On Saturday, we finished all our errands fairly early, so we decided that we'd go check out this festival after all. It had started raining lightly in Budapest, so we hauled out our umbrellas and trudged down to the train station to buy our tickets. The wait for the bus wasn't bad, and we soon hopped on for the ~1hr ride.
As we neared Etyek, I woke up from my nap to see two girls tugging newly purchased rain boots out of their shopping bags and onto their feet. Upon arrival, I understood why. Etyek was a little town planted on the side of a hill, with more mud and grass than pavement. The rain had gotten heavier. Little rivulets wandered down the paved areas, and pooled in the mud and grass.
None of the wine cellars were prepared for this weather. The few tents that had been set up were obviously not water-proof rain tents. We arrived cold and shivering at the first wine-tasting station, where people huddled with varying enthusiasm under umbrellas and over wine glasses. My stomach leaped for joy at the delicious smells of the enormous frying pans set up outside one of the restaurant lodges. J and I looked at each other, and immediately bought two heaping platters of piping hot food.
I felt revivified after lunch, and we went through a number of wine cellars with mixed success. We quickly spent the 20 wine tickets we had bought, and J had to buy another 40. We trekked through the pouring rain and the slick, squishy mud to taste all sorts of wines - red wines, white wines, dry wines, sweet wines.
As we were slogging from one station to the next, the local band struck up a tune in the distance. At first we were too far to hear it well. As we neared the stage, the band began to play... a Star Wars medley. We clutched our umbrellas and stared at them in bemusement for a good minute before trudging off for more wine.
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