veszprem, so I was in mutton heaven. I couldn't really deal with the nightly music offerings down on the soccer field, which comprised mainly of Israeli rap bands which invariably featured Heroic Hebes in dreadlocks whacking away artlessly on djembe drums and darabukkas. It was seriously painful and tedious. Instead, I wound up befriending a family of the local Beas (Boyash) Gypsies, who sang in the Beas dialect of Romanian and whacked artlessly on the top of the table for percussion (anything is better than an Israeli with a djembe.)The Beas are Gypsy in origin, but lost the use of the Romani language several hundred years ago while enslaved/enserfed by the Romanian nobility and used to work in mines (hence the name: Baias, or miner in Romanian.) The Beas are losing their language in Hungary, but these still spoke Beas, an older dialect of Romanian with admixtures of Serbian and Hungarian. When I was able to answer them in my own pidgin pan-balkanoid way, they were astonished. "You speak tsiganesht!" No, I had spoken Romanian, not Romani to them. But these were farm assistants, not linguists. On the other hand, the one Romani word they did recognize was useful a bit later when the wine flowed a bit to freely. "Patchiv!" Respect. Never met a Gypsy who didn't have a deep sense of respect, at least when expressed in their own language.