After visiting the church, we went to Csikszereda (Miercurea-Ciuc in Romanian) to visit a rural farm and see what life is like on the farm. Although the day was rainy, the fog made our visit and my pictures even more magical.
Next we went to the Gyimes mountains in the Csango region for lunch where we -- you'll never believe this -- were presented with a glass of palinka upon dismounting from the bus. We then had hors d'oeuvres and bread while we waited for our lunch. But before lunch, there were musicians and dancers who performed for us. The music (Csango) was qute appealing: monotonic seven (I think) syllable sentences recited while the musicians played to the beat of the words. The dancers then danced a bit, and the song continued in this way. Hajni translated some of the song for us -- something about a young man wanting to court a young lady but the man said that if he should meet her mother, he'd take her to the cattle show and sell her off as a cow. The song continues about his longing for the young lady and there were phrases that all the Hungarians were laughing at hysterically but Hajni wouldn't translate them because they were too sexually explicit (something about male body parts). At any rate, I really enjoyed the song and dance.i
| Csango singers |
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| Csango dancers |
After that all of us in the audience were invited to the dance area to learn Hungarian Csango dancing. One of the dances was a round dance where everyone linked arms and danced side to side, kicking and stomping our feet periodically depending on what the leader did. There was another dance that sort of was like the bunny hop except far more elaborate. The dancing really made us hungry for the food that we were about to eat.
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| Lunch (beer cooked pork) |
After our late afternoon lunch we rode through some very beautiful countryside. I got some pictures of the so green scenery and some elaborately carved Szekely gates that adorn many houses in the area.
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| Szekely gate |
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| Szekely Gate |
After that we returned to the houses where we had slept the night before. Our host and hostess prepared another great meal and afterward, our host put on his Szekely outfit and danced for us. This of course was after we had drunk palinka then beer then red wine. Then the host and hostess tried to teach me some Hungarian. It's really too bad that I didn't have the opportunity to learn Hungarian in a Hungarian household earlier during my stay in Hungary because I think I would have been far more proficient in the language if I had had that opportunity. At any rate, they taught me a number of sentences (none of which I can remember now unfortunately), but one of them brought them to tears of laughter. They encouraged me to use this sentence with Hajni the next day but I could tell that it, too, was something rather risque. They never did tell me what it meant -- or rather they tried to explain in other Hungarian words which I couldn't understand, but from their gesturing, I could tell it was not anything I would want to tell Hajni!
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| Our host doing a Szekely dance |
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