the National Cake of the Year! Flóra Cukrászda, Zugló

By now, summer has definately left the building. It lasted a nice long bit into October, but right now Budapest has grey skies, howling winds, cold rain, and we face another six months of that grey, noxious east European cold that reminds one that as regards climate Hungary is, essentially, the European equivalent of the US' midwest. Think Ohio or Indiana in winter. OK, you can now stop thinking about it. Sorry. That ends our happy routine of a daily coffee break at neighborhood outdoor cafe. Until last week, we had wonderful, warm fall weather, and we would often stop by the nearby Flóra Cukrászda on Erzsébet Királyné utja in Zugló for a coffee and a slice of cake. Not just any cake, but the National Cake of the Year! The Flóra is only one of our neighborhood pastry, ice cream and coffee parlors, but since it is near and has a couple of outdoor tables, it gets most of our custom. And it features the last few years worth of "national cakes." Such as the "Szatmar Plum Cake" seen above, winner of the 2009 National cake award. Apparently, each summer the National Pastry Bakers Association holds a competition for the best cake to represent a national birthday cake on the national holiday of August 20th, and our local cukraszda features these prominently on their top shelf.

And these are goooood... given that pastry and cake baking are something Hungarians do very well, it is frightening to see how well they can outdo each other on a yearly basis. These babies go for about FT 400 a slice, which is not bad compared to downtown cakes or anything you might encounter in any other European city. You are getting the best slice of cake in the civilized world (outside of Milan, I mean) for two bucks. You just can not beat that. Even if you don't like cakes. I don't know where the Flóra gets its cakes - they are certainly not baked on the premises - but they do take pride in their quality and they are always fresh. Fresh cake and coffee is something we absolutlely take for granted in Budapest and something we always miss when we go abroad. We're spoiled. We know it. We like it.

We don't actually eat cake that often, but when we do we like to do it outside in the late morning, taking out time and enjoying a sunny day. Well, that's over with until next May, it seems. Around this time of year all the outdoor cafes pack in their tables and Budapest goes into Arctic Explorer survival mode, huddled down in their heated ice dugouts waiting for the next planeload of supplies to be dropped onto the icy wastes of McMurdo Sound. For the next few month we will gnaw on our hard rations of seasonal beigli and kifli until the sun comes out, the tables return, and the new cake of the year returns to reign again.

On another note: Fumie posted a video she took from our MuPa concert on her youtube page. She had full permission to do photography at the hall, so she stuck her digital camera in video mode on the edge of the stage during the encore. Since we both only use our little Nikon Coolpix digital cameras for video, we aren't going to win any cinematography awards soon, but this is what we have - way too many Jews, Magyars, and Hutsuls singing and playing at once.

Big Night in Budapest: The Naye Gig with the Técső Band

Our concert of Di Naye Kapelye with the Técső Band at the Budapest Palace of Arts on October 1 went well - considering the logistics of getting everybody together, rehearsed, and playing while speaking in in six languages simultanesously. The operative languages in this group are mainly Hungarian and Hutsul Ruthenian, although I speak rudamentary Romani (Gypsy) with Ivan, the Técső fiddler, who is the only member who doesn't speak Hungarian. Yankl speaks a bit of Magyar, but since he hadn't been in Hungary in four years it was justifiably rusty. Six languages per rehearsal or gig. Just try that in your local bluegrass band.

It was a blast just leading a band of this size - something I have only experienced while teaching Klezmer music workshops, in which case it isn't like you are really fronting a band as much as leading the High School orchestra in band practice. I think this was also the first time the Técső Band played a full blown concert hall - they usually play folk festivals and bars, but they were mighty impressed with the hall's acoustics and the blue ribbon treatment that one gets backstage at the Palace of Arts.

When you have that many musicians - and none of us play from music notation - you've got to get a rehearsal in, just to shake out the bugs and eliminate those awkward surprises. When I was just starting out in music there were bands that I played in where everybody would just stop onstage and look at each other when somebody missed a cue or made a mistake. A professional musician is not necessarily guaranteed to not make a mistake now and then - he is paid to act like it never happened.

The evening before the concert we had an open rehearsal in the basement of the Siraly in the seventh district, mainly to run through the tunes we would play together. After a while friends drifted in and we ended up playing for a full blast klezmer dance session. Veteran Klezmer dance teacher Sue Foy led the freylakhs, and it wasn't surprising that Joska joined in seeming to know the dance already. We also had both of our clarinet players along for the ride. When you really want to blow an audience away, use two clarinetists and two lead fiddlers. Works like a charm. Our main man when playing internationally is Yankl Falk, from Portland Oregon. But Yankl can only get to Europe for the longer tours, so a lot of the local work is taken by Janos Barta, who was one of our first clarinetists and who now leads the Veszprem Klezmer Band.Our next gig (without the Técső Band, alas, but with the guest appearnce of New York Klezmer fiddle prodigy Jake Shulmen-Ment whose new CD "A Redele" is now out) will be in Bucharest on November 4 at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant concert hall. (Clubul Țăranului la Muzeul Țăranului Român, Şos. Kisseleff, Nr. 3) A little taste of what Jake does: with Raoul Rothenblatt (bass) and Pete Rushevsky on tsimbl playing a set of Klezmer fiddle tunes from collections I gathered in Iasi fifteen years ago. Jake does my stuff better than I do!

Di Nayes and Técsői Banda at the Budapest Palace of Arts: Thursday October 1

On Thursday, October 1, Di Naye Kapelye plays a concert with the Técsői Banda at the Budapest Palace of Artists. This is a pretty rare event - due to the arcane atmosphere surrounding anything involving Jewish music in Hungary, we rarely give public performances in Budapest. Our last formal concert was, I believe, in 1998. We tour all over Europe, we play for local Jewish community events (Hassidic weddings, brisses, call for special rates!) and we sometimes play the unadvertised Budapest seventh district underground club networks. We do play an occasional festival or concert gig outside of Budapest. But Budapest itself... well due to circumstances far beyond our control, is kind of off limits to us. Buy me a beer sometime and I can explain it in person. It's... Hungary... It is a surprising and convoluted tale. So this particular concert - at the grand and fancy "MuPa" - is a welcome chance to play for our home town fans and friends who otherwise only know us from our packaged digital CD selves. Yes: we actually do exist on an analog plane. It is kind of neat to walk around town and see your face on a poster on every downtown street corner - sort of a minor rock star moment. Very minor. A little unnerving too - Budapest is not a place I want to be seen as a celebrity. Anytime I show up on some recycled TV folk music show taped a decade ago my whole neighborhood goes into ga-ga celebrity mode and suddenly i walk into the butcher shop or try and buy asparagus and I get confronted with "Mr. Artist! (yes, this is how they address you, without any sense of irony and with full celebrity awe) I saw you on the TV last night!" I cherish my local anonymity. But standing in front of paying audiences playing fiddle is what I've done my whole life. People keep asking if I get nervous playing concert halls. My usual answer is: no - stick me behind a fiddle and I am fine - but if you ask me to take the controls of a small airplane and land it after the pilot has had a heart attack, that's where I would get nervous. Playing rural Moldavian Jewish fiddle is what I do, whether in my living room or in front of six thousand screaming drunk Belgian folk music hippies (a distraction factor equivalent to playing for twenty talkative and drunk Vizhnitzer Hasids.)Playing with the Técsői Banda is a thrill - these are traditional musicians who still play in a context in which their music isn't "folkorized." I have to mash the two ensembles together at a rehearsal tomorrow night and fine tune the beast, but it should be noisy and ragged but right. When we recorded the newest CD, "Traktorist" I had the idea of using a couple of the Carpathian Jewish tunes that I had learned from the Técsői Banda, and then suddenly they showed up in Budapest so I took them into the old Hungarian Army Choir studios and we recorded the pieces that are used on the CD. It was the last time I played with the tsymbaly/cimbalom player Misha Csernovec, who passed away a few months later. The band has been working as a trio ever since, but will be using our cimbalom player a bit at the thursday concert. But Misha is sorely missed - he was one of the best traditional hutsul tsymbaly players, and they aren't making them like they used to any more.I have to run out and pick up Jack "Yankl" Falk at the airport in the morning. Yankl lives in Oregon, in the far distant USA, and when we have a major gig we fly him in. He's been busy the last two weeks - as a freelance hazan, a cantor specialized in singing Jewish liturgical music - he usually travels to sing at Jewish congregations for the high holidays of Rosh Hoshanna and Yom Kippur. This year he just finished a gig in Indiana, and in the past he conducted services for the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland: Anchors OyVey! Yom Kippur ended yesterday, so Yankl first flew back to Oregon and then hops on a plane to Budapest. I expect he's gonna be run ragged by erev shabbes. And what do you feed an observant Jew? Kosher cold cuts and sausage from the Orthodox Kosher butcher on Dob utca, of course. Having traveled all over Europe on tour with Yankl, you eventually get the knack of feeding your furry frum friends. We have made pit stops at virtually every kosher food shop in Europe during our many tours, and even fended off the dreaded "kolbász Maasai" in the town of Gouda, in Holland. (It was actually Árpi Bácsi, our 73 year old guest cimbalom player from Transylvania. The nomadic Maasai of Kenya believe that all the cattle in the world belong to them and that by raiding other tribes' cattle, they are simply reclaiming what is already rightfully theirs. Uncle Árpi felt the same way about kolbász. Any and all kolbász.)I found this little video on Youtube lately - a bit that wasn't used in the final cut of the film "The Last Kolomeyke" - me and the Técsői Banda singing Michael Alpert's song "Chernobyl" together at the Castro bar a few years ago. This was in a bar late at night. Now you can see why I never, ever allow myself or any of my band members to step onto a formal stage after having had anything to drink. It really doesn't make the musical experience noticeably better... A little bit of the film - which has aired on Hungarian TV and is actually a very well done documentary, is the cut below:

The Wonders of Fabled Nyíregyháza!

Nyíregyháza! Who has not heard that name and dreamed of one day seeing this fabled city with one's own eyes while alive on this earth? Nyíregyháza! Oh flat city of wonders, of glorious Tescos and Spar markets spreading riches to the Ukrainian border, the enobled capital of Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county! Nyíregyháza! A city whose name resonates deeply among lovers of apple pie! Nyíregyháza! Nyíregyháza! Nyíregyháza! The last time I was in Nyíregyháza was around 1991, and I remembered a dusty, flat provincial burg that was famous for... apples. Yes, the eastern region of the Nyírség - "the birches" in Hungarian - is the apple producing center of Hungary, and a lovely place to drive through on your way to somewhere else. Last week we had a gig at the Vidor Festival and so it was with a smidgen of trepidation that we drove the band out to Nyíregyháza.

And guess what? Nyíregyháza has grown into a really beautiful and smart town. On a scale of 1 to 10 for Hungarian provincial town attractiveness (with say, Pécs or Veszprém a 10 and Szolnok a 1) Nyíregyháza rates at least an 8. If you have to choose to live in someplace that was extremely flat (if you are confined to a wheelchair, for example, or perhaps almost perished climbing Mt. Everest and are subsequently traumatized by elevation of any sort) this would definately be on the A-list of places to move to.The Vidor festival was one of the best and most well organized events we have yet played in Hungary - they brought in really good World music acts like Selim Sessler from Turkey, Ba Cissoko from Guinea, and the Bollywood Brass Band from London, filled out with younger bands from Transylvania and some of the best local folk and Gypsy bands. These guys were playing in the square right outside our dressing room tent - real old fashioned local Szatmár style Gypsy band nóta music, nothing too polished, stuff you never hear in Budapest anymore. Made me wonder why we were on stage and not these guys.

Playing at festivals means arriving early and waiting a lot - for sound checks, for accountants, for band members... you wait. They had a pretty nice spread for us, although I think the chef was pushing the BBQ chips and diet coke a bit hard, but this will be home for the next ten hours. A musicians life is best described as "hurry up and wait."

And after you have done a sound check and tuned up, and told all the new jokes you've heard since the last gig and inquired if your kontra fiddler has recently added to his already vast brood of illegitimate children, you get a bit silly and start jamming new tunes and taking the verses of beautiful Transylvanian folk songs and changing them to reflect the fact that your dressing room tent is located next to the portable toilets... this can evoke shock and moral outrage from astute Hungarian musicians.

The top band for the evening was a Spanish World fusion outfit called Canteca de Macao (but I can't help thinking that they were having a play on words with Manteca de Cacao) who were a damn hot dance band and, luckily, although they juggled a lot and had dreadlocks and tattoos, were not vegetarians, since we had lunch with them and lunch was some fine beef goulash. Thus they redeemed themselves from my harsh and shallow judgement. It's OK to be a hippie if you eat meat.

This is the stuff you never get in Budapest: real, honest hard core granny gulyás. As soon as you get 25 kilometers out of Budapest the food always starts getting better. It makes it hard when working on travel guide books and trying to recommend Budapest restaurants (only twice the price for half the portion!)

Another feature of Hungarian provincial towns is the local fast food: lángos and lapcsánka , which is essentially a potato latke, a flat fried starchy filling spud pancake. It's getting harder to find good lángos on the street in Budapest - heck, you won't even find it on the streets in Budapest anymore, regardless of what I write in tourist guidebooks because my editors want me to say so ("lángos is widely popular as a street food in Budapest..." NOT!) But get out to the countryside (Miskolc, in particular) and you still find cheap fried spud bread kiosks all over town.Nyíregyháza used to be home to a large Jewish population, both orthodox Hasidic and Status Quo Ante traditional Ashkenazic congregations. Today there are about 300 Jews living in the town, and we met the president of the community but had no free time to visit the synagogue. The Nadvorna Hasidim make a pilgrimage to Nyíregyháza annually to visit the grave of one of their most influential rebbes, and not far away is the small town of Nagykálló, the home of the Kaliver Hasidim. Since this are is right up against the Ukrainian border, there was a lot of interaction between the Jews here and those in Munkács, today in the western Ukraine. And since we are next playing at the Művészetek Palotája on October 1 with the Técső Banda, who often play for the Jewish communities around Munkács, what could be better than a full set of Hutsul tunes played by them last week in Budapest at the Kertem garden bar in the City Park. This is a really fine take - Yura's singing and drum playing really put him in a category above most "folk" musicians. These guys are playing traditional music at their prime - it is almost like hearing blues played in Missisippi in 1932, or Klezmer in Lviv in 1910. It's a changing world, and we need to be grateful for musical holdouts like this. There won't be many more like them in the future.

Pizza. Pizza... Did I Say Pizza?

Late summer is the time for pizza. Nothing says summer like a nice slice on the street or waiting for the pizza to be delivered. We love pizza. We adore it. We worship at the temple of the Great God Zza, He of the dripping cheese and crusty perfection. It's not enough to eat pizza, one must know pizza: one of my favorite food blogs is Slice, the pizza blog. Of course, on a more realistic level we live in Budapest, which is not one of the world's great pizza towns. Sure, we have pizza in Hungary, in fact we have a lot of pizza - after 1990 pizza became the substitute for most Eastern European medium-fast foods. Before 1992 the late night munchy target of Hungary used to be the meleg szendvics, a toasted slice of bread with melted cheese and ketchup dreamed up in imitation of the bakery pizzas which were the only thing Hungarians could ever afford to eat when they visited Italy back in the days when you could only leave Hungary with a limited amount of foreign hard currency. The meleg szendvics is the default mode for Hungarian pizza, and the reason that Hungarians always like to squirt ketchup on top of pizza. After the first Yugoslav civil war, Hungarian refugees from Serbian Voivodina began introducing the vastly superior Yugo pizza, and since then pizzerias sprang up everywhere. The problem is, most aren't very good. Most of the few decent pizzas - Okay Italia, Trattoria Toscana, or Terzio Cerchio - are too expensive to eat in the New York manner, meaning downing one or two a day. The only option left: make it at home.This is where having an obsessive baker living in your home helps. Fumie bikes across town in search of flour with the proper gluten levels, and she will get up at two AM to check on how her sourdough culture is doing. Pizza dough is a cinch for her. For some reason, Fumie loves to bake on those days when the thermometer breaks record highs and everybody else heads to the beach. But nothing beats pizza on a hot summer day, right?At least we can get the basics: marzano tomatos for homemade sauce, basil we grow on our balcony, and for some reason locally made mozzarella cheese has become reasonably cheap and good lately. I've learned to go light on the toppings: basil, red onion, italian salami, anchovies... Last week we tried adding sliced mangalitsa bacon to the pizza. Utter FAIL.. the result was slimey... the mangalitsa basically just melted into tasteless pools of lard and dripped off the slices. Kids, don't try this at home!

Mangalitza (a local breed of curly haired pig) is one of those products Hungarians laud as branded local "Hungaricums" within the EU, and not long ago we bought some mangalitsa pork chops to try with a friend who is a wine importer. Well... maybe it was just our pig, but the curly haired pig is bred for its fat, not for its meat. You can eat it, but... textureless, insipid, bland, entirely without character. The regular Hungarian pork that we get at any butchers is far superior for meat, so we'll be giving the curly hired pig a pass in the future.August 20 is the Hungarian National Holiday. It's a combination of holidays, actually, St. Stephen's Day, New Bread Day, and Constitution Day all rolled into one big do which culminates with fireworks over the Danube at night. The crowds along the Danube banks downtown are huge, and a couple of years ago a freak storm broke out just as the fireworks were beginning, flooding the streets, blowing giant fireworks into the city, and stampeding the crowd, causing injuries and several dead from boat accidents in the river. So, to avoid any possible apocalyptic destruction, we just biked up the street to the highway overpass here in Zugló for a clear view of the show going on downtown a few kilometers west of us.

The overpass bridge was packed with people, who had brought out lawn chairs and bowls of popcorn for the event. Cars parked along the bridge, taxis waited for fares, and lots of the local Gypsy families were out enjoying the evening - this part of Zugló is considered to be the residence area of choice for better off Roma in Budapest.There was also an air show over the Danube during the afternoon, but scandal erupted when it turned out the sponsors, the Austrian makers of the putrid Red Bull Energy Drink - a vile sugary brew that tastes like bubblegum with caffeine - had paid off the city council to cancel the usual flyover of the Hungarian Air Force. So in the morning I got to see a formation of frustrated fighter planes angrily zipping past my bedroom window.

We Own All the Salt Cod in Hungary. All of it.

Hungary doesn’t really have anything approaching a “summer cuisine.” In summer, Hungarians eat the same thing they do in winter – soups, stews, things sautéed in paprika – but usually just a bit less. Vegetables are an afterthought, and fish is mainly carp, usually boiled into fish soup. We do not like carp. Fumie comes from Tokyo, I come from New York, and both of us were brought up next to fresh fish from the sea. Carp are fresh fish from irrigation ditches. How do we survive? Salted cod. Baccalà, bacalhau, bacalao, morue. We hoard the stuff.

In our home we maintain what may be the the largest stock of salted cod in Hungary. It may be dangerous to say this openly - I can imagine hungry employees of the Portuguese embassy laying siege to my flat – but at any given time I probably have at least two kilos of non-perishable salted codfish in my fridge. Whenever we travel abroad I try and pick up a kilo or two, and my Mom helps by sending me some from the United States of New Jersey from time to time. I often wonder what the customs officials think when they find the bacalao packages – do they even recognize that this stuff is fish?Well, yes, it is fish, in fact, it isn’t even very strange fish, but the secret is in the salting and the soaking. Salted cod was developed during the middle ages in order to preserve fish to be packed inland from the sea. Since Catholics abstained from meat on Fridays and during Lent, salted cod became a valuable commodity, and evidence shows that Basque and English fishermen were catching cod off Newfoundland at least fifty years before Columbus sailed for the Indies. Not only were they catching cod, they were salt drying it, a process that can only be done on land. The cagey Basque and Bristol fishermen were not about to tell everybody where their fishy gold mine was, although Columbus himself spent several years sailing in the Northern Atlantic and probably knew of the Grand Banks fishery. It wasn’t dreams of gold and spices that drove the Europeans to sail west – it was dreams of cod, almost as good as gold.

Sadly, the amazing Atlantic cod fishery is over - the Grand Banks stocks collapsed in the 1990s, due to overfishing by factory ships using nets which destroyed the ocean bottom structure that provided the cod with breeding grounds. And it doen't look like the fish are ever coming back. Cod is no longer the cheap fish it was when I was growing up - it has become nasty expensive, in fact. What used to be a poor man's food is now one of the more pricey ingredients in traditional mediterranean cuisines. A good staring point for all things salted cod would be Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - a hard to put down mixture of history and recipes.

The secret to good salted codfish is in the soaking. An overnight soak in water leaches out most, but not all, of the salt. Many recipes require a day long soak, but the result is bland, so we like to keep a bit of the salty taste if I am making codfish fritters or a pasta sauce. In Portugal, most restaurants keep cod soaking in vats varying from six hour soaks to two day soaks, and the customer can request his preference.

The main characteristic of salted codfish is the texture – it is denser and meatier than fresh fish, and cod is a pretty delicate and soft white fish. In France the practice is to salt fresh cod - morue - in the market place to firm it up. We’ve done this in Hungary using Alaskan pollack fillets from the supermarket, covering them in a bed of coarse salt for a day, which essentially cooks and preserves the flesh. Then we soak them for a bit to desalinate the fillets, and poach them in hot water as we do for hard salted cod. But it is never as dense and chewy as good bacalao.

Of course, we don't eat bacalao that often, but we somehow do manage to eat intensely non-Hungarian amounts of ocean fish. Our local CBA supermarket in Zugló (the corner on Nagy Lajos and Erszébet Királyné, by the #3 tram) was recently bought by a Greek owner, who exhibits that exotic EU sense of cross border mercantilism that so is lacking in Hungarian markets (which usually stock only products Hungarians are used to eating. You like paprika? They stock it.) So far I have found real Italian salami (cheaper than hot dogs!) Italian cappelini pasta, and last week the holy grail of keeping The Tokyo Rose happy: fresh frozen sardines. I know that "fresh frozen" is an oxymoron, but these were from Croatia at FT469 a half kilo... and remarkably clear eyed and fresh smelling when thawed - and Fumie knows how to judge a sardine by smell the way a sommelier can sniff a fine wine. Fumie had been pining for what she calls "oily smelly stinky little fish" this summer, and so now our freezer is packed with these frozen sardines. She guts them, salts them, pops them on the electric grill on our terrace, driving all the neighborhood cats crazy and probably really confusing our neighbors who have never smelled oily fish being grilled. But they are Not Carp. They are wonderful. [photo by Fumie from her secret blog]

Cucumber Season in Zugló

The mid summer doldrums are called “cucumber season” in Hungary. Nothing much happens, everybody is on vacation, and all the newspapers can report is that the cucumbers are ripening. I'm going a bit stir crazy, and you are all invited along! We’ve been taking it easy this summer – which is to say we can’t afford any big adventures abroad this summer and are most likely to be found biking around Zugló, our leafy district of outer Pest. One of the things I most appreciate about life in Hungary are open markets. Especially Bosnyak tér out here in district XIV. When I am back in the US I enjoy the convenience of the American supermarket and the range of foods you can get, but you really cannot beat the European farmer’s market for honest, fresh, seasonal food.In the US most people under the age of thirty have never bought meat from a real butcher. You know, the fat moustached guy who hands you a slice of salami over the counter to taste before hacking away at a hunk of cow and wrapping it up in brown paper for you? In the states, your meat is guaranteed to come wrapped in plastic with lots of stamps attesting to the free range, additive free, bio-friendly origin of the thing wrapped in plastic before you. In Hungary, as in most of Europe, we get our meat from a butcher, preferably in a marketplace where all you could ever want from a bird is available.

Chicken heads, for example. Or chicken feet. You ever wonder why your chicken soup doesn’t have that rich yellow broth action going on? Boiled chicken heads and feet. About as expensive as buying soup cubes and much, much better. Not only chicken heads, but let’s push this "Nightmare on Poultry Street" theme one step further.

How about turkey balls? Yes the word here is Hungarian for testicles. They live up inside the bird but they are definitely there, and people definitely eat them. Turkey balls are unfamiliar to me - we usually get fried rooster balls, and not only Magyars love them. I don’t actually go out of my way to search for them but I have had them fried… or as we mentioned in the spring there is rooster ball stew.I think the unspoken subtext of this ingredient is that it is "good for men" uhhuh uhhuh... Eat a plate of avian balls and inherit the strength of a turkey? Asian folk cuisine has lots of similar concoctions "for men" but I think cobra blood or endangered species bear balls make a lot better marketing/branding strategy than one that says "Men: You, too, can attain the strength of a chicken!" Of course, when it comes to actually playing with your food, nobody can beat the butchers of Italy in the creative department:Buying potatoes should be easy, but in Hungary we basically have one variety: the red, yellow fleshed, soft rose colored spud. If you want any other variety you have to search hard in the market. This is our onion and potato seller, who is a Hungarian Bulgarian who served in the Bulgarian army. He has... different types of potato!Large numbers of Bulgarians emigrated to Hungary during the revolts against the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. They introduced specialized vegetable farming methods using raised beds, hot frame houses and irrigation methods unkown in Hungary at the time, methods which are still practied and are known as "Bulgarian" gardening. Bulgarians also introduced eggplants, squash, kohlrabi, and most of our Hungarian pepper varieties. They form a significant ethnic minority and maintain their language and position in the veggie retail trade. This guy basically fell for Fumie last year when she spoke Bulgarian to him while buying onions, and now he likes to tutor us - in Bulgarian - in the details of the artillary ordinance used by Bulgarian military units in WWII. You don't get chat like that at the Whole Foods on Houston St. in the Village.Biking homeward, we head down the former Lumumba Street. Back in 1990 most Hungarian cities went on a campaign of changing the old communist street names - gone forever were the Lenin Streets and Marx squares. Some of the more obscure lefty heroes, however, included the "Rosenberg Couple Street" right around the corner from the US Embassy, and, out here in Zugló, Lumumba Street, named for the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, whose murder at the height of the Cold War in 1961 pretty well guaranteed him a place in the commie street naming pantheon. Today, on Rona utca you can still see a few buildings that have never gotten around to renaming the block address markers. I kind of liked the idea of living near Lumumba Street.

Just down Rona utca (the former Lumumba St.) I saw this shop advertising "Pi Viz." I'm not sure what that is, or why one would open a shop to sell it, but in my warped bilingual mind it says "Pee Water." Something to do with "Life Energy / Life Water = Pi Water." Obviously somebody is making a killing selling water. I just thought I should mention that.For another offering of life energy water, just around the corner is the "Base" drink shop. This is a classic example of a Budapest Booze dispensary - no frills, nothing fancy, not much in the way of fine bordeaux or Danish Aquavit or single maltwhiskies from the Gaelic speaking outer Hebrides. This is basically a dirt cheap cash and carry for drunks who don't want to pay the minimal markup to drink in a bar - just booze away in the parking lot next to the market. The sign is a good example of clear, direct advertising. Ah, Zugló, beautiful Zugló... always a pride of place and a home for everyone!