By
noeleenm on August 10th, 2007
Last night we had a midnight feast…
We didn’t set out to have it, unlike Kasia’s birthday which we celebrated a week after Jan’s, and unlike the dinner we’ve planned for Sunday week for no other reason than it seems like a good idea - and Gail and Jan have been nagging about it.
Since Kasia’s birthday, she’s been to Belgium to visit her parents (her Dad works there and her Mum had gone for a holiday), Jan went home with Leti to receive his Degree, and Gint went home for nine days to Latvia. It was this latter event which serependitiously triggered our midnight feast last night.
Gint arrived home late last Monday night and had to go straight to work on Tuesday morning. By last night he was so tired that he went straight to bed and only woke up at midnight to get something to eat. I had gone to my bedroom around 10pm to work on e-mails for the flood campaign, and came out to check that everything was locked up for the night when I discovered Gint in the kitchen. I had hardly seen him since his holiday so sat down to hear about his travels and, of course, he insisted that we try a bottle of something that was balsamic and herbal and 45% alcohol. I had enough sense – or cowardice – to say ‘no’ to this but instead started grazing my way through the chocolate sweets filled with liqueurs that he had also brought back from his trip.
Then Jan arrived in and joined Gint at the drink – just to be sociable – with the occasional foray into the chocolates – just to be sociable. He was swiftly followed by Kasia, finishing her late shift at the hotel, who spat out the balsamic drink saying it reminded her of medicine her mother used give them when they were small, but was easily tempted by the chocolates.
By then it seemed like an awful pity that Alba had come in and gone to bed before Gint’s emergence from his slumbers so Jan and Gint went up and woke her to come down and join us. She was on antibiotics, she announced, and couldn’t drink, but the chocolates…
At two o’clock in the morning we finally all went back to bed, having decided it was just a little too early for breakfast. I’ve still only the vaguest notion of what Gint did on his holidays, but the bit I heard was interesting enough to make me want to hear more. He visited someplace that was sacred to the Druids, if I got it correctly, and I think it was in the middle of a forest where the birds didn’t sing, and there was something in there about hollows lined with stones, and as soon as I get to sit down with him over a mug of tea I might get it right yet…
It will have to be soon. Kasia’s going home to Poland on Sunday for a few days – where she’ll again see her parents – and Alba is finally getting to go home to Spain for her holiday at the end of September. And on Sunday I spent the evening in my niece’s home in Ashford at a family get-together. They had just returned from a holiday in the Appennines in Italy, and we saw slides of the most fabulous scenery imaginable.
All their stories of their travels are being woven in my head against the background to a wonderful book I read last week, which was set in Nova Scotia and is called ‘The Birth House’, and through the descriptions of Jenni Diski travels in Antartica (and in her head), which I’m totally absorbed in at the moment. These two books – and G. K. Chesterton’s ‘Fr. Brown’ stories, which I was re-reading in the middle – formed another kind of midnight feast for me, this time for my imagination.
Sometimes, though, I think it needs to go on a diet just as much as my body. Does anyone know how you can tell when your imagination has become obese?.
Posted in Books/films/theatre, Czech Republic, House Family, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Spain, Wine and Some Spirits | Comments Off
By
noeleenm on July 17th, 2006
Last week I spent much of my normal ‘writing time’ thinking about trackbacks and pingbacks, and trying to understand how they work, with the very able and compassionate assistance of Mike Fox of Radicalbright.
Then on Saturday night, we had a ‘going away’ dinner for Gint, who left Ireland on Sunday to return to his beloved Latvia for two months. I listened to English, Polish, Russian, some Chinese and Korean, and a little a bit of Irish being spoken around the table. (’Slainte’ or ‘Good Health’ was the word most frequently used in Irish, I admit, but we also somehow got onto the subject of the ‘gluaistean’ or car. Maybe we were discussing ‘bling bling’…)
The following day I was strangely incoherent, which helped enormously when saying goodbye to Gint, but I’m not sure whether it was the cocktail of languages or the wild rose wine made by Wojtek’s Uncle Mateus that did it.
We were in ten at the table eventually, although we only started out with six – Gint, Dong-Kwang and his Chinese girl friend, Doee, Wojtek and his Korean friend who is also a girl, but seemingly not a girlfriend (an important distinction) – Iongchan – and myself. Now I must point out in the interests of linguistics that I had no pen and paper at that dinner, and, besides, it’s difficult to hold a pen and a wine glass at the same time.
So, even though I had met all of these people before, I hadn’t heard their names enough to remember them through Uncle Mateus’ wine. Dong Kwang’s girlfriend, for instance, had been known as Judy, up to then, but we converted her that night to our house tradition of giving her name in her own language, and letting the ‘foreigners’ pronounce it as best they can.
Iongchan I had met, briefly, on a few occasions, but hadn’t seen her name written down, and, besides they were discussing at the table the difference between her name in Korean and in Chinese…
So I don’t pretend to be reproducing either girl’s name accurately, or even remembering it very accurately, only as well as I can remember through Uncle Mateus’ wine. And I’m not sure he was really Uncle Mateus either. I must remember to ask Wojtek.
Anyway, the six of us were together at 7pm, unsure whether Grazine and Eddie were definitely coming to eat with us at 8pm, but knowing that – unless we ordered our take-away promptly – Gint, who wasn’t interested in take-away but had bought two enormous pizzas to share, would cremate the pizzas while waiting for us. We decided to go ahead and order, on the grounds that there would be enough to go round anyway.
We had agreed on take-away for most of us because our taste in food is so distinct right now. There’s an excellent take-away service in nearby Shankill village, called ‘Let’s Eat In’, which offers cuisine from Italy, India, China, or Thailand. We had used it before when Elke was leaving the house, and found the food excellent, and the helpings very substantial indeed.
So Wojtek and Iongchan chose an Indian and a Chinese dish each to share, Dong Kwang and Doee ordered a Chinese and a Thai dish each to share, and I ordered Vegetarian Balti, while Gint put on his first pizza and opened the first bottle of red wine.
Unfortunately, the pizza he cooked had meat on it, so I couldn’t eat it, and was forced to just drink wine.
Forty-five minutes later the second of Gint’s enormous pizzas was cooked (this time the vegetarian one, but it was too late), the first bottle of wine was inexplicably empty, and the doorbell rang. Amazingly, the delivery man turned out to be a very good guitarist and singer of Irish rebel songs, Vincent, who has promised to play at a fund-raising ‘gig’ next month for our flood campaign. He couldn’t be persuaded to abandon his delivery round, though, and come in and have a sing-song with us, so we waved him off with mutual goodwill and settled down to dish out the food.
Dong Kwang was the only one who was disappointed, as rich spicy food appeared with two different kinds of noodles (as per our order), delicious Nan bread and sauces, but only two helpings of rice – as per our order. Dong Kwang feels about his rice the way Irishmen used to feel about their potatoes: a meal just isn’t a meal without plenty of it. He departed to the kitchen to put on a saucepan of rice while we continued to open packages like children at a party.
We were happily tucking in to our dishes when the front door opened, and in came Grazine and Eddie, bearing a delicious Lithuanian chocolate cake, of the same feathery sort of lightness as the honey cake Grazine had brought home before. We bore it to the kitchen for later, pulled one of the kitchen benches into the dining room, everybody moved up a bit, and – deciding it was too late to order a take-away now for them – we agreed it was best that they start with Gint’s second pizza, while Dong Kwang’s rice finished cooking. There was quite a lot of my vegetarian balti left (just because of the size of the helpings – it was delicious) so they weren’t going to go hungry, just vegetarian.
Watching them from the opposite end of the table to ensure they were both comfortable, I suddenly realised that Gint and Eddie were deep in animated conversation. Gint being deep in conversation isn’t unusual, but I had never seen Eddie chattering away before, except in Lithuanian with Grazine. I cocked my ear and then called up to check it out. They were speaking Russian, their common language since both their countries had been part of the Soviet bloc. Eddie spoke it for another reason, too, though. “My mother was Russian”, he explained. “I like Russia.”
A few minutes later, I thought that either Latvia or Poland (it was unlikely to be Lithuania beside him) had decided to wreak revenge for years of occupation as he turned scarlet in the face and began to snort. It was the Vegetarian Balti, which Grazine was enjoying composedly beside him – until she started to laugh at his reaction. Other than that Gint is very blonde and Eddie is dark, it was a perfect replica of Gint’s reaction to the spicy food in the Indian restaurant three months ago. We poured water into him, as well as wine (I had ensured he wouldn’t be driving that night), and he gradually returned to normal.
Then the doorbell went again.
This time it was the young Polish couple – friends of Wojtek – who had been leaving their tent with us all week during the day as they saw some of Ireland, and then returning to collect it and pitch it at the foot of Bray Head each night. I still haven’t memorised their names at all.
Wojtek was at Primary School with the boy, and had met them coming over to Ireland when he was coming home from Poland last week.
They are extremely polite, but quite shy, and were reluctant at first to come in and join us. Without the excuse of a delivery round, though, they hadn’t a chance, and the second kitchen bench was pulled in, everybody moved up some more, and Grazine cut the Lithuanian chocolate cake and the Vienetta ice-cream, and Uncle Mateus’ wild rose wine was opened to toast Gint on his journey home.
I don’t know how to describe this wine (I think Uncle Mateus will just have to send another bottle and I’ll try to do better next time) except that it was dense and sweetish and very strong. Wojtek said his uncle was very proud when he heard his wine was coming to Ireland. We were glad too. We toasted Uncle Mateus several times that night, in every language we knew.
By then, a Polish conversation had broken out to my left, with sporadic bits of Russian still coming from the top of the table between spicy coughs.
But, by the end of the night, the young Polish couple had lost their shyness and were joining in the conversations with great gusto – especially the lad, who turned out to be reading Political Science at university, with the wish to get into journalism.
Ireland is his favourite country, he informed us, and I knew he would go far. It turned out that he had seen ‘Michael Collins’, dubbed in Polish, and had followed its political nuances very well. I recommended strongly that he watch ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’, too, and – after a brief debate until a satisfactory translation of the title was reached, and recognised – he agreed he would.
His girlfriend (who, at some stage, appealed to me to back her up that women’s brains are developing faster than men – I thought everybody knew that – causing Wojtek, for some reason, to accuse me of ’solidarity’) is reading law. And she speaks Russian, as well as Polish, and English, and French…
It was a good night, we all agreed sleepily, as Dong Kwang walked his Doee safely home, Grazine and Eddie headed off on foot for the seafront and fresh air, Wojtek smiled and swayed and allowed himself to be persuaded by Iongchan that she would be perfectly safe to walk to her nearby house alone (to my strong disapproval), and we then persuaded the young Polish couple that our attic was a better bet than trying to pitch a tent at the foot of Bray Head.
At least I hardly felt the pain of saying yet another goodbye the following day. It had too much competition.
Posted in Friends, House Family, Ireland, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Wine and Some Spirits | 2 Comments »
By
noeleenm on June 21st, 2006
It started with a bottle of wine…
Wojtek announced the other day that he had been telling his Hungarian friend, Zoltán, about our house family’s occasional wine (and beer, and ‘Rabid Dog’) drinking sessions.
Zoltán liked the idea, and said that he had brought back a bottle of wine from his recent trip home, and would we like to share it. Well, it would have been rude to refuse, wouldn’t it?
Yesterday he came down to watch the World Cup with Wojtek, bearing a bottle of ‘Tokaji Aszú’, and we agreed that we’d enjoy it together after the matches ended. (Ecuador lost to Germany, but will still go through to the second round, and Poland beat Costa Rica, so go out with their pride salvaged to some extent, at least.)
I have met Zoltán before, quite briefly. He’s a quiet (at least in English!), serious guy, whose face lights up when he smiles. Wojtek and himself shared a room in a previous house and Wojtek claims to have taught Zoltán twenty new English words every night, and forced him to practise them.
He has done a good job, although Zoltán still comes to visit armed with a dictionary (as well as a bottle of wine) that he describes as a ‘pocket dictionary’. It resembles ‘War and Peace’, unabridged.
Last night it came to the table with him, but he decided, sensibly, following a toast in each of our languages (Irish, Polish, Latvian, and Hungarian: Grazine was out with Eddie and Dong Kwang was at work), that it was about time we learned something about his language, too.
He started with the fact that nobody is very sure where the Hungarian language came from: it bears a greater resemblance to Finnish, for instance, than to any of the Slavik languages of the countries surrounding Hungary.
For me, that anomaly was deepened by the fact that when Zoltán speaks English, he has – for some phrases – a marked French accent. “It is poss-ee-ble…”, he says, softening the ’s’ and drawing out the ‘e’ with quite Gallic charm.
He refused to be distracted by my attempts to find out why, though, and insisted on concentrating on his own language.
The toast brought on this language revolt mainly because of my efforts at repeating it in Hungarian. I thought I was reproducing ‘Egészségedre’ (Good Health!) quite well – especially after the fifth time – but Zoltán was quite perturbed at the assault on his language.
He explained that the Hungarian language has 14 vowels. “We lost six”, he explained, seriously, as I choked: apparently, all five letters once had four different forms (all pronounced differently) in Hungarian.
Zoltán believes it is because of this multiplicity of vowels – and their sparseness in English – that English speaking people have difficulty with the subtleness of sound in Hungarian.
It isn’t only English speaking people, either, I realised, when he wrote the vowels down – a, á, e, é, i, Ã, o, ó, ö, oâ€, u, ú, ü, uâ€. In Gaelic, we have ten – a, á, e, é, i, Ã, o, ó, u, ú.
“How many letters do you have in your entire alphabet?”, I asked. “42″, he said, nonchalantly.
In English, there are 26, but in Gaelic there are only 18, I confessed – but that’s counting only one form of each letter in our vowels, I realised later. Each of our vowels has an accented form also.
Neither is it counting letters that change their sound by adding the ‘buailte’, which used to be indicated by a dot over the letter, but is now (for ease of printing) shown by the letter ‘h’ following it.
Nine letters take the ‘buailte’ in Gaelic – b, c, d, f, g, m, p, r, t – which would bring our alphabet to a respectable 32 (if you count the other form of the five vowel letters), but they only take the ‘buailte’ in certain circumstances – for instance, following a possessive pronoun, ie. ‘mo ghra’ or ‘my love’.
So do they count as extra letters…?
As the level of wine in the bottle went down, my grasp of what Zoltán considered to be different letters diminished too. Apparently, the letter ‘y’ is a foreign letter in Hungarian, appearing in words imported from other languages, such as English. But it is also used following g, l, n, or t in Hungarian words (it appears in the name of the country – Magyarország), in much the same way that we use the ‘h’ in Gaelic. ‘G’ followed by ‘y’ produces a totally different sound (which Zoltán had me reproducing by clicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth before uttering the ‘g’), than the ‘g’ alone, for instance.
By the time they had moved on to ‘Rabid Dog’ drinks, this time made with orange juice in the absence of a red-berried juice, and Zoltán had moved on to explanations of the difference between the pronunciation of ‘d’, ‘dz’, and ‘dzs’, I was begging for mercy, and asking to be told instead about Hungarian wine.
The wine Zoltán had brought with him was the classic ‘Tokaji Aszú’, a sweet dessert wine from the region of Tokaj. It’s a golden straw coloured wine, produced by the addition of grapes affected by ‘noble rot’. This collection of grapes is known as ‘aszú’, according to winegeeks.com.
I resorted to them today because my head was too full of the effects of sweet grape juice last night to follow Zoltán’s explanation of its meaning. While I was there I discovered their definition of ‘noble rot’ as “a mould that attacks the skin of the grape, thinning and dehydrating it and causing high levels of residual sugar”.
The sweetness of the wine depends on how many ‘puttonyos’, or hods, of the crushed ‘aszú’ are added to the base dry wine, resulting in a designation of 3, 4, 5 or 6 – according to the bottle of wine we drank, and according to Zoltán: according to winegeeks.com, the highest is 7. I’ll leave them fight it out among themselves…
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I couldn’t find Egri Bikavér – the red ‘Blood of the Bull’ wine from the Bikavér region – which Zoltán told us about, on winegeeks.com, but I did find it mentioned on another site, which I’ve now mislaid.
It told the legend of a young Hungarian girl whose father gave her a bottle of this famous red wine from the Egri region, when the Turkish Sultan summoned her to his palace, with dishonourable intentions. The father told his daughter to explain to the Sultan that this was the blood of the bull, and that it would make him strong and powerful.
The Sultan, unused to alcohol (although I don’t know if he rubbed his right ear), fell fast asleep after drinking the wine, and the maid’s virtue remained intact.
With no dishonourable intentions whatsoever, I found the ‘Tokaji Aszú’ affecting me in the same way.
As I fell asleep, though, I smiled, imagining the comic-strip ‘zzzz’s (for snores?) forming above my head, and wondering how a Hungarian would read them…
Posted in House Family, Hungarian, Wine and Some Spirits | 1 Comment »
By
noeleenm on May 10th, 2006
I’ve had two ‘complaints’ since I put up my last post – from people who’ve obviously never heard of using the ‘Comments’ facility.
The first was very, very politely phrased. Dong Kwang told me that he was talking to his family by phone on Sunday – including his grandparents, who were visiting – and explained about our blog. His sister promptly brought up this site, and the entire family were immediately looking at the kitchen in which we cook and talk – and drink wine…
“My sister translated about the kimchi”, Dong Kwang tried to continue, but I interrupted his story with a shriek: “Did she translate about you drinking wine?!”
“Yes”, he said, reassuringly, “but you remember I told you about her bringing home a bottle of wine from Germany…?” He grinned.
I wiped the perspiration from my forehead. “Go on then.”
“My mother asked me to explain that there are different kinds of kimchi. I told you that you put the vegetables in the salted water for 24 hours, but this depends on the… on the… density?”
I nodded.
“If you use lots of different kinds of vegetables, and the pot is very full, then you leave for 24 hours. But if you just use two heads of lettuce, then you only need to leave for around 25 minutes.”
I reassured him that his family’s honour regarding kimchi preparation would be restored, and asked: “What happened about the wine from Germany?”
“My sister says she would like to go back to Germany and try much more wine!”
Uh, oh…
And it was this subject that brought in my second ‘complaint’. My website ‘guru’, Peter McCourt of Interactive Training, e-mailed me today on another matter entirely, and added: “… and what kind of guide is it that can introduce wine without mentioning claret? I look forward to reading that this oversight has been rectified in the near future.” (I forgot to mention that he’s also a wine guru.)
As I have never tasted claret, I await his contribution – via the Comments facility, Peter!
And last night a new alcoholic beverage appeared in our kitchen – the Rabid Dog.
It was Grazina’s 24th birthday on Sunday, but I thought it was Monday and we ended up celebrating it on Tuesday night, eventually.
As Monday was Decision Day regarding the proposed high density development on our flood plain, and our local Council granted the permission subject to proposed flood protection works (which none of us have seen) being passed, then there were no causes for celebration on that day. Even though we suspected that the decision would be favourable to the developer, as the Town Manager has made it clear all along that he will facilitate this development in any way he can, it was still a blow.
It also means that we are straight into the next stage of the fight, which is an appeal to An Bord Pleanala, Ireland’s Planning Appeals Board, and the subsequent – and welcome – publicity for our fight that such a decision brings…
So, by Tuesday evening, I was glad to put crazy planning decisions to one side, and celebrate instead.
Grazina’s pronunciation of the words she knows is very good, but her vocabulary is still very limited. So she tends to have avoided to date many of our kitchen conferences. But on Sunday night, when we established that we were actually at the end of her birthday, and, not the night before, Gint and myself arranged with her to have a birthday cake and a few drinks together, as a family, on Tuesday night. I already knew Monday was going to be bad…
“Vodka”, suggested Grazina. “I have Lithuanian vodka, and I will get a cake.” We hurriedly reassured her that we would supply the cake, but, if she didn’t like wine (she doesn’t), then vodka for herself and anyone else who drinks it would be just fine…
When it came to Tuesday night, there was still no sign of Grazina – who normally comes home around 8.15pm – at 8.30pm, and we were beginning to get worried that she had, in fact, misunderstood. We were also drooling at the two bottles of wine and the cake.
At 8.45pm, we agreed that it wouldn’t be right to cut a cake that said: “Happy 24th Birthday, Grazina!”, without the eponymous Grazina, but the wine…
She arrived just as we took our first sips, and the candle-lit cake and the not-too-obviously sipped wine were greeted with cries of pleasure, and cheek kissing all round. Already the boys were happy…
Then Grazina fetched her Lithuanian vodka, along with some Lithuanian chocolate, and Wojtek, Gint, and herself set about drinking what Wojtek told me at first was called ‘Crazy Dog’. He then went on to explain that the word wasn’t really ‘crazy’, it was when a dog drools with all white stuff at the sides of his mouth, and it’s very, very bad…
“Rabies?”, I suggested in fascinated horror. “That’s it!”, he cried, enthusiastically, and continued to mix the drinks.
‘Rabid Dog’ consists of roughly one third of a shorts glass of red juice (it can be strawberries, raspberries, anything), roughly one third of vodka, and – seven drops of Tabasco sauce! Yuk…
When it was Grazina’s turn to mix the next round, she accidentally put in eight drops (and nine in one!), but no one died as a result. Neither Dong Kwang nor I were drinking Rabid Dogs – me because I don’t like vodka but love wine, and Dong Kwang because he sensibly decided to stick with his one glass of still experimental Merlot-Shiraz wine. I backed him stoutly against the others’ temptations to try a ‘Rabid Dog’, and was glad, as the evening went on, and he developed a slight tilt and a tendency to keep rubbing his right ear…
It was a good night, for all of us, interrupted by several calls on her mobile to Grazina, who eventually asked to be excused at around 10.30pm as ‘a friend’ was waiting for her.
As she whisked out of the kichen, and out of the door, in a flurry of goodbyes and thanks, I wished Dong Kwang, who had recorded the evening on camera, had taken one more photograph of the faces of the three young men, who looked sadly after her…
Gint, who had enjoyed the tabasco in the Rabid Dog, decided it was time to eat anyway, and prepared himself an omelette, which he promptly dosed in tabasco sauce.
“Yuk!”, he said.
Posted in House Family, IT friends, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Wine and Some Spirits | 1 Comment »