Hutsul Lunch: A Pál utcai fiúk

The Técsői Banda, a Hutsul folk band from the western Ukraine village of Tjaciv (Técső in Hungarian) is in Budapest again this week, playing concerts and doing the rounds of springtime folk festivals and new Budapest "ruin" bars. I'm working on a project that should see the Técsői Banda playing in New York City in September in cooperation with the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York, so I had to drop in and explain some of the visa procedures the guys will have to deal with. But first things first: lunch. When musicians are on the road, meal times are one of the few periods of normality that band members can expect. Among east European musicians, eating in restaurants is something you do when the owner throws in a meal as part of the gig, otherwise you feed yourself.

So, at two in the afternoon, Joska, Yura and Ivan lay out the Hutsul lunch spread they have brought with them from home: dark bread, Ukrainian salami, cucumbers, sheep cheese, red pepper ajvar, and home made orda - an unsweetened white sheep cheese eaten in Transylvania that I have never seen elsewhere. And of course a bottle of Ukrainian vodka. What's a light lunch without a few shots of vodka to wash it down? The French may have their wine... the Germans beer... the Hutsuls drink vodka. While staying in Budapest the Técsői Banda stays at the home of our friend Imre Keszthelyi and his family.

Imre has done the folk music show on Tilos Radio for years, and been a part of the dance house scene since its early years in the 1970s. Imre lives in the house on Pal utca in Pest that was made famous by the Ferenc Molnár novel A Pál utcai fiúk (The Boys of Pal Street.)Published in 1906, the story tells of competing groups of children fighting increasingly serious turf wars amidst the court yards and connected warrens of the building. There is even a plaque on the building and groups of tourists show up regularly with no idea that this is not some kind of memorial to Ernő Nemecsek but still a functioning place to live. A lot of the tourists are Danes and Italians: the Boys of Pal Street was adapted to film four times - as "No Greater glory" by American director Frank Borzage in 1934, as I ragazzi della via Paal, by Italian film director Alberto Mondadori and Mario Monicelli in 1935, and by Hungarian director Geza Fábri in 1969.A few years ago the entrance was switched to the Pal street side, and the courtyards are no longer connected, but the place is much the same as it was when Molnar used it as a backdrop. While it looks like a tenement from the outside, the apartments inside are huge. Imre has enough space to be able to offer the guys from the band a room when they are on tour - a rare luxury in crowded Budapest.

Tim Meyen was in Budapest on his way to Romania. Tim is an Australian who studied the traditonal music of Hungary and Romania and specializes in cimbalom. Tim specializes in finding players of the small, portable folk cimbalom that he can find, so he had some time to check out the Hutsul tsymbay and its tuning, which is markedly different than the straight Hungarian tuning.Still... you have to be careful with playing in an apartment. Since it was in the middle of the day the guys got out their instruments, but drummer Yura Chernavets chose a less booming perussion option: a chest of drawers.

Zuglo Local Life: Pantlika and Dürer-Kert

We've had a week of nasty weather in Hungary - cold, rain, tree-toppling winds, with catastrophic flooding in Northern Hungary. The weather that seems more like early March than the wonderful spring days that we have been enjoying this year. We've hardly left the house this week, so I'm happy that at least one good indoor option exists to hear good music near my Zuglo neighborhood: the Wednsday night Dance House at the Dürer-Kert. The Dürer-Kert is the coffeehouse of the ELTE University campus on Ajtosi Dürer Sor, and a couple of years ago it underwent an expansion into one of the city's better summer garden bars, but since it focused on heavy metal music and DJ sets (yawn) I never put it on my list of places to visit during our weekend nocturnal outdoor bar pub crawls.

This year I've grown fond of the Pantlika, a retro bar evocative of the 1970s in the back end of the city park. Ft 400 fröccs and Ft700 bean gulyás, and they often have wonderfully cheesy Gypsy bands playing relentlessly unfashionable violin music at night. What's not to love.

Unlike a lot of my fellow dance house enthusiasts, I actually like cheesy Gyspy orchestra nóta played with cimbalom and cheez-o-matic electric keyboards. It is pretty difficult to find anyplace in Budapest anymore where you can hear the stereotypically Hungarian Gypsy violin bands except for tourist bus events at catered goulash parties. Hungarians simply do not patronize this music anymore, to the extent that it has become something rare and "retro." The musicians are still here - its just the gigs that have dissappeared. Not so for the folk string bands, which can be found almost any night of the week playing for less formal dance houses. Soós András' band was playing at Dürer-Kert the night we went, but the last couple of weeks there were no Transylvanian bands to be heard... but that may just be temporary.The Dürer-Kert dance house is organized by the folks that used to do the big Almassy ter dances - two bands, one playing for Transylvanian style dancing in one room, another playing for Csángó dancing in the other, and no entrance fee ensures a enthusiastic - and young - crowd. Not only local students and folk dancers, either. Last time we were there we sat and had drinks with a construction crew of Csángó guys from Moldavia who come to work as laborers in Budapest because it pays better than travelling for work to Bucharest. These guys could dance up a storm.The music at Csángó dances is less self-consciously "authentic" than at most Transylvanian dances. While the instrumentation is "archaic" - flutes, drum, and koboz with fiddle - the bands allow themselves to play more modern repetoires since Moldavian music is such a mix of Romanian, Hungarian, and pan-balkan dance styles and repetoires. The music may even switch into a free form "mahalleasca" dance, the post-1990 Romanian version of a čoček or Balkan belly dance.

If you need to know how to find a dance house, check the listings - in Hungarian - by clicking on the "FOLKNAPTÁR" tab on the on the Folk Radio website. The FolkRadio site is worth a listen in any case - 24 hour internet streaming Hungarian and Carpathian basin folk music. And if anyone is visiting during the summer months, the regular Dance Houses often close down during the summer as bands go on tour and the universities that provide the venues close down. The ones to look out for in the summer are the Dürer-Kert in Pest and the Kobuci kert, located in Obuda.

Jilk Paste. I Love Jilk Paste.

Hungary’s election is over, somebody (Orban, and thus, by extension, FIDESZ) won, and yet again, regardless of whom you vote for, the government got in. On a more positive note, spring has arrived. Living in Budapest’s fourteenth district, Zuglo, we really get a full blast of spring when it comes. Unlike downtown Budapest, we have trees galore out here, and where most of Budapest has a dive bar for approximately every ten residents, Zuglo is more family oriented. We have pastry cafes and ice cream shops. Which is great until it is not great. As in my belly. Alas, I am on a diet. The summer’s plans include hauling my massive bulk up several Balkan mountain tops and around one former Ottoman city located on seven rather steep hills, and there is just too much of me to traipse around. So… no bread, poatoes, pasta, or pretty much any carbs beyond a daily bit of fruit for me. But is spring, so the markets are perking up and we can get salads and vegetables, and chicken… but as always, making a smaller Me is monotonous eating and a boring daily round of chicken and salad, salad and chicken… until recently: we discovered the magic that is Jilk paste! Around the corner from us on Amerikai utca is our own local mini-ghetto. We have the Lauder Jewish school two blocks away, as well as the Jewish Old Age Hospital around the corner. And across the street from that is the Nasi Cuki Café, specializing in diabetic pastries.

In Hungary it is customary to bring pastry when visiting somebody in the hospital… and if it is an old age hospital that means a lot of diabetic cakes. These things have less calories and carbs than a Wasa whole grain cracker. And when I am losing weight I tend to stay away from anything labeled “diet” I’m not diabetic… so this doesn’t count. The strange thing is these actually taste good!

Somloi Galuska is a classic Magyar dessert that consists of a bit of cake smothered in chocolate sauce and whipped cream. I don’t usually eat sweets but given the monotony of sardines and salad every day, I have started treating myself to 100 calories and 9 grams of carbohydrate from one of these babies every day or two. The cakes don’t seem to taste of the weird chemical sweeteners either. I don’t really care: this is Better Living through Chemistry! I took a peek at the ingredients on my galuska expecting to see a list of unpronounceable advanced polymers, but all I found was fructose and… Alpha Gel and Jilk paste.I don’t know what they are, and honesty, I plumb do not care. Apparently they are some kind of super emulsifiers that make small amounts of soy flour turn into excellent Hungarian pastries. I want more Alpha Gel and Jilk paste in my life.

Bokolyi: Traditional Gypsy bread on Trash Day in Budapest.

The surest sign that spring has arrive in Budapest is when the fresh piles of garbage appear on the streets: trash day! Each district in Budapest has a schedule for setting trash out for pickup. It used to be posted for all to see but the the Budapest city fathers, mothers, inlaws, and cousins, decided a few years ago to post a notice in the hallway of your flat a week before the day when the trucks. Why? To prevent trash picking. In particular, organized trash picking. So what is wrong with that? Isn’t trash picking simply a populist form of recycling? Well… this being Hungary, trash picking as a profession tends to be in the hands of Roma, or as we know them on trash day, Gypsies. And this weekend was trash day in the 7th District... an affluent area of Pest with a large Roma population and a virtual Treaure Island for trash picking!

Now, I personally have no big problem with Gypsies picking my trash. I have actually set out old computers with handwritten menus about what caused me to toss them and how much they can handle. I have met Gypsies in torn and sweaty shirts who knew exactly what kind of hard drive was recyclable from which motherboard. But the city council doesn’t like the mess of having Gypsies on the streets picking through the trash, so they prefer not to tell us when trash day is coming until the last minute. Which means we slowly pile up our crap on the porch and hope for the best. In some years, I have been out of the country on trash day. Which means I have to live with a pile of trash for another year, or secretly sneak it into another district, not an easy task when you get around by bicycle.Personally, I can’t really understand the logic of this. Sure, the Gypsies picking through the trash and ripping out the backs of refrigerators on the street are a mess… but it is trash day, fer crying out loud! It is a Day of Mess. Gypsy families from all over Hungary wait for the day – and somehow they know when the secret trash days of each district will fall. Obviously somebody inside the city councils is letting the cat out of the bag.And the city councils don’t like this? An underemployed minority accused of not wanting to work… voluntarily doing backbreaking, environmentally friendly, fill-a-capitalist-market-niche work… and they don’t like seeing them work? Renting trucks on their own coin, waking up before dawn and working their Roma asses off in callous raising hard labor all day for the eventual small rewards of recycling the deritritus of our urban lives? They have a problem with this?Of course, this is Hungary. People here have certain, err… territorial sense about them. They like to set personal borders and boundaries… My space! My territory! My turf! My stuff! And so you find people who have just come upon a pile of trash a few minutes before you suddenly claiming eminent domain on it. Families set out chairs and have Grandma defending the trash pile from all who would posses these priceless treasures. And then, suddenly, you come upon something amazing... something you really must (?) have... finally - and literally - the trash heap of history!We came on this pile that included the collected works of Lenin and Stalin translated into Hungarian. I took some photos, but the family wanted me to buy the books. I’m not shopping, I said, so they barked “500 Forints for a photo!” Of somebody’s trashed Stalin books? How long have you owned them?Trash picking is hungry work for country people making pennies who don't want to spend their money in urban restaurants. And so while biking around the 7th district we came on some out of town Roma having lunch. They were eating a kind of flat bread, the traditional Gypsy bread once common to most east European Roma and virtually unknown to non-Gypsy Hungarians called bokolyi.Basically, it is biscuit dough baked in a round, just as it used to be made in the ashes of a campfire. Essentially, this is bannock, the most primitive campfire bread you can make, the beloved lunch of Cree Indian trappers in Manitoba and Budapest trash pickers alike. The Gypsy trash pickers baked it at home to bring with them to either save money on food (bread? A buck a loaf?) or because it is considered to be more filling, more satisfying, and generally, more Romanes…more Gypsy. As the song (Gelem, Gelem) says Maladyilem bakhtale Romensa... I even met happy Gypsies. [thanks to Fumie for the Bokolyi pix!]

Election Day in Hungary: Mudslinging with Mud. Zsidesz. Fun!

It is election day in Hungary. Readers of this blog may notice that I rarely mention Hungarian politics here. There is a good reason. As anybody who knows me can tell you, I love to talk about politics, especially late friday nights in a bar with my journalist buddies. I read about three Hungarian newspapers a day and as many websites. I write extensively about Hungary. But I do not publish in English on the topic of Hungarian politics. It is a simple matter of self-censorship. Hungarians have memories like elephants, and if you publish a word against a political party it will be remembered and resented for decades. And I have been here for over two decades, so I know better than to stand in the line of fire. Politics in Hungary is a brutish and nasty business, one best expressed in short bursts of outrage. And since there are relatively few English language blogs coming out of Hungary, I long ago made a conscious decision not to comment on politics here. But to give you all a taste of the low level of discourse that has characterized this recent campaign here are a few photos of campaign posters taken around my modest outlying neighbrohood of Zuglo in Budapest's 14th district. The photo above is a FIDESZ poster featuring the face of FIDESZ, Viktor Orban, defaced with a star of David and the name of the Israeli party Likud. This is obviously the work of some right wing Jobbik party activists - it is pretty hard to imagine FIDESZ, which has a long history of antisemitic rhetoric itself, being controlled by Israel.

This poster's slogan "Only FIDESZ!" has been changed to "Zsidesz" - sort of "JewDESZ" from the Hungarian word for Jew: zsidó. Again, probably the work of Jobbik supporters. Jobbik came to prominence on the basis of antisemitic and anti-Gypsy rhetoric, and gained wide support for their formation of a paramilitary wing, the Hungarian Guard (Magyar Garda) which has been outlawed, but immediately returned unpunished. I would like to say, that in showing these photographs, this does not mean that the majority of Hungarians express these kinds of views. The Jobbik Party are expert in using an advanced understanding of negative communication strategy to gather support among a percentage of Hungarians who are both frustrated and ignorant enough find their extremism attractive. March around in uniforms closely reminiscent of the Nazi era Arrow Cross, use a flag closely copying that of the Arrow Cross, and then tell your supporters that the Jews Who Control Everything have commanded their press minions to label all Hungarians 'Nazis.' Classy. Real classy. But, for about 20% of the populace, very effective.

This poster is one supporting the MDF, the center-right Hungarian Demorcratic Forum, which was the ruling party in the first post-communist Hungarian governemnt coalition after 1990. The graffitti labels the young man as "faggot" the young woman as "lesbian" and MDF candidate Lajos Bokros as "Jew." And for good measure, it adds "+SZDSZ boo!" The SZDSZ (Free Democrats) was the liberal party that had its roots in the intellectuals who published anti-communist samizdat literature in the 1970s and 80s. They are not really even running candidates in most districts, and we only saw one poster for SZDSZ in all of Budapest:Now, is that the saddest looking political poster you have ever seen or what? The SZDSZ may be the saddest of all the poltical parties in Hungary. Their party split over the rigged election of their own party leaders, and they sat quiet while their coalition partners, the Socialist MSZP, looked the other way while tolerating internal corruption on a scale that would make even a New Jersey congressman blush to see. Then, basically, they gave up. They stopped getting out of bed and walked around their apartments in pajamas all day and never went out and started drinking margaritas at noon. Sad. Especially for a liberal political party. So sad.

Here's another MDF poster defaced by literal mudslinging. In Hungary we sling mud the Old School way. With mud. Of course, there is the spanking new party called "Lehet Mas a Politika" ("Politics can be different") and of course, having come out of nowhere with no background, nobody is really sure what they support. This poster says "cleaner city air" but could just as well be advertising a return to WWI gas warfare. Politics can be clueless as well.Of course, tarring your opponent with the label "I am an Alien Vampire Intellectual" really addresses the pressing issues in a time of economic crisis.

Hungarians do not like Hungarian intellectuals, and having met far too many of this species, I can almost understand why. Intellectuals always rank just behind skinheads and Gypsies in opinion polls of groups most despised by Hungarians. The Socialist party (MSZP), which has governed through the last two election cycles, is expected to come in at a weak second or third place. Their weakness was that they could never curb the inclination to take kickbacks and swim in a sea of corruption. This only fed the oppposition rhetoric of their equally greedy political opponents FIDESZ at time when the country desparately required good leadership. Of which there is not much to go around. The graffitti says "THIEVES!" and is signed "kuruc." Kuruc is the web portal for all things Hungarian neo-nazi, and is closely allied to the Jobbik Party - I won't link to it but you can find it on the web. If you read Hungarian be warned that it is really rather repulsive in a way you don't even see on many English language neo-nazi sites. But, the opponents of Jobbik are able to give as good as they get:

The Jobbik poster slogan is "Radical Change" which has been covered with the slogans "Rotten Nazis!" and "The Gypsies should work! The Arrow Cross should hang!" Note the Hitler moustache, a perennial favorite in any Hungarian election regardless of political viewpoint. No mincing words here! Another Jobbik poster in Zuglo also got the direct treatment:

This was across the street from the defaced "Faggot/Jews/Lesbian" MDF poster, meaning the defacer of both was most likely a FIDESZ supporter. Jobbik has been using the old slogan"In the Name of the People" which was actually one of the old Stalinist era Communist slogans. Go figure. You live, you learn. Here the "people" has been replaced with "your mother." Again, the ever useful Hitler moustache makes an appearance but now it is used to deface the poster of a party that Hitler would most likely approve of. It looks especially fetching on Dr. Krisztina Morvai, a very outspoken Jobbik leader (although she is not even a member of the party) and EU Parliament representative. No, I do not like her. At all. And no I will not use this space to explain why, although I heartily urge those who enjoy carnival freak shows to google her name and learn more about her - youtube has some particularly good moments from her in English. The end.Here are Jobbik activists manning a soup line outside of the Bosnyak market in Zuglo on Saturday. As I was taking pictures a van pulled alongside of me, and one activist cheerfully offered me a handful of posters to me to put up. I gently declined and he sped off with a chirpy "Szebb jövő" - the greeting of the party which translates as "Better Future" but can also be heard as something less positive, depending on one's view. I always wondered what it must have felt like to be a Jew in East Europe in 1939. Now I know.

Now, this is Hungary which is a place where irony and sarcasm are taken to new heights. "So, OK, where the hell is the fucking advert" and another placard that has been seen all around Budapest that really sums up the way a lot of Hungarians feel about the choices in this particular election campaign:

"Chose the Animals! Good programs! Friendly representatives!" An ad asking for tax donations to support the zoo. Think that this poster might escape the scrutinuy of the spray paint and magic marker brigades? This is it the next day:With the comment: "We're already full of those"

Táncháztalálkozó: The Hungarian National Folk Festival. My Insane Rant. About it.

Good festivals, like good food, have a sell by date. At some point you need to go out and get a fresh one because the one in your fridge has grown a bit moldy and starts to taste like everything else in your fridge. And unfortunately, such is the case with Hungary's national folk festival, the Országos Táncháztalálkozó és Kirakodóvásár, which is possibly the longest and most unpronouncable name ever given to a folk festival anywhere. It has been going strong since 1982, when it was first held at the Budapest sport Arena at Nepstadion metro ("People's Stadium" renamed two years ago (!) as simply "Stadium") as part of the Budapest Spring Festival.

It used to be one of the most exciting traditional music festivals in the world. During the early 1990s, when eastern European borders first opened and amature folk collectors began to scour the neighboring regions for unknown village bands the Táncháztalálkozó was a place to make real discoveries and real friends. Today it is, basically a commercial market for the folk dance business, a staged show for the TV sponsors, and a showcase for provincial school folk dance troupes with a jam session in a bus station parking lot.

It is a folk festival in an indoor sports arena, fer chrissakes, not the most amenable venue in the world for traditional culture. Now, a lot of my friends work very hard organizing this festival and they do a great job with the limited resources they have (meaning the stadium provided by the city of Budapest for the event) but the truth is this is not really my cup of tea anymore when it comes to hearing live traditional music. Rather than just rag on the whole thing, I'll just rag on a few small points. The best features of the original festival were the jam sessions - especialy the opportunity to play with traditional bands from Transylvania - and the crafts sellers who came from villages to sell authentic folk costumes, pottery, and all manner of folky weavings and carvings - this is where you go to buy a year's worth of birthday gifts.

The main area of the festival has become commercialized into a souvenir market, while the traditional crafts are now packed into a backstage room, instead of spread out around the venue as they used to be. At the old festival the atmosphere was like a village fair, and you could make friends while browsing somebody's old laundry while sampling their home brewed palinka. Not any more. Now it is like post-holiday shopping in a crowded subway car.The peasants from the village of Szek are there in force - the women dressed as they always are in red skirts and kerchiefs - although it is always good to see some of the Transylvanian Gabor Gypsies have caught onto the advantage of selling folk costmes in Budapest.

The main arena is dedicated to huge pageants of mass folkery... dance teaching on a basketball court can get little beyond teaching people to hop in a circle in rythym. The pageants feature strings of revival bands taking the stage to provide music one after the other with hardly any rest, with unfortunate sound system results blasting out into the arena. The stage pageants are not worth watching unless you are the parent of one of the unfortunate high schoolers bussed in to provide heritage footage for the ever present TV cameras funding the main events. The actual music occurs in four smaller rooms located at opposite ends of the horseshoe shaped arena - meaning you can only reach them by walking a few kilometers around the arena after climbing upstairs one or two levels. The dance room is about as unacceptable a space as possible for dancing: low ceilinged and carpeted.

Not exactly prime space for the events that the festival is dedicated to, namely folk dance. Of course, those who attend love it anyway. But why expect them to accept second best? How about the outdoor "folk tavern" area? In real life, this is the lower level of the Stadium bus station parking lot, a dimly lit, cement echo chamber. This, however, is where the best music can be found: I got there to see the Palatka Band from central Transylvania warming up at lunchtime.My biggest complaint is that over the years fewer and fewer traditional bands from the countryside appear at the festival, which is more and more focused on the revival folk music movement. It is not that there are no longer any village based trad bands to hire, there are. And for young Hungarian folk musicians who don't live in Budapest the chance to sit in and jam with musicians like the Palatka band is the dream of a lifetime, the reason many of them come to the festival. The bands and the fans deserve a better atmosphere than a bus parking lot.On the positive side, this year featured an exhibit of photographs of "Fathers and Sons" in Hungarian folk music. And there was our own Puma, whose son "Little Puma" has turned into one of the leading kontra fiddlers for the younger generation of dance bands...

And a proud Daniel Hamar from Muzsikas, posed in front of a line of his grown sons.

Signs of Spring: Chinese Food!

Obviously, March is not a month that inspires an awful lot of comment. Now, February... that's what I call a month! Stepping out of our building we saw the first of spring's kolbasz buds on a tree in the back yard. Really... I am not sure whether my neighbor was saving this for an outdoor snack or whether there is some folky reason to stick sausage on a tree branch, but it stayed there for several weeks. My birthday was adequately celebrated by a trip to the new Chinese restaurant in my neigborhood, Master Wang's. Chef Wang was the original chef at the Lanzhou Restaurant on Luther Utca, and this is his fourth Budapest locale. Why get excited about a Chinese restaurant? Well, Budapest has a lot of them, but by and large they are mediocre, overpriced, or unspeakably bad. That last category is aimed at the numerous "Chinese Buffet" joints polluting our gastronomic scene, offering up cheap plates of faux-sinitic stew on rice. Due to a quirk in Hungarian immigration law, any ethnic restaurant has the right to sponsor a residence permit for its cooking staff. So the Chinese folks cooking your fried rice and aromatic duck at the corner take out in Budapest are far more likely to have graduated from business or even medical school than culinary school. And they are far more likely to come from Northern China than from better known culinary regions like Szechuan or Canton.There are some Chinese banquet restaurants dotting the back neighborhoods of the city, places where the local Chinese go to celebrate a business deal or a family holiday with an off the menu hot-pot party or dim sum blast, but these are constantly changing and none has ever stayed in one locality for very long. Chef Wang Qiang comes from Lanzhou, a region west of Beijing with a significant Hui muslim population. The Lanzhou always had a special Chinese language only menu offering various mutton dishes for errant Hui in Budapest, but at the new Master Wang on they go all out with a great spicy cumin lamb dish.Since I had recently stretched my boundaries of icky food by eating sea cucumber and sea squirts at the a Korean Restaurant in the States, I also went for the Hundred Day Eggs. I had heard they were good, I had watched Chinese diners at the Lanzhou order them, but... black eggs? Eggs pickled in clay and salt for a few months until they turn black and gelatinous? And surprise! They were delicious. Run, don't walk, to your local Chinese banquet hall and order these today. Wang's were served with chopped tofu and peppers. Not smelly, not slimey, not really anything I had ever related to eggs before. I want more.

Fumie was laughing at me for never having tried them before, but then, I had never seen Fumie order them either. And yes, I have already looked at the wikipedia entry on Century Eggs with a perverse mind to making them myself at home, and just as quickly discarded the idea. Chef Wangs is only a few blocks away(off the 7 bus along Thőkőly út at Gizella út 46) so why bother? And they serve one of my favorite Chinese beer snack plates: spicy mixed offal salad. Who says a salad need to be wholesome to be good? Sliced tripe, toungue, heart, and kidney in a firey red pepper oil sauce topped with chopped garlic and chile pepper. It is almost enough to make me like beer.

What's that? Not liking beer? That's right. I am not a fan of beer. I drink it mainly because when I go out it is the cheapest way to keep a drink in my hand for the longest period of time - because I don't really like drinking it. Yes, it quenches thirst, but so does lemonade, and beer tastes like sucking on old sneakers. But last month we did a concert in Solingen, Germany, and yes, I drank beer. That is what you do in Germany. And in fact, Germany does a pretty good beer - so does the Czech republic, and when I am travelling I like to drink what the locals drink, and so it was beer. The gig itself was a lot of fun - German audiences really know how to show their appreciation, and since we were essentially a string band for this concert we got to perform a lot of Transylvanian style music as well. This being Solingen, we were surrounded by knife factories - in fact the concert hall housed a knife museum and shop featuring a selection of Solingen's best... including this interesting knife: it is the biggest one in the window, and it is labeled "kindermesser" - children's knife.What kind of kid needs a Bowie knife?