7/15, Kishegyes

Seems the folks in the house across the street aren’t talking to us. They evidently like to use the front yard as a parking lot during harvest season and we came back at the wrong time for them to use it. Just when you thought you were on vacation from High School...

There is a tragedy in town today. A three year old boy has been killed by hitting his head on a trailer. As mentioned before, the hay trailers here ‘bouts are stacked very high. A tractor was pulling two of these over full trailers and the boy tried to jump on the back one - the one farthest from the driver. He evidently hit his head falling off the back. His six year old brother was watching him and evidently egged him on to do it, and the driver couldn’t see them because they were on the other side of all the hay.


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On the other end of the spectrum, Zia and I were on our daily walk to the gelato stand and ran into a wedding procession. Hungarian weddings are quite the event. The entire wedding party, the band, and the grooms guests all meet at the grooms house. From there, to the accompaniment of the band, they process to the bride’s house to collect her and her guests. They then process to the court house for the civil ceremony. Along the way the men in the wedding party will pass out wine to spectators to toast the happy couple, and the women in the wedding party will pass out "Fonott Kalacs (Fo-NOTT Ka-lash)," a sweet bread shaped like a pretzel. After the civil ceremony the party, again accompanied by the band, process to the church for the religious part of the ceremony. They then process to the reception, where things look a lot like our wedding reception did.


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You have to admire Jaden. If there is another kid around, she wants to play, and finds a way to make it happen, with verve!


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Tonight’s band at Dombosfest is a quintet playing a cross between traditional Hungarian folk music and Gypsy Jazz ala the Paris Quintet with Grapelli and Reinhardt, with a major Balkan overtone. The whole thing comes off sounding kind of like the Mahavishnu Orchestra. This probably the most frustrating thing I have heard in a while. The guitarist and violinist are monsters, but everything sounds the same. The keys are almost always G and D without any key changes. The tunes mostly always accelerando at the end. The whole band play pretty much all the time. After three or four tunes you find your self thinking, "yeah, I’ve heard that."

Jaden, on the other hand, was completely digging it. She was having a grand old time doing the hippie dance in front of the crowd. Her great-grandmother promised her chocolate for dancing so enthusiastically, but had to renege and give clothing instead after she got sick. The local music teacher, who was sitting in front of us, asked which family she was with. When we explained that she was our granddaughter, and that her father was in the military, he was completely disbelieving. Seems Americans in general, and daughters of military personnel in particular, can’t dance that enthusiastically. You go, Jaden! Needless to say, Peter is taking full credit.

On TV this evening after the concert is a Folk Dance and Music Contest. The group on while we watch has dresses that were worn in this festival by the great-grandparents of the female participants. The dresses are highly ornate, and Zia says by custom they must wear 16 petticoats underneath. Sounds pretty hot to me. Again I am amazed by a folk culture that has been around for centuries longer than we have had a country.

Dave