7/31 Hevis

For all of you gardeners out there. Vera just passed on through Zia the story of a friend of hers who uses birth control pills as plant food for vegetable plants with great results. Now if you can just get your doctor to write your plants a prescription...


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Today we took a bus trip to the spa town of Hevis (the "e" has a long, horizontal line over it, HAY - vees). We will not visit the spa today - too hot! No, today we sight see.

Hevis, according to Peter, renovated all of the spa buildings last winter. When the town council inspected the buildings following construction they found shoddy workmanship and sub-standard materials (hmm, on a government project? Can you do that?). They ordered the whole thing torn down and rebuild before payment.

The spa at Hevis, according to our guide book, is slightly radioactive (!!!). I am, however, at peace with visiting the baths later in the week. In the first place, people have been coming here for over 200 years to "take the cure." So there must be something to it. In the second place, I don’t plan on having any more children.

Our visit to Hevis was very rewarding. As previously mentioned, this is a spa town (read "tourist"). So our sight seeing expedition was mostly of shops. We were wandering down a side street, when Zia excitedly grabbed my hand and exclaiming, "we have to go in here," drug me into a shop. Great, more footwear, I was thinking. Instead I found a bookstore. With Hungarian books. In Hungarian. Zia wandered off to look, and amused myself by doing what I have been doing this whole trip when walking into a Hungarian bookstore with Hungarian books in Hungarian. I looked at pre-1910 maps of Hungary, always a good bet. Then I stared at CD’s for a while. Nice classical selection, at least I think it is. I can read the composer names, even though they are backward. But orchestras? Soloists? Your guess is as good as mine. And then! We discovered the music shelf. And on it there is a fabulous and very scholarly book of ethnomusicology on the folk music of this region, with examples...in Hungarian. And the examples, very well organized, are only excerpts. And so, once again we slink towards the door in abject failure. Zia and the clerk exchanged a few words on the way out. The clerk reaches into a stack of newly arrived books that have not been shelved, and thrusts into my hand three books of Hungarian Folk Music. The Holy Grail! The end of the quest! I was giddy, I laughed, I cried, I think I even danced a cszardas (you can’t do a jig in Hungary). Even as I write this, Peter and Vera are sorting through the tunes, helping me to find the ones they hear played a lot.


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Hevis also has a pretty great German Folk Clothing store. The work is all done locally and is pretty inexpensive. They get a lot of German tourists here. Zia snagged me a new shirt for this year.

Our trip home was on the milk run bus, so we got to see the "garden district" of Keszthely. Some very beautiful houses, and the big bus stops all have some fabulous statuary. Even with the heat, things are very green and pretty.

Dave