A week in the tropics

After a rather hot, but pleasant last weekend which we spent mostly outdoors, this week we spent mostly indoors hiding from the tropical weather outside. For the first time ever in my experience we lived through several days of tropical rain, cloudbursts, in some places (thankfully not here) hailstorms and no corresponding drop in temperature. I thought I was back in Toronto, which tends to be hot and very humid in July/August, unlike over here where the heat is mostly desert dry. This high humidity lasted until Thursday/Friday, by which time it started getting comfortably cool by the late afternoon. Unfortunately that only lasted a couple of days and with the heat returning for the weekend, it is back to hiding indoors.

This picture shows the underpass stairs having upgraded themselves to ornamental waterfall by the Western Railway Station in Budapest. On one day there was a month's rainfall in an hour in the city. Thank goodness that in Bér we survived the downpours OK, although we did discover a nest of nasty large black biting ants, which I am sure got into the cracks on the back wall by the terrace to get away from the rain.  Roy has been waging an all out war against them ever since, especially that one of them managed to nip me on a finger, which was extremely painful!!

Of course, another way of making use of having to hide indoors is inventing things to do that are useful.  Roy started frantically cooking and preserving.  As the pepper and tomato harvest is still in full swing, he made some tomato juice (bottles at the end), lecsó (like ratatouille without the aubergines and courgettes) and in the middle you can see his piece de resistence, a massive bottle of pickled onions. The sack in the front is full of last year's walnut crop, which is just as well, as there will be very little this year.

Another harvest which is pitiful this year is that of the plums.  This solitary, lonely barrel contains all of them, which is a 75% shortfall for a proper amount of pálinka, as the still has vats that take four of these barrels for every distillation.  I am working on trying to get some plums from elsewhere, as everybody in this village is in the same boat. Failing that, perhaps we could team up with others whose harvest was as bad as ours and share the end product. As a last resort, we could put it away until next year, although I am not sure if it keeps that long, but we might not have any other option! :-(

The other activities we were forced to indulge in last week included a slightly larger amount of TV watching than normal.  Roy is still devoting a couple of hours daily to his beloved MASH. Good scripts, acting and directing will never date. We both wee ourselves laughing at times, it is still so, so funny.

After waiting for it for months, finally Who Do You Think You  Are? is back. It is in its 12th season and once this series is over it will be exactly 100 episodes since 2004.  They kicked off with a memorial program in which they had quite a few of the subjects of the last 10 years on, talking about how the program changed their lives etc.  It was fun.  The first actual program was about Julie Walters with lots of downtrodden and starving Irish ancestors, which always make a good program.  Julie was suitably horrified at the cruelty and greed of the English landowners and  was equally proud of her ancestor who was one of the founding members of the Irish National Land League. Roll on the next 7 weeks!

I have been also watching The Honourable Woman ever since we came back from Canada.  Brilliant mini series and very topical.  In fact, I agree with some of the criticism that it is a bit in bad taste to have it on while hundreds die in Gaza, but I am still looking forward to every episode.  Maggie Gyllenhaal is as good as her brother. Both very talented and good looking. Brokeback Mountain is still one of the best films I have ever seen and the last two episodes of The Honourable Woman are also awaited with much anticipation.

And finally, has anyone reading this seen Inspector Montalbano on BBC4? I found it by accident and am enjoying it a lot. On one level, the Sicilian countryside and seaside shots are absolutely glorious and the inspector has a rugged charm and sex appeal, I suppose.  Even the stories are OK, especially the one I saw today with that glorious large black dog in it. What is hilarious though, is the stereotypes from about 50 years ago, that seem to inhabit the police station: the overexcited idiot policeman, the lazy detective, the detective with the problematic lovelife etc., etc.  Even the inspector's girlfriend is the little, but very pretty, woman who gets ignored when detective work calls. Well, one can laugh at all this silly stuff and anyway, as soon as the weather gets a bit cooler I'll be outside and nowhere near the TV.

And finally finally, some pretty flowers from the garden: mostly roses, but also the hollyhock looking ones by the Kottage, which I am not sure what they actually are. They look more like camelias, but they grow like hollyhocks.  Still they are pretty and that is the main thing.