American pancake syrup

I have kept my New Year's blogging resolution. Here is a spate of recent hijinks-

Sport: Last weekend, my co-workers and I went skating on a huge Hungarian lake, about 3 square miles big. Being from south of the Mason-Dixon Line, I had never done anything like this! There were a couple hundred people there, and there was a wooden hut set up on the side to sell tea and mulled wine. I brought my hockey stick and had a blast.

Trip to another Hungarian town: I took off to Szentendre, a small town North of Budapest on the Danube. There were a lot of pretty churches and scenery... but the main highlight was the $2 entry to the Marzipan Museum. I had no idea this museum existed before I passed it on the road, but it was well worth it to see sugar Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Please note that the title of the following marzipan sculpture was "USA, the fifties." This is how the rest of the world believes we lived five decades ago:

Food: I have found the culinary mecca of Budapest. My directions were as follows: "go to the basement of the big market and look around the area where there are a lot of pickled things." And lo, I found a shop with $8 peanut butter, $10 maple syrup and all sorts of American groceries I had been lacking. The syrup was a big win, as I had been served French toast with sour cream earlier in my time here... which had led me to believe maple syrup simply didn't exist in the country. (Incidentally, the original syrup label was in English, but the store had deftly inserted a Hungarian label on top which translated to "For an American pancake." I wonder how Canada feels.)

Second, after the holidays, I brought back some apple butter from Virginia to share with my co-workers. And this was no ordinary apple butter - it was made by the seven-time state championship winning Effinger Volunteer Fire Department and Auxiliary. My co-workers all agreed that it was much, much better than peanut butter.

Finally, it always comes back to pig killing. A pig slaughter is a big family affair in Hungary. You start with palinka shots at 4a.m., have some trained pig killing experts do the dirty work, finish up the pig stuff and have something to eat by lunchtime. This act came up twice in the last two days: (1) A guy at the client will be off email today because he will be going home to participate in one. (2) I was making myself a sandwich in the office with the only ingredients I had - peanut butter, banana, bread. My Slovakian coworkers in the kitchen looked at me like I was absolutely insane. I responded by mentioning that I had been very accepting of putting fat on bread, and other Central European delicacies, and asked if there were other food things I didn't know about from Slovakia that I would probably find baffling. We got on the topic of pig killing and blood sausage. This is not the first time I have talked about pig killing with my co-workers. Mmm.

So, life is good and busy. Work may take a lot of time in the coming weeks, so I'm sorry if I'm slow to respond to emails and such. I'm currently in Munich, and will have multiple beer-related traditions to discuss in the next post.