After fueling up on sour
cream and cheese covered langòs and
a spicy Hungarian sausage smothered in pickled vegetables from the Great Market
Hall, we spent the rest of the afternoon walking. Across the Liberty Bridge to
the Pest side of the Danube, through the majestic Gellèrt bathouse, up the
river, across the traffic-free-for-the-day Chain Bridge, through a festival in
the square touting alternative energy and transportation plus the engineering
feet of a bridge made of spaghetti, stopping for a pastrami sandwich and some
lemonade at a repurposed VW bus (walking is hungry-making), we continued up the
also closed-to-traffic Andràssy utca. And we encountered the strangest street
fair I’d ever seen.
There was performance art.
There was a sandbox with toys for kids to play in. there were live models
changing poses every thirty seconds while people with sketchpads and charcoal immortalized them. There was a guy on stilts playing drum major to the kilt-clad
Budapest Highland Pipe and Drum band. Re-purposed three-wheeled Apes fitted
with espresso machines and chimney cake grills, all of which were good but my
most favorite thing was Titus.
Titus was running a food and
drink stand, a rustic wooden shack with chalkboards and utensils hanging from
it, selling pàlinkas and goulash
and lecsò and stuff. There were
café tables and chairs off to one side and small, tall tables out front. We
stopped to try some pàlinka.
The biggest problem in
Hungary when trying new things is that if you don’t all ready know what you
want and how to say it, you will never deduce from its Hungarian name what it
is. Pàlinka is kind of like a
brandy, I guess, made from fermented fruit or herbs and water. They come in all
kinds of fruit flavors, like apple, pear and plum. But Hungarian is not a Latin
or Germanic-based language so “mele” or “apfel” wouldn’t help when searching
out the apple one which was irrelevant since I wanted to try plum. Turns out,
the Hungarian word for plum is szilva. Don’t ask me how to
pronounce it. Anyway, because of this, ordering pàlinka in the little basement
bar full of locals next to our hotel was behind my capability. At a street fair
though, I could give it a whirl.
Titus said they had plum,
apple, pear, apricot and some of those also with honey but to truly be pàlinka,
it is made with fruit only. I wanted the plum and V. asked to try one of the
honey ones. Titus made a face. “Those are for pussies.”
V. was undeterred. Titus
looked a little suprised.
We took our small plastic
cups over and stood at one of the high tables, sipping the clear, fiery liquid
and declaring it a far superior drink to Italian grappa, though the honey one did taste a bit more like cough syrup and, really, wasn't that good.
Titus came over to smoke a
cigarette and we chatted, commending him on his English as he explained about pàlinka and brought us other flavors to try.
He explained that there was
true pàlinka, made from only
fruit or herbs and water, as well as the more profitable but less authentic
bastardization szeszes
ital or “spirit
drinks” (pàlinka to which honey has been added).
We asked him about one of the dishes
listed on the chalkboard as “tripes with knuckles and nails”.
“You
know, the stomachs of beef with the feet and fingers of the pig. We only have
one word in Hungarian for both the cow animal and the cow meat. We do have many ways to describe other things that I cannot even translate,” he
explained.
“Interesting.
Like, in Italian, they have fingers on their hands and fingers of the feet—dita
del piede—but
in English, we’ve got a separate word for each--fingers and toes. Though with pigs, the toes are
the hoof. Of course, if we’re eating them, we just call them feet.” Clearly,
I’d reached my Hungarian brandy limit. “You could change your sign to read
‘tripe with pig feet’.”
“Oh,
this is good. You help me with my English.”
He had
to get back to work but suggested we come back later in the evening, they’d
be there ‘til ten or eleven o’clock. Sadly, we didn’t.
