[An evening with Erika]
Sunday was a very, very good day. Tak, pod'me!
Ruth and I had stayed up almost to one the night before, so we slept in until eleven the next day. Ah, the luxuries of the weekend. Tibor came home at around one, and together we had Sunday lunch, prepared by Ruth, meat courtesy of Tibor. It happened to be the Czech national dish: pork, sauerkraut, and knedl'a. It was so delicious. Sad that I like the Czech national dish but not the Slovak one, which is bryndzove halusky. "Halusky" is invariably translated to "gnocci" on restaurant menus, but if it counts as gnocci, it's certainly not the Italian kind! It looks like a mass of tiny, irregularly-shaped pieces of white pasta-dough. Which I really like. What I do not like, as of yet, is the bryndza part. Bryndza is a special Slovak sheep cheese which is nearly liquid-- about the texture of ice cream after some little kid whips it with their spoon for a few minutes. I absolutely hated the bryndza when I had it. But I'm open to having it again. Ruth says everyone, including Slovak children, hates bryndza when they first have it. But according to her, you gradually acquire a taste for it, and you end up liking it--or at least thinking it's fine.
After lunch I went to Marks & Spencer in Mlyny to buy more peanut butter-- we used up the whole jar I bought before on just one batch of Fudge Quickies! This time, I was planning on buying up at least two jars, but it turns out I couldn't. The peanut butter was on super clearance and there was only one jar left... I'm hoping they're going to get more soon, and this doesn't mean they're going to stop carrying it (since the market for peanut butter here is zero).
After getting peanut butter, I went to the second floor of Mlyny, to the bookstore. Many people had told me they have a large English section, so I decided to finally see for myself. Well, unless I was missing something, it was actually just one table; but happily, most of the books on that table were thick and inexpensive classics. Each book was two or three books in one. So, since I've always loved his children's stories, I got a Rudyard Kipling book which was both The Jungle Book and Kim, for five Euro. In the same section, I found something wonderful. I just had to get it. It's an "obrazky slovnik" (picture dictionary) to help Slovak children learn English. Well, that works both ways! What it is is fifty-five pages of beautiful illustrations which have vocabulary words for everything in day-to-day life: in the town, in the city, in the farm; clothing; food; occupations; places; around the house; cooking, etc. All the words I really need to know! Plus an extra dictionary in the back for more words and phrases. I'm in love with this book already. I love just flipping through the pages to look at the drawings. And I think it must surely be easier to memorize vocab when you have an accompanying visual, instead of just squinting into a pocket dictionary and repeating a word a few dozen times.
I got home at 2:30 and was preparing to go out immediately to walk to Erika's, but Tibor kindly drove me instead, since he had to pick up Kora. So, what was I doing with Erika today? Making Christmas cookies! She tied the apron on me and laid out her full collection of cookie cutters for me to choose from. I picked a violin, a Star of David, the outline of Mary and Jesus, Mikulas (St. Nicholas), what I later discovered was Satan (no joke), a bell, a candle, a church, two different angels, and a little house. I rolled out the dough, pre-made by Erika, and cut out all the little designs. They filled two cookie sheets. I brushed egg yolks over the tops, Erika popped them in the oven, we let them cool, and then I got to work frosting! (Things moved much more quickly this time when I knew the routine.) Erika had three colors for me to work with; red, yellow, and white. These were just the base colors, and I would apply the decorative frosting later. I struggled with this last time, but this time it was a breeze! I got through all but five by the time Erika said we had to go.
Go? Where? Huh? To the synagogue, for a concert, of course! Oops. I didn't know about this. Luckily I happened to be wearing my nice trousers and blouse and not tennis shoes, but it was definitely a step down from my dress the time before... It had been a warm day walking over there, and I thought I was only staying until six or so, so I hadn't brought a jacket. Erika was worried I would be cold, and gave me nylon stockings for my sandaled feet (people only wear socks with tennis shoes, and if their feet are at all exposed, it's never just bare skin-- it's always nylon stockings) and an old sweater of hers. We walked over to the synagogue, and were lucky to get seats in the front row, dead center! Maybe not so lucky, as there was practically no one there, and for some reason everyone was choosing seats in the back rows...
What we were seeing that night: a quartet consisting of two violins, a viola, and a cello. They were all only a few years out of university, having met at the conservatory in Bratislava. However, they were recognized as the best young quartet in all of Slovakia. (And they played for an audience of fifty... how sad.) It was a long concert. They played Mozart, Zeljenka, and Shostakovitch. The Mozart was light and sweet. I'd never heard of Zeljenka--obviously some Czechoslovak composer--and it was obvious why; the music was very modern. The Shostakovitch was my favorite. I imagined it was a storm brewing, and every so often the dark clouds would burst, and it was incredibly violent. They were all just tearing at their strings. Several broke some bowstrings. And no guessing why!
It was so wonderful to be only six feet away from these people. There's no elevated stage or anything; they're all sitting at the same level as you. So I was actually on eye-level with them. The most interesting thing for me, aside from the music, was getting to see the unspoken communication that is so vital in a group that has no conductor. All the eye language and breathing cues, etc. I'd never been close enough to really get to observe that before.
It was a great concert and I was so grateful to Erika once again. As she and I parted ways outside, I asked her if it'd be okay if I gave the sweater back Monday, when we were going to meet again. She told me just to keep the sweater, since it doesn't fit her anymore and fits me perfectly. Dakujem!
I got home just before eight, and before I could eat anything Ruth and I had to leave! We were going to Sunday mass. I couldn't believe Ruth hadn't been yet, and what church held service this late?
It turned out to be a church I've never been to before (yet another one! yay!), actually the closest of all of them to the flat. It's the one inside the hospital. When I first arrived here, it surprised me how there were ambulances roaring past the flat all the time (though it's very quiet here; city noises never disturb me). I found out quickly from Ruth that the hospital was near us, and that was why. Since then, I'd always wondered where this mysterious hospital actually is, because I'd never seen it! Well, Sunday I finally did. Or a part of it, anyway--it was dark when we got there, of course.
The reason Ruth's never taken me to this church is because she doesn't think it's fun in that "they don't sing." But I loved it! It was a very narrow, not very long room with an extremely high ceiling that was all glass and windows all the way up on both walls. The decorations were simple but very beautiful: all clean, smooth wood; granite floor, and some potted orchids. It had rows of two chairs, separated by an aisle. It fit 60 people max (I counted), but it looked like it should only fit twenty. There were only fifteen people there, including us. Everyone was sitting by themselves in the rows, so Ruth and I had two options: to not sit together, or to sit in the very first row. We chose the latter. I realized later it happened to be the only row (that is, two chairs) which had a front step for kneeling on. That's always nice.
They did, in fact, sing. One woman with a very nice voice led two songs. Not as much as at other churches, but for some reason I just loved this place. It was very calm and personal. There was just one priest (at the larger churches there are legions of brothers and alter boys and nuns and everyone else). At one point he went through a thick stack of index cards, saying "Prosime..." and someone's name. You could write requests on the papers for him to read. Obviously a special feature since it's the hospital.
We got home after nine and though I hadn't had dinner, I wasn't particularly hungry. And that was my night!
More posts to come to fill in the details of my week. Let's pray for the wi-fi to hold out!
Much love!
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Vidime sa Vodnika
/We see the Vodnik/
Saturday I got up at seven and left the flat at eight with Tibor. We drove to Klokocina to pick up first Aneta and Paco (Patrik´s nickname), and then Lupka. We were off to canoe the Hron (second-largest river in Slovakia) for the ceremonial last time before winter makes it impossible.
We drove to Nova Bana, a little town I´d never seen before. (I had discarded it as uninteresting, and then I saw something extremely interesting. But I´ll get to that later.) We stopped at a friend of theirs´house; they told me he had been a goat farmer, but then due to financial strains had had to become a cow farmer, so now he "only" makes regular cheese, and no chevre.
The house was large, with somewhere between a rustic-cabin and a hippy-hangout design (pine panelling, antlers on the wall; a trippy Indian cloth and lots of guitars everywhere). I amused myself talking to the three caged budgies while more and more friends showed up. A lot of them I recognized from the canoing trip in Poland, though there were many new faces as well. Since Tibor was going to be in a boat with Aneta, I was going to be with Lupka, who is a very nice middle-aged woman who I bonded with before.
It was a cold, foggy morning, and I was dreading getting in a boat, since I was freezing on land! The forested hills around the town were lit up wonderfully and had half-changed to Fall oranges; I appreciated the view partly so I wouldn´t think how I was going to wither from hypothermia.
When everyone was finally together, we drove to the starting place. There was a kircma right there, and everyone was delighted to discover it was already open for the morning. Kircma! I had the best tea there. I was so warm and comfortable (still dreading...). After maybe an hour and a half of sitting and talking over drinks, it was finally time to change into our rafting clothes. We changed in a corner of the kircma were they kept all the kegs-- I set my clothes down on a keg, only to discover later someone had used the top as an ashtray (appreciated, anonymous smoker). I went from pants to spandex shorts under regular shorts and tennis shoes to Teva sandals. Oh God. I was clutching myself just in the warm restaurant!
Miraculously, Aneta appeared and gave me a Neoprene set of hers, which had apparently been the plan all along-- she has two sets, so she could spare one. The set was Neoprene overalls and a jacket. Aneta is petite, so everything was very tight on me, but I felt like a seal. Ready to take on the water! Another woman, eying my bare toes, produced Neoprene socks. And so I borrowed my way into warmth.
We finally set out in the water. Lupka and I were one of the very last boats, and we spent most of the time not paddling, just relaxing; but we ended up at the very front of the procession because we decided not to pull over on the bank when everyone else did. Unlike the Poland trip, no rapids here: most of the time the water was very still and quiet. The sun finally broke, and five minutes after we'd started I needed to strip off my top layers down to my t-shirt. I left the black Neoprene pants on, though, and the sun on my legs made me feel luxurious, like a hot cat in a windowsill.
The scenery was gorgeous. Above us were forested hills, half-turned to orange. Nothing fiery about this Fall; most trees here are deciduous, but they succumb very mildly to the changing seasons. No maples to flush red; everything goes a dull orange or, more commonly, just brown instead.
It was a much shorter row than the five-hours-a-day of the Poland trip. It was only three hours or so, and felt even shorter. Lupka and I spent most of the time reclining (we were in the comfy canoe) and talking in a mixture of Slovak and English-- she speaks English very well, since she is the co-founder of a community foundation and worked with Peace Corps volunteers while the program was in Slovakia.
Everything had gone smoothly, and as we went under the last bridge I smugly reflected that there would be no need for the extra clothes I'd brought. Of course, when you get smug, the universe immediately intervenes. As we pulled off to the bank, we went too fast and hit a metal pipe that was sticking out-- and capsized! "No!" I shrieked as I went under. Luckily, my head stayed dry; I just went in up to my chest. I was actually paralyzed from shock. It was so cold. I couldn't believe it. I just knelt there gasping for a few seconds, and said, "Wow, that is cold water!" before I realized I was using the wrong language. Lupka had the cool head (no pun intended) and saved the canoe. I was surprised to later find that I'd kept my paddle; that was a good thing to do, but I'm sure it only happened because my hands clenched up.
Still numb and pretty useless, I half-helped Lupka drag the canoe up the steep hill to lie next to the others. We were in a muddy field of long sedge grass (I was thankful for the Neoprene so my legs didn't get cut up). Up the hill above us was a well-mown soccer field and what looked like a restaurant. The sun had dimmed, though it was only four o'clock, and though I stood in what looked like sunshine, there was no warmth in it.
I never enjoy changing clothes (especially Neoprene! It's like ripping skin off!), but I was soaked through. But where were my clothes? In two different locked cars, and the men with the keys were on the river, far away. Ybi, the woman who had given me the socks, again came to the rescue. She had stayed dry, so she gave me her extra clothes: jeans and two long-sleeved shirts to layer. I changed in the bathroom off of the restaurant. I was so surprised-- everything fit perfectly. They fit better than my own clothes, and looked nicer! Which is especially strange since Ybi and I have completely opposite body types. Hmm.
We lay out our clothes to dry on a nearby wall, and then waited around for everyone to come in off the water. Then it was time for the ceremony! About a hundred and fifty of us (many people I'd never seen before, but they were all canoers--where did they all come from??) went back down the hill to the riverbank. Waiting there was a very strangely-dressed character: the Vodnik. On my very first day in Slovakia, Ruth and Tibor picked me up from the airport, and then we had lunch with stara mama in a restaurant in Bratislava. I'm not sure why, but in the course of our meal Tibor told me about "vodnik," which are Slovak mythological creatures: little green men who live underwater. And they're good-natured, I believe. (After Tibor told me this at the time, I looked over and saw a little figurine of what was obviously a vodnik actually there in the restaurant!)
So, here was a real-live (okay, so maybe not "real") vodnik. He had on green canvas breeches, green wool knee socks, green hiking boots, a green wool sweater, a green scarf, and fluorescent green latex gloves. On his head he had a floppy burlap hat with a sunflower in it and, attached to the hat, a matted wig of green dreadlocks. He had a cape of green netting with leaves caught in it. Slung over his shoulder was a kind of hobo-sack: a stick with a net attached, with sunflowers and candy sticking out of it. On his face, he had bright red lipstick, a thin layer of green facepaint, and these things over his eyes which made them look like they were bulging. He looked like a cross between a toad and a spirit of nature.
Someone had a poster with song lyrics printed on it in large type. He held it while everyone sang the song, which was about how nice it had been to row the river in the summer, but now there could be no more rowing until next spring. (Yes, I understood!) The Vodnik sang along and everyone took pictures. Then the Vodnik was handed a huge wooden key, and he ceremoniously "locked" the river for the winter. He flung down his sack on the ground, and called "Mlade deti!" ("young children!"), who swarmed for the candy inside.
After all the pictures had been taken, the Vodnik disappeared into the nearby woods. The rest of us went back up to the restaurant for gulas (goulash) with bread. A man served the gulas out of an enormous pot. It was blisteringly hot; I dared to try it after it had sat for five minutes, and I burned my tongue for two hours. I went back for more bread (typical me), and stopped and looked at the man serving up the gulas. Ah ha! It was the Vodnik. I'm not sure how he had gotten out of his costume so quickly!
After dinner and hours of talking, I finally got my clothes from the car and changed again. I was sad to say goodbye to Ybi's clothes. Everyone grabbed their sleeping bags and planned on sleeping outside under the stars... Sounds awful to me! It was probably near actual freezing! Luckily, Tibor had prepared an alternative plan for me: Stara mama, with husband in tow (stara mama's second husband, after she divorced when Tibor was still a boy), arrived to take me home.
While we were still in Nova Bana, stara mama pulled over at an unremarkable-looking church. Were we going to a service? I wondered. Just in case, I pulled on my pants over my long-underwear pants. Two priests were walking down the steps. Stara mama asked if they would be so kind as to unlock the church for us-- I was American, and she wanted me to see it. The nice men were more than happy to do so. (And it was good I had dressed myself up, because it turned out there were signs everywhere inside which said in Slovak, "You are in church and not the mall. Dress and behave accordingly!")
What an incredible sight. And of course I hadn't brought my camera... Wow. How to describe this. Words simply can't! Well, it was a very lovely, large church, with beautiful painted detailing and large stain-glass windows. However, what made it remarkable were the fifteen or so large altars set up all around inside. They were made entirely of food. I couldn't believe how much food. It was all autumn's harvest: apples, walnuts, grains, pumpkins, pears, potatoes, turnips, radishes, corn, wheat, and more. Each altar had two pictures with a quote each that were made entirely out of grains. And these were intricate, exquisitely-detailed pictures, with shading and depth of almost photographic quality. The quotes were about food, taken from the Bible (well, one was a Mother Theresa quote). Bordering the pictures, which were lying flat, were apples with a walnut on each one. There were also candles, etc. The rest of the altar was designs of various harvested crops.
The whole floor of the church was coated in food in various designs. I saw one beautiful swirl of four colors made exclusively of apples: red, yellow, green, and brown. These were not the flawless GMO apples you buy in the supermarket, either; they were real apples, fallen off the tree, pitted and irregularly-shaped and natural. All of the food was obviously donated by locals from their own gardens and orchards. There was a line of carefully-positioned walnuts on each pew--and this is a huge church--and, at the front of the place hanging from the ceiling was a banner made of food which said "God Will Feed You" (in Slovak). Am I doing okay at describing this? I guess it doesn't matter if I am, because it's pretty unimaginable--you just have to see it! Apparently the church does this every year for fifty-six days. I'm not sure about the significance of that particular number, but I'm wondering if they replenish all the food? Because it must go bad pretty quickly... I wonder what they do with all of it. It was a glory to see, but a small part of me couldn't help but observe the irony of all these altars, which were reveling in God's gift of feeding the world, and yet the food couldn't be eaten.
We spent an hour or so there, feasting our eyes (pun intended) on the harvest beauty. Then we drove back to Nitra, a glorious sunset all around us. Ruth and I celebrated with Kofola after stara mama left; she had taken back with her Molly and Lilly, the two terrors. "Do you hear that?" "What?" "The silence."
That was my wonderful Saturday, and I planned on posting this on Sunday, but the wi-fi has been dead since then! There's so much to fill in since the weekend, but I'm not sure I have time now to do so...Soon, hopefully!
Much love!
Saturday I got up at seven and left the flat at eight with Tibor. We drove to Klokocina to pick up first Aneta and Paco (Patrik´s nickname), and then Lupka. We were off to canoe the Hron (second-largest river in Slovakia) for the ceremonial last time before winter makes it impossible.
We drove to Nova Bana, a little town I´d never seen before. (I had discarded it as uninteresting, and then I saw something extremely interesting. But I´ll get to that later.) We stopped at a friend of theirs´house; they told me he had been a goat farmer, but then due to financial strains had had to become a cow farmer, so now he "only" makes regular cheese, and no chevre.
The house was large, with somewhere between a rustic-cabin and a hippy-hangout design (pine panelling, antlers on the wall; a trippy Indian cloth and lots of guitars everywhere). I amused myself talking to the three caged budgies while more and more friends showed up. A lot of them I recognized from the canoing trip in Poland, though there were many new faces as well. Since Tibor was going to be in a boat with Aneta, I was going to be with Lupka, who is a very nice middle-aged woman who I bonded with before.
It was a cold, foggy morning, and I was dreading getting in a boat, since I was freezing on land! The forested hills around the town were lit up wonderfully and had half-changed to Fall oranges; I appreciated the view partly so I wouldn´t think how I was going to wither from hypothermia.
When everyone was finally together, we drove to the starting place. There was a kircma right there, and everyone was delighted to discover it was already open for the morning. Kircma! I had the best tea there. I was so warm and comfortable (still dreading...). After maybe an hour and a half of sitting and talking over drinks, it was finally time to change into our rafting clothes. We changed in a corner of the kircma were they kept all the kegs-- I set my clothes down on a keg, only to discover later someone had used the top as an ashtray (appreciated, anonymous smoker). I went from pants to spandex shorts under regular shorts and tennis shoes to Teva sandals. Oh God. I was clutching myself just in the warm restaurant!
Miraculously, Aneta appeared and gave me a Neoprene set of hers, which had apparently been the plan all along-- she has two sets, so she could spare one. The set was Neoprene overalls and a jacket. Aneta is petite, so everything was very tight on me, but I felt like a seal. Ready to take on the water! Another woman, eying my bare toes, produced Neoprene socks. And so I borrowed my way into warmth.
We finally set out in the water. Lupka and I were one of the very last boats, and we spent most of the time not paddling, just relaxing; but we ended up at the very front of the procession because we decided not to pull over on the bank when everyone else did. Unlike the Poland trip, no rapids here: most of the time the water was very still and quiet. The sun finally broke, and five minutes after we'd started I needed to strip off my top layers down to my t-shirt. I left the black Neoprene pants on, though, and the sun on my legs made me feel luxurious, like a hot cat in a windowsill.
The scenery was gorgeous. Above us were forested hills, half-turned to orange. Nothing fiery about this Fall; most trees here are deciduous, but they succumb very mildly to the changing seasons. No maples to flush red; everything goes a dull orange or, more commonly, just brown instead.
It was a much shorter row than the five-hours-a-day of the Poland trip. It was only three hours or so, and felt even shorter. Lupka and I spent most of the time reclining (we were in the comfy canoe) and talking in a mixture of Slovak and English-- she speaks English very well, since she is the co-founder of a community foundation and worked with Peace Corps volunteers while the program was in Slovakia.
Everything had gone smoothly, and as we went under the last bridge I smugly reflected that there would be no need for the extra clothes I'd brought. Of course, when you get smug, the universe immediately intervenes. As we pulled off to the bank, we went too fast and hit a metal pipe that was sticking out-- and capsized! "No!" I shrieked as I went under. Luckily, my head stayed dry; I just went in up to my chest. I was actually paralyzed from shock. It was so cold. I couldn't believe it. I just knelt there gasping for a few seconds, and said, "Wow, that is cold water!" before I realized I was using the wrong language. Lupka had the cool head (no pun intended) and saved the canoe. I was surprised to later find that I'd kept my paddle; that was a good thing to do, but I'm sure it only happened because my hands clenched up.
Still numb and pretty useless, I half-helped Lupka drag the canoe up the steep hill to lie next to the others. We were in a muddy field of long sedge grass (I was thankful for the Neoprene so my legs didn't get cut up). Up the hill above us was a well-mown soccer field and what looked like a restaurant. The sun had dimmed, though it was only four o'clock, and though I stood in what looked like sunshine, there was no warmth in it.
I never enjoy changing clothes (especially Neoprene! It's like ripping skin off!), but I was soaked through. But where were my clothes? In two different locked cars, and the men with the keys were on the river, far away. Ybi, the woman who had given me the socks, again came to the rescue. She had stayed dry, so she gave me her extra clothes: jeans and two long-sleeved shirts to layer. I changed in the bathroom off of the restaurant. I was so surprised-- everything fit perfectly. They fit better than my own clothes, and looked nicer! Which is especially strange since Ybi and I have completely opposite body types. Hmm.
We lay out our clothes to dry on a nearby wall, and then waited around for everyone to come in off the water. Then it was time for the ceremony! About a hundred and fifty of us (many people I'd never seen before, but they were all canoers--where did they all come from??) went back down the hill to the riverbank. Waiting there was a very strangely-dressed character: the Vodnik. On my very first day in Slovakia, Ruth and Tibor picked me up from the airport, and then we had lunch with stara mama in a restaurant in Bratislava. I'm not sure why, but in the course of our meal Tibor told me about "vodnik," which are Slovak mythological creatures: little green men who live underwater. And they're good-natured, I believe. (After Tibor told me this at the time, I looked over and saw a little figurine of what was obviously a vodnik actually there in the restaurant!)
So, here was a real-live (okay, so maybe not "real") vodnik. He had on green canvas breeches, green wool knee socks, green hiking boots, a green wool sweater, a green scarf, and fluorescent green latex gloves. On his head he had a floppy burlap hat with a sunflower in it and, attached to the hat, a matted wig of green dreadlocks. He had a cape of green netting with leaves caught in it. Slung over his shoulder was a kind of hobo-sack: a stick with a net attached, with sunflowers and candy sticking out of it. On his face, he had bright red lipstick, a thin layer of green facepaint, and these things over his eyes which made them look like they were bulging. He looked like a cross between a toad and a spirit of nature.
Someone had a poster with song lyrics printed on it in large type. He held it while everyone sang the song, which was about how nice it had been to row the river in the summer, but now there could be no more rowing until next spring. (Yes, I understood!) The Vodnik sang along and everyone took pictures. Then the Vodnik was handed a huge wooden key, and he ceremoniously "locked" the river for the winter. He flung down his sack on the ground, and called "Mlade deti!" ("young children!"), who swarmed for the candy inside.
After all the pictures had been taken, the Vodnik disappeared into the nearby woods. The rest of us went back up to the restaurant for gulas (goulash) with bread. A man served the gulas out of an enormous pot. It was blisteringly hot; I dared to try it after it had sat for five minutes, and I burned my tongue for two hours. I went back for more bread (typical me), and stopped and looked at the man serving up the gulas. Ah ha! It was the Vodnik. I'm not sure how he had gotten out of his costume so quickly!
After dinner and hours of talking, I finally got my clothes from the car and changed again. I was sad to say goodbye to Ybi's clothes. Everyone grabbed their sleeping bags and planned on sleeping outside under the stars... Sounds awful to me! It was probably near actual freezing! Luckily, Tibor had prepared an alternative plan for me: Stara mama, with husband in tow (stara mama's second husband, after she divorced when Tibor was still a boy), arrived to take me home.
While we were still in Nova Bana, stara mama pulled over at an unremarkable-looking church. Were we going to a service? I wondered. Just in case, I pulled on my pants over my long-underwear pants. Two priests were walking down the steps. Stara mama asked if they would be so kind as to unlock the church for us-- I was American, and she wanted me to see it. The nice men were more than happy to do so. (And it was good I had dressed myself up, because it turned out there were signs everywhere inside which said in Slovak, "You are in church and not the mall. Dress and behave accordingly!")
What an incredible sight. And of course I hadn't brought my camera... Wow. How to describe this. Words simply can't! Well, it was a very lovely, large church, with beautiful painted detailing and large stain-glass windows. However, what made it remarkable were the fifteen or so large altars set up all around inside. They were made entirely of food. I couldn't believe how much food. It was all autumn's harvest: apples, walnuts, grains, pumpkins, pears, potatoes, turnips, radishes, corn, wheat, and more. Each altar had two pictures with a quote each that were made entirely out of grains. And these were intricate, exquisitely-detailed pictures, with shading and depth of almost photographic quality. The quotes were about food, taken from the Bible (well, one was a Mother Theresa quote). Bordering the pictures, which were lying flat, were apples with a walnut on each one. There were also candles, etc. The rest of the altar was designs of various harvested crops.
The whole floor of the church was coated in food in various designs. I saw one beautiful swirl of four colors made exclusively of apples: red, yellow, green, and brown. These were not the flawless GMO apples you buy in the supermarket, either; they were real apples, fallen off the tree, pitted and irregularly-shaped and natural. All of the food was obviously donated by locals from their own gardens and orchards. There was a line of carefully-positioned walnuts on each pew--and this is a huge church--and, at the front of the place hanging from the ceiling was a banner made of food which said "God Will Feed You" (in Slovak). Am I doing okay at describing this? I guess it doesn't matter if I am, because it's pretty unimaginable--you just have to see it! Apparently the church does this every year for fifty-six days. I'm not sure about the significance of that particular number, but I'm wondering if they replenish all the food? Because it must go bad pretty quickly... I wonder what they do with all of it. It was a glory to see, but a small part of me couldn't help but observe the irony of all these altars, which were reveling in God's gift of feeding the world, and yet the food couldn't be eaten.
We spent an hour or so there, feasting our eyes (pun intended) on the harvest beauty. Then we drove back to Nitra, a glorious sunset all around us. Ruth and I celebrated with Kofola after stara mama left; she had taken back with her Molly and Lilly, the two terrors. "Do you hear that?" "What?" "The silence."
That was my wonderful Saturday, and I planned on posting this on Sunday, but the wi-fi has been dead since then! There's so much to fill in since the weekend, but I'm not sure I have time now to do so...Soon, hopefully!
Much love!
Friday, October 8, 2010
Pribeh o dve koncerty
/A tale of two concerts/
Back to writing on the Slovak laptop (as opposed to Ruth´s, which was purchased in America), so that will explain if anything´s a little off.
So, in the last two days I have been to two concerts. What a lucky, musically-enriched exchange student I am. Let´s see...
Yesterday, after my wonderful free afternoon, I walked over to Erika´s house at 5:30, dressed in my best. I was a little early, and guess who I saw right next to Erika´s door? Ramiro! (He´s one of the two other exchange students in Nitra.) That was a surprise. I wonder why he was there. Ahoj, Ramiro! And cau.
Erika and I had a little time, so she got out "some" of her Christmas cookie cutters. These are cookie cutters exclusively Christmas-themed. "I have many others," she told me, as if apologizing for the narrow selection. Um, wow? There were many, many dozen. My favorite I saw was one shaped like the Eastern-Orthodox churches. When it comes time to make Christmas cookies with Erika, I´m definitely going to use that one. Oh wait, that sometime in the future happens to be... Sunday at 1 o´clock! As we walked to the synagogue, which is just two blocks from her house, Erika asked me how soon I could come over and do this. Saturday´s booked up, and so was today (Friday), so Sunday it is. Wonderful!
I was excited to get to go inside the synagogue, because I´ve always wanted to, but assumed just poking my head in would be inappropriate, seeing as I´m not even Jewish and am in fact just a curious tourist... The synagogue from the outside is awesome. It was designed in the early twentieth century in sort of Moorish, Oriental style. It´s tall with steep black domes and intricate molding. The windows are made of a rose-colored, reflective glass. But I read in a Nitra tourist pamphlet a long time ago that the interior was all white. Very intriguing! Apparently the government assumed ownership at some point down the line (I´m not sure if it´s still in use, then), and it houses a special Holocaust museum-- though I didn´t see any hints of the latter when I was there.
The inside of the synagogue was surprising. The building looks immense from the outside, but I guess it must just be very disproportionate as far as height to length. Also (sadly, I thought), there are no hints of the giant domes once you´re inside. The ceiling looks flat and isn´t very high. What a shame to waste such an opportunity for a grand, impressive sanctuary. I liked the interior´s design, though: sure enough, all the detailed molding, which was in Oriental and flowered designs, was painted white. Seen from afar, it was hard to see the shapes in the plaster since everything blurred together in the absence of color. What wasn´t white was brown: beautifully-carved mahogany railings on an upper viewing floor over the main sanctuary.
There were rows of beautiful, modern wood chairs, and I wondered if they were always there... I tend to think yes, because they were of such high quality; if you´re setting up chairs just for one night´s concert, you go for the plastic, folding variety.
I´ve forgotten to mention: why exactly was I there? Well, Erika had an extra ticket, and in the course of my frosting decorating we´d discussed Beethoven and Vivaldi and so on, so Erika had thought of me for this concert. How nice of her. The concert was Dvorak (Czech, you know) and Chopin pieces performed by a trio of a piano, violin, and cello.
It was wonderful! Quality music and quality musicians equals a fulfilling night. The cellist was my favorite-- partly because he had such a sweet sound, partly because the way I was positioned, I had the best view of him; and partly because he had the most wonderful, expressionate eyes and face.
Afterwards, Erika and I walked as far as Tesco together. She was going to Tesco to buy cat food: she has three or four strays which she feeds nightly. That sounds like her! I asked if she ever petted them (yes, I was doing some subtle sleuthing, ready to invite myself over for feeding time), but sadly she said no, they were "dive" (wild, ferile). I guess I´ll have to keep searching for where to get my cat fix.
This morning, I got ready for school alone since Ruth gets to sleep in on Fridays (I always have left before Tibor gets up). I found a note on the kitchen counter from Ruth: "Rhiannon, do you want to go to a concert with dad tonight at 7 of one of the most famous Slovak singers? Circle your answer: ANO/NIE!" Um, samozrejme! Another concert? So awesome!
I didn´t know what kind of concert to expect, so after dinner I got dressed up again in my nicest outfit. I realized I was overdressed when I saw Tibor was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, but oh well-- always better to err on the classy side of things!
We drove to Mestska Hala-- this is a large building I pass every day when taking the bus to school. The name literally translates to "town/city hall," so that´s what I assumed it was (though I thought it was strange a sports bar was attached), but apparently it´s a different kind of hall. Actually, I was instantly reminded of St. Martin´s Pavilion (the gym where I had my graduation). It was a huge place, and it was packed. I think Tibor and I actually had ideal seats: we were on the side, a few rows up. This was better than being in the middle section, because the rows there weren´t staggered, and the stage wasn´t much higher.
So who is this famous Slovak singer? Why, Miro Zbirka, of course! He is a Slovak idol. I had seen posters for this concert all around Nitra for weeks, but I had never imagined I would be going to it! I mark this as a personal milestone for me, in that it´s my first concert of a well-known, popular-with-the-masses person. I mean, this was my first non-Benaroya-type concert (Anoushka Shankar is the next-closest thing).
Miro started off with three guitarists (not including himself, with his acoustic guitar slung around his neck), a drummer, and a keyboardist for maybe five songs. Then the whole symphony orchestra came in! (Not exactly a surprise, as all the chairs were set out and the concert was billed as "Miro Zbirka with a symphony orchestra!") Plus a conductor. So there were forty musicians on stage, total.
And I really liked his music. I´m not sure how to classify it, genre-wise, since I´ve never been sure of my genres (the Rolling Stones= rock´n´roll. Okay, got that one). Though, to be honest, I think I would have liked anything live, where there´s so much excitement, and awesome lighting and visual effects and all that. Speaking of the visual effects, there were screens behind the musicians like giant televisions with accompanying videos. One of my favorite songs had the visual of a Fall day; one of Tibor´s favorites had an albatross flying over the ocean. Most of the time it was cool abstract colors and patterns.
The strange exception came with Hey Jude. Talk about the ultimate finale, right? All of his songs before had been his own, and in Slovak. But, as Ruth and Tibor had told me, Miro´s mother is British. Which may explain why when he sang Hey Jude, not only was his pronunciation absolutely perfect, he actually sounded exactly like John Lennon (Miro´s got a great voice!). Tibor whispered to me something about today being the seven-year anniversary of something, and John Lennon, but it was hard to hear, so I don´t know. Anyway, so this was Hey Jude to its full length and then some, and it was epic. It´s always been a dream of mine to hear Hey Jude in concert because I´ve always imagined that would be incredible. And it was! The visuals were just kind of weird-- if I´m not mistaken, they were taken from Final Fantasy (a video game). But yeah, everyone in the audience sang along and Miro did all the screechy high parts and it was just great. Definitely my favorite, and a perfect end to the night. Dobru noc!
But wait! Nope, there was an encore... Or a few, anyway. I think the encore was five songs? At least half an hour! I´m not complaining. Miro´s daughter sang with him on one song. I think she must only be a teenager at the oldest; she seemed pretty terrified, clutching the microphone, but she did well.
As we left, the people who had been sitting next to us were remarking to each other about what a positive, wonderful person Miro is. And it´s true! He was so charismatic and obviously a really good guy. Not to mention a talented one. I had such a wonderful night. I couldn´t stop smiling afterwards!
I´m exhausted and I wanted to go to bed an hour ago. I have to get up early for tomorrow!
Much love!
Back to writing on the Slovak laptop (as opposed to Ruth´s, which was purchased in America), so that will explain if anything´s a little off.
So, in the last two days I have been to two concerts. What a lucky, musically-enriched exchange student I am. Let´s see...
Yesterday, after my wonderful free afternoon, I walked over to Erika´s house at 5:30, dressed in my best. I was a little early, and guess who I saw right next to Erika´s door? Ramiro! (He´s one of the two other exchange students in Nitra.) That was a surprise. I wonder why he was there. Ahoj, Ramiro! And cau.
Erika and I had a little time, so she got out "some" of her Christmas cookie cutters. These are cookie cutters exclusively Christmas-themed. "I have many others," she told me, as if apologizing for the narrow selection. Um, wow? There were many, many dozen. My favorite I saw was one shaped like the Eastern-Orthodox churches. When it comes time to make Christmas cookies with Erika, I´m definitely going to use that one. Oh wait, that sometime in the future happens to be... Sunday at 1 o´clock! As we walked to the synagogue, which is just two blocks from her house, Erika asked me how soon I could come over and do this. Saturday´s booked up, and so was today (Friday), so Sunday it is. Wonderful!
I was excited to get to go inside the synagogue, because I´ve always wanted to, but assumed just poking my head in would be inappropriate, seeing as I´m not even Jewish and am in fact just a curious tourist... The synagogue from the outside is awesome. It was designed in the early twentieth century in sort of Moorish, Oriental style. It´s tall with steep black domes and intricate molding. The windows are made of a rose-colored, reflective glass. But I read in a Nitra tourist pamphlet a long time ago that the interior was all white. Very intriguing! Apparently the government assumed ownership at some point down the line (I´m not sure if it´s still in use, then), and it houses a special Holocaust museum-- though I didn´t see any hints of the latter when I was there.
The inside of the synagogue was surprising. The building looks immense from the outside, but I guess it must just be very disproportionate as far as height to length. Also (sadly, I thought), there are no hints of the giant domes once you´re inside. The ceiling looks flat and isn´t very high. What a shame to waste such an opportunity for a grand, impressive sanctuary. I liked the interior´s design, though: sure enough, all the detailed molding, which was in Oriental and flowered designs, was painted white. Seen from afar, it was hard to see the shapes in the plaster since everything blurred together in the absence of color. What wasn´t white was brown: beautifully-carved mahogany railings on an upper viewing floor over the main sanctuary.
There were rows of beautiful, modern wood chairs, and I wondered if they were always there... I tend to think yes, because they were of such high quality; if you´re setting up chairs just for one night´s concert, you go for the plastic, folding variety.
I´ve forgotten to mention: why exactly was I there? Well, Erika had an extra ticket, and in the course of my frosting decorating we´d discussed Beethoven and Vivaldi and so on, so Erika had thought of me for this concert. How nice of her. The concert was Dvorak (Czech, you know) and Chopin pieces performed by a trio of a piano, violin, and cello.
It was wonderful! Quality music and quality musicians equals a fulfilling night. The cellist was my favorite-- partly because he had such a sweet sound, partly because the way I was positioned, I had the best view of him; and partly because he had the most wonderful, expressionate eyes and face.
Afterwards, Erika and I walked as far as Tesco together. She was going to Tesco to buy cat food: she has three or four strays which she feeds nightly. That sounds like her! I asked if she ever petted them (yes, I was doing some subtle sleuthing, ready to invite myself over for feeding time), but sadly she said no, they were "dive" (wild, ferile). I guess I´ll have to keep searching for where to get my cat fix.
This morning, I got ready for school alone since Ruth gets to sleep in on Fridays (I always have left before Tibor gets up). I found a note on the kitchen counter from Ruth: "Rhiannon, do you want to go to a concert with dad tonight at 7 of one of the most famous Slovak singers? Circle your answer: ANO/NIE!" Um, samozrejme! Another concert? So awesome!
I didn´t know what kind of concert to expect, so after dinner I got dressed up again in my nicest outfit. I realized I was overdressed when I saw Tibor was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, but oh well-- always better to err on the classy side of things!
We drove to Mestska Hala-- this is a large building I pass every day when taking the bus to school. The name literally translates to "town/city hall," so that´s what I assumed it was (though I thought it was strange a sports bar was attached), but apparently it´s a different kind of hall. Actually, I was instantly reminded of St. Martin´s Pavilion (the gym where I had my graduation). It was a huge place, and it was packed. I think Tibor and I actually had ideal seats: we were on the side, a few rows up. This was better than being in the middle section, because the rows there weren´t staggered, and the stage wasn´t much higher.
So who is this famous Slovak singer? Why, Miro Zbirka, of course! He is a Slovak idol. I had seen posters for this concert all around Nitra for weeks, but I had never imagined I would be going to it! I mark this as a personal milestone for me, in that it´s my first concert of a well-known, popular-with-the-masses person. I mean, this was my first non-Benaroya-type concert (Anoushka Shankar is the next-closest thing).
Miro started off with three guitarists (not including himself, with his acoustic guitar slung around his neck), a drummer, and a keyboardist for maybe five songs. Then the whole symphony orchestra came in! (Not exactly a surprise, as all the chairs were set out and the concert was billed as "Miro Zbirka with a symphony orchestra!") Plus a conductor. So there were forty musicians on stage, total.
And I really liked his music. I´m not sure how to classify it, genre-wise, since I´ve never been sure of my genres (the Rolling Stones= rock´n´roll. Okay, got that one). Though, to be honest, I think I would have liked anything live, where there´s so much excitement, and awesome lighting and visual effects and all that. Speaking of the visual effects, there were screens behind the musicians like giant televisions with accompanying videos. One of my favorite songs had the visual of a Fall day; one of Tibor´s favorites had an albatross flying over the ocean. Most of the time it was cool abstract colors and patterns.
The strange exception came with Hey Jude. Talk about the ultimate finale, right? All of his songs before had been his own, and in Slovak. But, as Ruth and Tibor had told me, Miro´s mother is British. Which may explain why when he sang Hey Jude, not only was his pronunciation absolutely perfect, he actually sounded exactly like John Lennon (Miro´s got a great voice!). Tibor whispered to me something about today being the seven-year anniversary of something, and John Lennon, but it was hard to hear, so I don´t know. Anyway, so this was Hey Jude to its full length and then some, and it was epic. It´s always been a dream of mine to hear Hey Jude in concert because I´ve always imagined that would be incredible. And it was! The visuals were just kind of weird-- if I´m not mistaken, they were taken from Final Fantasy (a video game). But yeah, everyone in the audience sang along and Miro did all the screechy high parts and it was just great. Definitely my favorite, and a perfect end to the night. Dobru noc!
But wait! Nope, there was an encore... Or a few, anyway. I think the encore was five songs? At least half an hour! I´m not complaining. Miro´s daughter sang with him on one song. I think she must only be a teenager at the oldest; she seemed pretty terrified, clutching the microphone, but she did well.
As we left, the people who had been sitting next to us were remarking to each other about what a positive, wonderful person Miro is. And it´s true! He was so charismatic and obviously a really good guy. Not to mention a talented one. I had such a wonderful night. I couldn´t stop smiling afterwards!
I´m exhausted and I wanted to go to bed an hour ago. I have to get up early for tomorrow!
Much love!
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Dovolenka od skoly!
[Holiday from school!]
Today I had two morning mishaps!
Firstly, for breakfast Ruth and I usually have sausages (think hot dogs minus buns) with rozki (bread rolls) and, for me, yogurt. We have a system worked out: While I'm showering, she puts the water on the stove, and while she's washing her hair I put in the sausages and get everything ready. Today, I noticed there were two sets of sausages in the fridge; that was strange, but I just decided to take the last two sausages from one of the sets, and put them in the boiling water. Ruth was still washing her hair when they were ready, so I put hers on her plate and ate mine. I was finishing off the last bite when she took the first bite of hers. "Wow," I said, "These taste especially good. Like, for some reason they taste special today." She chewed, and then said slowly, "Actually, I regret to tell you this, but... Um, I think they're bad." What?! "Yeah, they taste off to me," she continued. A little too late for that! Something must be wrong with my genetic makeup if I take old meat to be delicious, but no food poisoning yet, so I guess it was okay...
Minutes later I took the bus to school, and started getting a gnawing feeling that something was wrong as I wasn't seeing any of my classmates that I usually do. I went upstairs to the classroom, and yep, suspicions confirmed-- it was totally empty, all the chairs still upside-down on the desks. I went back out in the hallway, and luck was on my side: I saw my History/Ethics teacher at the end of it. She doesn't speak a word of English, and I've always found her Slovak hard to understand, so I was a little nervous, but again luckily today I magically understood her perfectly and I was able to articulate perfectly. It turns out, everyone was at the park (you know, the one that's at the base of the hrad). That was what I'd suspected. On Tuesday, everyone had been talking about how we were going to the park on Wednesday for a mandatory by law periodic "fitness day" (I don't remember the Slovak word for it). They had canceled it, though, because Tuesday the weather was so miserable: icy gusts of wind, showers, and even a few snowflakes. You may be wondering how I didn't hear the news on Wednesday as to what was going down on Thursday; I wasn't at school because I was traveling with Tibor. So, this teacher told me everyone was at the hockey stadium in the park, and she said it was fine if I took the bus there right then. So I did.
I love that buses come max every fifteen minutes, minimum every five. They start at four-thirty in the morning and go till after midnight. And they go everywhere in the city! Ah, I've forgotten to mention the drama that occurred on the bus this morning. The doors closed, and then a very average man who had just gotten on shouted "Receipts!" Ah. These people again. Even though I had my receipt on hand I could feel the adrenaline. The crackdown people are just plain frightening! (They definitely try to be, too.) This guy was, unlike the woman before, actually effective; he zoomed through two dozen people and then reached two teenage boys in the middle of the bus, on their way to school, who didn't have receipts. Uh-oh. I don't know if he actually gave them tickets, though I think he did; he certainly spent as long as he could chewing them out. It was really unpleasant to see, even if I didn't know what he was saying.
So, there are at least thirty-five different bus routes within the city, and obviously I haven't gotten them all figured out. Only two, actually. So, I decided to take to the park bus no. 2, which is the one I take to and from school, and therefore one of the two routes within my limited scope of knowledge. I knew Larissa took it home every day, and she lives on Zobor, so I assumed the bus would go right past the hrad.
Wrong! It turned at Mlyny. And I knew that, actually, but I'd forgotten. I had been hoping it would continue straight. So, I got off at Mlyny and had to get there on foot. It's a fifteen-minute walk if you super-powerwalk it, and that's what I did. School starts at 8 and it was already 8:15. I blew through the stare mesto, finally reaching the park. I knew where the hockey stadium there was because Larissa and I went there on Tuesday-- we went home to her house after school, and then at 5 walked to the stadium to meet up with these girls from school who wanted to take our picture for the school newspaper. But the hockey stadium's a big place, so I didn't know where my classmates might be. I saw one girl who looked high school age, dressed in athletic clothing, walking towards the stadium. I decided to follow her. Wrong person-- she went inside and then started talking to the hockey coach; she was another hockey coach. Still someone, though, so I asked her if she knew where the school was, and she told me the "bufet," which I knew.
Yay! My classmates. And while it was 8:30, I was exactly on time-- the P.E. teacher who was there was writing down names. I'm still not sure why, but there were only thirty of us there between three different classes. I was one of only five girls from my class there, when there are twenty-three total. A mystery to be solved another time. Aside from the students, there were three teachers: my Biology and English teachers, and then the male P.E. teacher (our usual P.E. teacher is a woman). I was glad to see most everyone was dressed in regular clothes, like me; it meant both I wasn't missing out on how we were supposed to dress, and also that we weren't doing anything terribly strenuous. We were hiking up Zobor!
It was a wonderful, bright day. The sun was shining, but it wasn't hot, and the skies were blue and clear. We walked at the perfect pace--not fast enough to get me breathing hard, not maddeningly slow--up the hill. I was so excited to finally go up Zobor, which is something I've always wanted to do, since it's such a huge part of the character of the city, and yet still unknown to me. I found out later that we weren't actually going up to the very top, though. So, I still haven't done that. Later. Any Saturday I'm free. (That's going to be a very long time from now.)
Anyway, the walk was as nice as possible. Perfect weather, perfect pace, perfect scenery. Zobor really is the nicest residential part of Nitra. It's basically the only place in the city where you can own a house and land. All the houses are beautiful and well-kept with luscious gardens. As we went higher up the hill we started to get a bigger view of the city below. With the red-tile roofs reminding me of Italian villas, I kept expecting to see the sparkling Mediterranean beyond the hill's lip. Sadly, no. Just patchwork fields. Ah how I miss the ocean....
The higher up we went, the bigger the houses got, until they were mansions with beautiful wrought-iron gates and walled gardens of paradise. Finally, the houses ended and we were in forest. It was a long walk up, maybe an hour. I loved every minute of it! But every hill's climb needs a summit. Ours was a sudden clearing in the forest, in the midst of which was a large, rambling building. I wasn't sure what it was. A hotel, maybe? With a church attached? No; actually, a hospital. I'm pretty sure it marked the end of human habitation on Zobor; everything above is wild forest and rock, up to the top, which has a modern viewing-structure on it.
We were allowed to do what we wanted up there for a half-hour; there wasn't much to do but sit on the benches and talk. We all wanted to take the bus from there back home (I wanted a walk, but also, the bus goes right to my apartment. That's so tempting), but the answer was no. So back down the hill! I knew it would be so much quicker than the way there, but it still surprised me how much faster the way back always is. Not to mention downhill. We went back to the park, and then the teacher said we could do what we wanted for fifteen minutes. I'm really not sure why this was, since all anyone did was sit for those fifteen minutes, and then after a quick head-count they said we were free to go home... Home by noon? How lovely! Twenty minutes from the park to the apartment, and then the whole afternoon before me to spend however I pleased.
I walked the four Yorkies all together at the same time (surprisingly, not the catastrophe I was sure it would be), made myself some cheesy pasta for lunch, and finished with some chocolate Tibor got for me from Hungary. Then I wrote this blog post. I think I'm going to go take a walk now... At 5:30 I'm going over to Erika's house, because she's taking me (just me-- she only had one other ticket) to a concert at the synagogue. This was a bit of a surprise to me, when I sat down to breakfast this morning and saw that Tibor had left a note with this information, but hey, that's awesome. And I can't even tell you what's happening on Saturday! We'll see...
Much love!
Today I had two morning mishaps!
Firstly, for breakfast Ruth and I usually have sausages (think hot dogs minus buns) with rozki (bread rolls) and, for me, yogurt. We have a system worked out: While I'm showering, she puts the water on the stove, and while she's washing her hair I put in the sausages and get everything ready. Today, I noticed there were two sets of sausages in the fridge; that was strange, but I just decided to take the last two sausages from one of the sets, and put them in the boiling water. Ruth was still washing her hair when they were ready, so I put hers on her plate and ate mine. I was finishing off the last bite when she took the first bite of hers. "Wow," I said, "These taste especially good. Like, for some reason they taste special today." She chewed, and then said slowly, "Actually, I regret to tell you this, but... Um, I think they're bad." What?! "Yeah, they taste off to me," she continued. A little too late for that! Something must be wrong with my genetic makeup if I take old meat to be delicious, but no food poisoning yet, so I guess it was okay...
Minutes later I took the bus to school, and started getting a gnawing feeling that something was wrong as I wasn't seeing any of my classmates that I usually do. I went upstairs to the classroom, and yep, suspicions confirmed-- it was totally empty, all the chairs still upside-down on the desks. I went back out in the hallway, and luck was on my side: I saw my History/Ethics teacher at the end of it. She doesn't speak a word of English, and I've always found her Slovak hard to understand, so I was a little nervous, but again luckily today I magically understood her perfectly and I was able to articulate perfectly. It turns out, everyone was at the park (you know, the one that's at the base of the hrad). That was what I'd suspected. On Tuesday, everyone had been talking about how we were going to the park on Wednesday for a mandatory by law periodic "fitness day" (I don't remember the Slovak word for it). They had canceled it, though, because Tuesday the weather was so miserable: icy gusts of wind, showers, and even a few snowflakes. You may be wondering how I didn't hear the news on Wednesday as to what was going down on Thursday; I wasn't at school because I was traveling with Tibor. So, this teacher told me everyone was at the hockey stadium in the park, and she said it was fine if I took the bus there right then. So I did.
I love that buses come max every fifteen minutes, minimum every five. They start at four-thirty in the morning and go till after midnight. And they go everywhere in the city! Ah, I've forgotten to mention the drama that occurred on the bus this morning. The doors closed, and then a very average man who had just gotten on shouted "Receipts!" Ah. These people again. Even though I had my receipt on hand I could feel the adrenaline. The crackdown people are just plain frightening! (They definitely try to be, too.) This guy was, unlike the woman before, actually effective; he zoomed through two dozen people and then reached two teenage boys in the middle of the bus, on their way to school, who didn't have receipts. Uh-oh. I don't know if he actually gave them tickets, though I think he did; he certainly spent as long as he could chewing them out. It was really unpleasant to see, even if I didn't know what he was saying.
So, there are at least thirty-five different bus routes within the city, and obviously I haven't gotten them all figured out. Only two, actually. So, I decided to take to the park bus no. 2, which is the one I take to and from school, and therefore one of the two routes within my limited scope of knowledge. I knew Larissa took it home every day, and she lives on Zobor, so I assumed the bus would go right past the hrad.
Wrong! It turned at Mlyny. And I knew that, actually, but I'd forgotten. I had been hoping it would continue straight. So, I got off at Mlyny and had to get there on foot. It's a fifteen-minute walk if you super-powerwalk it, and that's what I did. School starts at 8 and it was already 8:15. I blew through the stare mesto, finally reaching the park. I knew where the hockey stadium there was because Larissa and I went there on Tuesday-- we went home to her house after school, and then at 5 walked to the stadium to meet up with these girls from school who wanted to take our picture for the school newspaper. But the hockey stadium's a big place, so I didn't know where my classmates might be. I saw one girl who looked high school age, dressed in athletic clothing, walking towards the stadium. I decided to follow her. Wrong person-- she went inside and then started talking to the hockey coach; she was another hockey coach. Still someone, though, so I asked her if she knew where the school was, and she told me the "bufet," which I knew.
Yay! My classmates. And while it was 8:30, I was exactly on time-- the P.E. teacher who was there was writing down names. I'm still not sure why, but there were only thirty of us there between three different classes. I was one of only five girls from my class there, when there are twenty-three total. A mystery to be solved another time. Aside from the students, there were three teachers: my Biology and English teachers, and then the male P.E. teacher (our usual P.E. teacher is a woman). I was glad to see most everyone was dressed in regular clothes, like me; it meant both I wasn't missing out on how we were supposed to dress, and also that we weren't doing anything terribly strenuous. We were hiking up Zobor!
It was a wonderful, bright day. The sun was shining, but it wasn't hot, and the skies were blue and clear. We walked at the perfect pace--not fast enough to get me breathing hard, not maddeningly slow--up the hill. I was so excited to finally go up Zobor, which is something I've always wanted to do, since it's such a huge part of the character of the city, and yet still unknown to me. I found out later that we weren't actually going up to the very top, though. So, I still haven't done that. Later. Any Saturday I'm free. (That's going to be a very long time from now.)
Anyway, the walk was as nice as possible. Perfect weather, perfect pace, perfect scenery. Zobor really is the nicest residential part of Nitra. It's basically the only place in the city where you can own a house and land. All the houses are beautiful and well-kept with luscious gardens. As we went higher up the hill we started to get a bigger view of the city below. With the red-tile roofs reminding me of Italian villas, I kept expecting to see the sparkling Mediterranean beyond the hill's lip. Sadly, no. Just patchwork fields. Ah how I miss the ocean....
The higher up we went, the bigger the houses got, until they were mansions with beautiful wrought-iron gates and walled gardens of paradise. Finally, the houses ended and we were in forest. It was a long walk up, maybe an hour. I loved every minute of it! But every hill's climb needs a summit. Ours was a sudden clearing in the forest, in the midst of which was a large, rambling building. I wasn't sure what it was. A hotel, maybe? With a church attached? No; actually, a hospital. I'm pretty sure it marked the end of human habitation on Zobor; everything above is wild forest and rock, up to the top, which has a modern viewing-structure on it.
We were allowed to do what we wanted up there for a half-hour; there wasn't much to do but sit on the benches and talk. We all wanted to take the bus from there back home (I wanted a walk, but also, the bus goes right to my apartment. That's so tempting), but the answer was no. So back down the hill! I knew it would be so much quicker than the way there, but it still surprised me how much faster the way back always is. Not to mention downhill. We went back to the park, and then the teacher said we could do what we wanted for fifteen minutes. I'm really not sure why this was, since all anyone did was sit for those fifteen minutes, and then after a quick head-count they said we were free to go home... Home by noon? How lovely! Twenty minutes from the park to the apartment, and then the whole afternoon before me to spend however I pleased.
I walked the four Yorkies all together at the same time (surprisingly, not the catastrophe I was sure it would be), made myself some cheesy pasta for lunch, and finished with some chocolate Tibor got for me from Hungary. Then I wrote this blog post. I think I'm going to go take a walk now... At 5:30 I'm going over to Erika's house, because she's taking me (just me-- she only had one other ticket) to a concert at the synagogue. This was a bit of a surprise to me, when I sat down to breakfast this morning and saw that Tibor had left a note with this information, but hey, that's awesome. And I can't even tell you what's happening on Saturday! We'll see...
Much love!
Monday, October 4, 2010
Hladame huby (a gastany) v lese
[We hunt mushrooms (and gastan) in the forest]
Here is the post about my Sunday which I wanted to write on Sunday! Ah well.
Sunday morning we got up when we felt like it and Tibor cooked breakfast (eggs and meat). At 10:30 he and I left to hunt wild mushrooms!
We picked up Aneta in Klokocina and then took the road I'd been on the day before, the one to Bojnice. This time, however, we only got 12 km out of Nitra-- I could almost still see the hrad! We drove into this forest and Tibor pulled over onto a dirt road. The end of the line.
Kora had been in the trunk, I discovered (this is an SUV trunk), and now she got let out. She jumped down joyfully and then ran as fast as her gnarled old legs could take her. It had rained earlier, and there were many deep, muddy puddles. She deliberately splashed through each one, pausing to drink a little now and then. It was wonderful to see her so happy, free in the wild. I was also glad that Tibor didn't mind about the cleanliness of his trunk, because her belly and legs were completely black, coated in thick mud. She certainly didn't care!
On the drive, Tibor had given me a wood-handled knife (which you had to pull out, so no risk of accidental stabbing) and a wicker basket to use. He and Aneta had their own knives and baskets.
Slovakian forests, unlike my native ones, are thin, light-filled, deciduous (the only conifers are a few pines). Delicate. It's just now becoming Fall, so a few of the maples had begun to shift-- no fiery oranges or reds, just sweet yellows. The forest floor is dry brown grass, flattened low. The sky was gray (possible rain) and it was windy. My ideal. The cold, however, struck me as different this day; it wasn't just "a cold day"; it was Winter's first beckoning.
We had to get up a steep, but short, hill at first; it was too much for Kora, who stopped halfway up, shaking and panting; she had to go back to the car. We reached the top, and I saw the hill's crest was a gentle incline. An eagle shrieked in the silence. The forest seemed to stretch into eternity; I couldn't imagine it was really finite.
Tibor and Aneta set off, examining mushrooms, cutting them, and then smelling them; it's a subtle art, and since I know nothing of fungi, either in Slovakia or America, I wasn't sure what to do. I found a little prickly thing like a thistle and put it in my basket, thinking I might take it as a souvenir later. I walked onwards, content to just enjoy my surroundings, and began to find more, much larger, of the prickly fruits, obviously fallen off trees. Many were brown, but a few were green, and I realized what they were. Back in Nitra, behind the flat, there are several immensely tall fruit trees (that's where the turtledoves I hear in the morning live). When I first arrived I thought they were lemon trees, but I'd never imagined lemon trees could get that big. Later, the fruit started falling off, and I could see they were actually spiny green balls. When split open, there are smooth brown seeds like chestnuts inside. Ruth and told me they were similar to the fruit they call gastan, which she loves. So here, in the forest, I guessed these fruits were maybe gastany. I asked Aneta and she said yes. Unlike the spiny fruit, gastan are actually edible. Their exteriors are extremely prickly-- they look like thistles, until they're split open, at which time they look exactly like sea urchins. What a pain to handle! The green insides are disturbingly smooth, partially textured with something like peach fuzz. It feels like you're stroking an oyster. And each gastan has an average of three chestnut-like seeds inside, which are the parts you eat.
Aneta said the gastany were just the perfect ripeness and I should collect them. Wonderful; a task I could do! The exterior coloring ranged from shriveled brown to a beautiful lime green and every blend in between. I figured it's better to go with the more recently-fallen fruit, and tried to get as many green as I could. I had a huge basket and I made sure it was overflowing!
Once, Tibor showed me a rare fungus he'd found. I'd never seen anything like it! Aneta had shown me some lovely pink mushrooms, and I'd thought those were different. Tibor's fungus had a bumpy, snow-white stem, and its cap looked like it was solidified green sludge. No way I was going to touch that thing! Tibor told me to smell it. Uggh! It had a terrible stench like rotten cheese which lingered for fifteen minutes afterwards. I called after Tibor as he began to walk away. "To mozes jest?" ("Can you eat it?") "Nie!" he said. I hope I'm not going to die now from inhaling toxic spores...
At one point, right in front of me, there was a single blackberry. It was plump and perfectly ripe, just waiting for my outstretched hand. Destiny! I plucked it and ate it, and it was delicious.
We walked around in the forest for about an hour or so and then went back to the car (and Kora). Tibor and Aneta both had full bags of giant mushrooms. I don't know where they developed their knowledge of all these different species, or where they even found them! Despite my gastan quest I was looking for mushrooms, and I never saw a single one as big as each Tibor had in his basket.
Back into Nitra, and home to a wonderful Sunday lunch prepared by Ruth (a kind of cordon bleu). Afterwards, Ruth spread out newspapers on the kitchen floor next to my gastan basket and got knives and forks for us. We sat on the floor and then spent the next hour or so cutting open the gastan. Now, here is something unfortunate! No one had told me that really it was the dried, brown gastany I was wanting. Their ugly shells hid the perfectly-formed seeds within. While the pretty green gastany's seeds were white and inedible! Luckily I'd picked up a fair amount of brown gastany along with the green ones, but the rest Ruth and I left in the basket, which she set out on the balcony. We'll see if maybe we can get them to brown and mature!
We put the seeds in a tuperware, but I haven't tried them yet. I'm really curious!
At 4:30 Tibor dropped Ruth and me off at stara mama's (vacant) flat. Ruth needed to use stara mama's giant copy machine for a whole binder's worth of chemistry notes. Yikes! Poor Ruth. We stayed for an hour and a half and then walked to the nearby church at the base of the hrad for Sunday mass. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but very nice.
After church we went back to stara mama's flat for more copying, and then Ruth and I caught a bus to go back home. (It would have been an easy walk, but Ruth wanted to get home early for game night.) Back at the flat, she and I had some chickpea soup leftovers, and then she opened four decks of Hoyle cards for the first time. The giant stack they formed kept slipping and sliding everywhere from all that "airbrush finish"!
In the family room with Tibor we played a game called "Hand and Foot" which Ruth had picked up in America; I've played similar games, but not that exact one. We also had the TV on, half-watching Ceskoslovensko Ma Talent (Czechoslovakia's Got Talent). We played until ten at night, and then a movie called Playing With Death--a Canadian/American film dubbed into Slovak--came on. It was low-budget indie, but we were all interested.
Ruth eventually went to bed, but Tibor and I stayed up to watch it til the end, at 12:30 AM! I thought it was weird at the beginning, but it got better and better and my final verdict is that it was awesome. Such a treat! Unfortunately afterwards I still had to take a shower, because I needed to take a shower at night so I would have time to walk all five dogs with Ruth the next morning. And the water was icy! That was really unpleasant.
Today, Monday, was a typical school day. I was really looking forward to the Rotary meeting afterwards. I got there and the receptionist told me which room the meeting was in and had me select a lunch to have. I went to the room and it was empty, though I was on time. So I waited. Larissa showed up, ten minutes late, and she was the first other person there! What. Something was wrong here. We waited half an hour, and then we went back to the receptionist. She was just as perplexed, and called someone in Rotary to see when the meeting would be. Turns out, it was canceled, along with next week's meeting! That's a bummer, and it would have been nice to know!
Our afternoon's plan gone, Larissa and I decided to take the bus to Mlyny, since she needed gym shorts for volleyball. We had a nice time window shopping and all that, but then, something extraordinarily wonderful happened! As we passed Marks & Spencer, a clothing store I've never gone into because it looks like it's for middle-aged women, Larissa mentioned there was a grocery store at the back of it. I thought that was pretty weird, and I'd never seen it. "Oh yeah," Larissa said. "Marks & Spencer is a British company, so the grocery store has all these British foods. Like, you can peanut butter there..." WHAT?! I practically ran there. Ruth's and my peanut butter perplexity solved! I found it in the grocery store, and it even happened to be 20% off. There must be a very small market for it here. But now I know where I'll get my supply for the year!
And it turned out to be a good thing that I bought it, because Ruth really had the Fudge Quickie munchies. But we were out of butter and sugar! It's always one thing or another. The grocery store practically next door to the flat had closed just an hour earlier, so I had to go all the way to Billa, in Mlyny, instead. While I was in Mlyny, I popped into Marks & Spencer again. Maybe they had vanilla extract! Nope, too much to hope for; they had almond, lemon, and rose extract, and vanilla pods, but no vanilla extract. We only have about one tablespoon left... The situation is becoming more dire! All those out there who are listening and have the financial means... please, send us vanilla extract! It simply does not exist here. Very sad.
The Fudge Quickies turned out well, but surprisingly (to my taste) much sweeter than usual. The M&S peanut butter had tasted incredible when I dipped my spoon in, but not particularly sweet. Hmm. The final product's a little too sweet for me, I think, but Ruth likes it. I certainly like the peanut butter straight out of the jar! I think I'll go back there tomorrow and get a few more while they're on sale...
Much love!
Here is the post about my Sunday which I wanted to write on Sunday! Ah well.
Sunday morning we got up when we felt like it and Tibor cooked breakfast (eggs and meat). At 10:30 he and I left to hunt wild mushrooms!
We picked up Aneta in Klokocina and then took the road I'd been on the day before, the one to Bojnice. This time, however, we only got 12 km out of Nitra-- I could almost still see the hrad! We drove into this forest and Tibor pulled over onto a dirt road. The end of the line.
Kora had been in the trunk, I discovered (this is an SUV trunk), and now she got let out. She jumped down joyfully and then ran as fast as her gnarled old legs could take her. It had rained earlier, and there were many deep, muddy puddles. She deliberately splashed through each one, pausing to drink a little now and then. It was wonderful to see her so happy, free in the wild. I was also glad that Tibor didn't mind about the cleanliness of his trunk, because her belly and legs were completely black, coated in thick mud. She certainly didn't care!
On the drive, Tibor had given me a wood-handled knife (which you had to pull out, so no risk of accidental stabbing) and a wicker basket to use. He and Aneta had their own knives and baskets.
Slovakian forests, unlike my native ones, are thin, light-filled, deciduous (the only conifers are a few pines). Delicate. It's just now becoming Fall, so a few of the maples had begun to shift-- no fiery oranges or reds, just sweet yellows. The forest floor is dry brown grass, flattened low. The sky was gray (possible rain) and it was windy. My ideal. The cold, however, struck me as different this day; it wasn't just "a cold day"; it was Winter's first beckoning.
We had to get up a steep, but short, hill at first; it was too much for Kora, who stopped halfway up, shaking and panting; she had to go back to the car. We reached the top, and I saw the hill's crest was a gentle incline. An eagle shrieked in the silence. The forest seemed to stretch into eternity; I couldn't imagine it was really finite.
Tibor and Aneta set off, examining mushrooms, cutting them, and then smelling them; it's a subtle art, and since I know nothing of fungi, either in Slovakia or America, I wasn't sure what to do. I found a little prickly thing like a thistle and put it in my basket, thinking I might take it as a souvenir later. I walked onwards, content to just enjoy my surroundings, and began to find more, much larger, of the prickly fruits, obviously fallen off trees. Many were brown, but a few were green, and I realized what they were. Back in Nitra, behind the flat, there are several immensely tall fruit trees (that's where the turtledoves I hear in the morning live). When I first arrived I thought they were lemon trees, but I'd never imagined lemon trees could get that big. Later, the fruit started falling off, and I could see they were actually spiny green balls. When split open, there are smooth brown seeds like chestnuts inside. Ruth and told me they were similar to the fruit they call gastan, which she loves. So here, in the forest, I guessed these fruits were maybe gastany. I asked Aneta and she said yes. Unlike the spiny fruit, gastan are actually edible. Their exteriors are extremely prickly-- they look like thistles, until they're split open, at which time they look exactly like sea urchins. What a pain to handle! The green insides are disturbingly smooth, partially textured with something like peach fuzz. It feels like you're stroking an oyster. And each gastan has an average of three chestnut-like seeds inside, which are the parts you eat.
Aneta said the gastany were just the perfect ripeness and I should collect them. Wonderful; a task I could do! The exterior coloring ranged from shriveled brown to a beautiful lime green and every blend in between. I figured it's better to go with the more recently-fallen fruit, and tried to get as many green as I could. I had a huge basket and I made sure it was overflowing!
Once, Tibor showed me a rare fungus he'd found. I'd never seen anything like it! Aneta had shown me some lovely pink mushrooms, and I'd thought those were different. Tibor's fungus had a bumpy, snow-white stem, and its cap looked like it was solidified green sludge. No way I was going to touch that thing! Tibor told me to smell it. Uggh! It had a terrible stench like rotten cheese which lingered for fifteen minutes afterwards. I called after Tibor as he began to walk away. "To mozes jest?" ("Can you eat it?") "Nie!" he said. I hope I'm not going to die now from inhaling toxic spores...
At one point, right in front of me, there was a single blackberry. It was plump and perfectly ripe, just waiting for my outstretched hand. Destiny! I plucked it and ate it, and it was delicious.
We walked around in the forest for about an hour or so and then went back to the car (and Kora). Tibor and Aneta both had full bags of giant mushrooms. I don't know where they developed their knowledge of all these different species, or where they even found them! Despite my gastan quest I was looking for mushrooms, and I never saw a single one as big as each Tibor had in his basket.
Back into Nitra, and home to a wonderful Sunday lunch prepared by Ruth (a kind of cordon bleu). Afterwards, Ruth spread out newspapers on the kitchen floor next to my gastan basket and got knives and forks for us. We sat on the floor and then spent the next hour or so cutting open the gastan. Now, here is something unfortunate! No one had told me that really it was the dried, brown gastany I was wanting. Their ugly shells hid the perfectly-formed seeds within. While the pretty green gastany's seeds were white and inedible! Luckily I'd picked up a fair amount of brown gastany along with the green ones, but the rest Ruth and I left in the basket, which she set out on the balcony. We'll see if maybe we can get them to brown and mature!
We put the seeds in a tuperware, but I haven't tried them yet. I'm really curious!
At 4:30 Tibor dropped Ruth and me off at stara mama's (vacant) flat. Ruth needed to use stara mama's giant copy machine for a whole binder's worth of chemistry notes. Yikes! Poor Ruth. We stayed for an hour and a half and then walked to the nearby church at the base of the hrad for Sunday mass. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but very nice.
After church we went back to stara mama's flat for more copying, and then Ruth and I caught a bus to go back home. (It would have been an easy walk, but Ruth wanted to get home early for game night.) Back at the flat, she and I had some chickpea soup leftovers, and then she opened four decks of Hoyle cards for the first time. The giant stack they formed kept slipping and sliding everywhere from all that "airbrush finish"!
In the family room with Tibor we played a game called "Hand and Foot" which Ruth had picked up in America; I've played similar games, but not that exact one. We also had the TV on, half-watching Ceskoslovensko Ma Talent (Czechoslovakia's Got Talent). We played until ten at night, and then a movie called Playing With Death--a Canadian/American film dubbed into Slovak--came on. It was low-budget indie, but we were all interested.
Ruth eventually went to bed, but Tibor and I stayed up to watch it til the end, at 12:30 AM! I thought it was weird at the beginning, but it got better and better and my final verdict is that it was awesome. Such a treat! Unfortunately afterwards I still had to take a shower, because I needed to take a shower at night so I would have time to walk all five dogs with Ruth the next morning. And the water was icy! That was really unpleasant.
Today, Monday, was a typical school day. I was really looking forward to the Rotary meeting afterwards. I got there and the receptionist told me which room the meeting was in and had me select a lunch to have. I went to the room and it was empty, though I was on time. So I waited. Larissa showed up, ten minutes late, and she was the first other person there! What. Something was wrong here. We waited half an hour, and then we went back to the receptionist. She was just as perplexed, and called someone in Rotary to see when the meeting would be. Turns out, it was canceled, along with next week's meeting! That's a bummer, and it would have been nice to know!
Our afternoon's plan gone, Larissa and I decided to take the bus to Mlyny, since she needed gym shorts for volleyball. We had a nice time window shopping and all that, but then, something extraordinarily wonderful happened! As we passed Marks & Spencer, a clothing store I've never gone into because it looks like it's for middle-aged women, Larissa mentioned there was a grocery store at the back of it. I thought that was pretty weird, and I'd never seen it. "Oh yeah," Larissa said. "Marks & Spencer is a British company, so the grocery store has all these British foods. Like, you can peanut butter there..." WHAT?! I practically ran there. Ruth's and my peanut butter perplexity solved! I found it in the grocery store, and it even happened to be 20% off. There must be a very small market for it here. But now I know where I'll get my supply for the year!
And it turned out to be a good thing that I bought it, because Ruth really had the Fudge Quickie munchies. But we were out of butter and sugar! It's always one thing or another. The grocery store practically next door to the flat had closed just an hour earlier, so I had to go all the way to Billa, in Mlyny, instead. While I was in Mlyny, I popped into Marks & Spencer again. Maybe they had vanilla extract! Nope, too much to hope for; they had almond, lemon, and rose extract, and vanilla pods, but no vanilla extract. We only have about one tablespoon left... The situation is becoming more dire! All those out there who are listening and have the financial means... please, send us vanilla extract! It simply does not exist here. Very sad.
The Fudge Quickies turned out well, but surprisingly (to my taste) much sweeter than usual. The M&S peanut butter had tasted incredible when I dipped my spoon in, but not particularly sweet. Hmm. The final product's a little too sweet for me, I think, but Ruth likes it. I certainly like the peanut butter straight out of the jar! I think I'll go back there tomorrow and get a few more while they're on sale...
Much love!
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Magicky hrad v Bojnice
[The magical castle in Bojnice]
(I wrote this post on Saturday, and then right as I went to press the "publish" button, the wi-fi died. So you can translate all the "today"s and "tomorrow"s, etc.)
Yesterday at Silvia's house she showed me a print they had framed on their wall; it was a copy of an ancient sketch of Nitriansky hrad, as it was back in the 1300's, I believe. I would never have recognized it as the building I see from my window every day! There was a moat and a fortified lower wall (some ruins of which can still be glimpsed today), but the big difference was in the architecture and size. It was several times the size it is now, and the design style is completely changed. Silvia and Ruth were drawing from their shared knowledge about it, and they thought it had been burned down twice... Well, that explains something. Also in this sketch was the "ancient church" (that's what I call it in my head, because I don't know the actual name). It's this simple, unadorned building all alone on a cliff at the far western edge of Zobor. I'd always wanted to get a closer look of it, which I actually did today, while I saw another hrad...
Today Tibor, Ruth, Silvia, and I went to Bojnice to see its hrad, known as the prettiest castle in all of Slovakia. Well let me tell you, of that I have no doubt! But I won't get ahead of myself.
Bojnice is a town very close to Kremnica. But we took a different route to get there than the highway I've been on three times now. I was very grateful for the alternate route; new scenery to take in! A fun surprise as well for me, because the road happened to go right past the ancient church. I could crane my neck to look up the rock cliff and see it perched there. Silvia said they hold a mass there once a year. It would really be worthwhile to look into the date...
The countryside was Slovakian countryside. Always beautiful. The sunflowers are still not ready for the harvest, so as far as the eye could see it was gentle hills of drooped black heads. From a distance, they were actually lavender-toned, blending so gracefully with the green cornfields and pastures. It was a gray-sky day, so the higher hills were just faint outlines in the distance. I like them best that way.
We passed through some villages and towns I hadn't seen before, including Topol'cany, which I've been curious about for a while since a few of my classmates at school are from there. There was one village that Tibor said had been home to Tolstoy's doctor. Hmm! I really tend to prefer the rural settings to the industrialized cities, so I always enjoy these kinds of drives.
Bojnice was a smaller city. It's main attraction is its hrad, though there also is a zoo next door (which we didn't go to-- Ruth says it's not a very nice one, so I'm happy to skip it; things like that usually depress me). Please take a second and google image search this castle... If you do, you'll say, "wow!", but the reality was a thousand times more amazing.
My first impression was that it looked exactly like the castle from Beauty and the Beast (okay, minus the gargoyles). How to describe this... It was, simply put, the perfect castle. (I should probably use the word "castle" in lew of "hrad," because in Slovak there are two words for castle, based on if the function is primarily defense or pleasure, and this particular castle fits more into the latter category, but I don't remember the word for it.) It was huge--all in solid stone, plastered white--and exquisite from every angle. The spires were bronze (long turned green), and there was one section of roof that had a gorgeous inlaid design. There was a partial moat (you could see where there could be water, but the lake didn't go all the way around) with willows, ducks and even a white swan (sadly, only one). When we entered the first archway into a courtyard, I honestly felt I was stepping into a fairytale. There were a few delicate trees with black bark and lovely yellow leaves amid exposed rock, the ground dusted with fall's first leaves...
We got a tour, and while this castle had me sold just from its exterior, the inside was incredible too. Every room was fully furnished in period style with countless treasures; a rich feast for the eyes. There was an oriental room with silk screens with passages from the Koran on them, Japanese tapestries, huge Chinese vases and a Buddha, and a large mirror. Of the latter, the tour guide said, "If you smile in it, tomorrow you will be prettier." Soon we'll see how well that worked...
The previous owners (royalty) seem to have been infatuated with details; even the smallest or most ordinary thing had some secret worked into it. Somehow I picked out a serpent in what seemed to be wallpaper of just ivy! There were hidden faces everywhere; a little disturbing, actually. I realized one seemingly plain vase actually had many people etched into it subtly. One room had a whole ceiling studded with a hundred identical "cherub" faces... I use the quotation marks because there was nothing angelic in their expressions. No matter how I squinted, they looked downright evil, with their lips puckered in a grimace, mouths open-- I felt if I put my finger in one of them, it would bite me! In that same room there was a strange painting... I didn't know why, but of the dozens around it, I felt like it was radiating something unpleasant, melancholic at best, but maybe sinister. And to my surprise, the tour guide singled out this painting, drawing our attention to one of the apparently unremarkable background people. What! The artist had actually painted two faces on her! Very disturbing.
And on the subject of pictures, there was another that caught my interest, of a woman standing by a pond in a garden with a staircase behind her-- on the staircase are some nondescript, mysterious figures. The tour guide said the perspective was such that no matter where you stood in relation to the painting, it would look like the stairs were directly in front of you. I tried it; it was true.
Probably my favorite painting I saw there was a very large one of some ancient Grecian ruins. I love paintings in this style that can make the ruins look like they're in another world, or perhaps the only things left on the earth after some devastation. I could have looked at it for a very long time.
Sadly, the portraits were not the prettiest. That's speaking euphemistically. Really, I kept wondering if the portrait-sitters had realized how completely foolish-looking they had been immortalized. I hope they got their money back...
There was one part where there were three small dog statues. One had its mouth open excitedly, one had its paw raised (just like Phoebe always does!), and the last one I couldn't really see well. The tour guide told us each to pick one. Ruth and I both picked the one closest to us, the one with its mouth open. The worst one, it turned out! It symbolized a wild, lawless person. The dog with the raised paw (Silvia's pick) symbolized intelligence. And the last dog was the best: the well-rounded one who lives a good life. Oh well!
There was also periodic entertainment for us on the tour, as people dressed in full period-wear would be waiting in rooms to perform various skits. Twice we saw sword fights-- except these were with real metal swords, and they were doing some impressive moves! I was getting really nervous watching, even though I could guess how extensively rehearsed it was. There was one time when they were asking who wanted to shoot their crossbow. (Yes, a real crossbow with metal-headed arrows.) All of these audience participation sections were designed for the little kids--we had two in our group-- so at the crossbow part (yes, for little kids) I didn't go forward. But Silvia and Ruth started going, "Come on, Rhiannon, you should totally do it!" so finally I gave in to peer pressure. I ignored the weird looks the guys with the crossbow gave me. Whatever, I'll never see you again! But they kept giving me instructions on how to hold the crossbow in Slovak, and I kept doing it wrong, and Silvia kept translating... Finally the stars aligned and I got it right; I only half-glanced at the target and then fired... It was only a few inches off dead center. By far the best (yes, I beat some little kids), but they didn't give me the souvenir card. Fine then.
Another audience participation thing I did was learning the period dance... I didn't want to do it because of course, I wouldn't be able to understand their instructions in Slovak, but Silvia wanted to do it, so I went if she was going to. Actually, it turned out I did understand the Slovak instructions, so no translations required, and it was pretty fun. Thankfully easy! I'm terrible at learning dances unless they're left-right-left, which this one was.
To top it all off, the castle even had a cave underneath it. The caste is built on a--let's see if I can get this right from memory-- collapsed thermal cover? Does that sound plausible? Well, the cave was large and there was a lot of (drinkable) water down there. Also down below was the tomb of the last of the Palfi family, who owned the castle for centuries. It was very impressive, ornately-carved pink granite. Huge! I missed the date in Slovak as to when he died and was buried, but some time afterwards a honey-like liquid began to seep from his tomb. People said he was crying because the castle hadn't been turned into a museum immediately following his death, as he'd wanted it to be. Years later, in 1992, they discovered the liquid was actually...him. The metal structure within the tomb that had supported his body had partially collapsed, and well... Ruth told me this story, and I immediately said, "What? Why did no one assume from the beginning the liquid was him? Why would they assume it was anything else?" It seems pretty obvious to me that if something's seeping out of a tomb, it's going to be organic material! But Ruth said, "Here, people always want to assume first that it's something magical happening." That's a very interesting cultural thing. Who jumps first to science, and who looks to the supernatural?
So, a wonderful tour and time at the castle. We spent many hours there walking around and enjoying ourselves. It's such an incredible place. Okay, I was only 7 when I went to Europe the first time and saw castles, so I've definitely forgotten a lot, but I don't think I've ever seen a nicer castle. I'm not sure how it would be possible!
Outside the castle Tibor bought me a package of what looked like edible plates-- they're plate-sized, thin, beige sugar-wafers--in a souvenir box (which pictured Bojnice castle on one side, and leopards from Bojnice zoo on the other). I can't remember the name for this food, but they're more souvenirs than sustenance. An outline of the castle and a fountain is embossed on each one. So, here's the part I don't get: Coming home in the car, Silvia told me that these are traditional "spa food." What? "Slovakia has a lot of spas, you know. When you go to the spa, you buy these. You can only buy them near spas." "So what, you eat them there while you swim?" I asked. "No, you don't actually eat them there, you just buy them and bring them home for your friends to say like, 'hey, look, I went to the spa!'" I kept pressing Silvia for what the correlation was between sugar-wafers and spas, and she didn't know. That's just how it is! So, I found out there is a spa near Bojnice castle, and that's why we were able to get these there.
Coming home at 3, we went to lunch at a traditional Slovak restaurant near Bojnice. I knew what I wanted: vyprazany syr! (Breaded and fried cheese.) I actually decided on vyprazany encian instead; encian is a particular kind of cheese which tastes roughly like bleu cheese but is completely oozy when you cut open the fried shell (that's the "vyprazany" part). To drink, of course Kofola; and for a side... hmm, why not knedl'a? "Knedl'a?" Ruth asked. I knew before I said it that my Slovak friends would find it a very weird combination with vyprazany encian. But hey, it tastes good. "I know it's a weird combo," I said. "Can I take a picture of you with it when it comes?" Ruth asked. Wow, okay, apparently very weird! Tibor ordered for everyone, and when he said my order, he laughed and winked at the waiter, who gave me the strangest look as he shook his head in disbelief, chuckling. That American! Ruth did in fact get a picture when my food came, but it took so long I'd finished my Kofola by then... Too bad, because Kofola, knedl'a, and vyprazany encian define my favorite Slovak foods.
Ruth and I got home to something very unpleasant. Stara mama and stary otec were off to the spa, so now we have Molly and Lilly, two more Yorkies, to look after. And Molly is terrible as far as "house-trained." She just isn't. I can't believe how much she's gotten around in such a short amount of time! Everywhere...
Well, Ruth and I had an adventure, because this afternoon, when the dogs first arrived, we gave them all baths! Molly and Lilly were filthy and stank. Neither of us wanted to even touch them, let alone have them running all over the furniture... Phoebe and Roxy were also due for baths. But wow, that was a painful process. Well, for Ruth, anyway-- I thought it was really fun. Most memorable was Lilly, who is a mutant Yorkie. I call her "Vel'ka" and "Med'ved" ("the big one" and "bear"). She's enormous. She's about half the size of a big lab and just as heavy! Stara mama doesn't believe in cutting the dogs' hair at all, so Lilly is just a shaggy mess. Not only did we have to cover more surface area in bathing her, it was denser as well! And she's a sweet dog, but it was very traumatic for her. The whole time I had to have both hands wrapped around her neck (above her collar bones, you see) applying constant pressure to keep her down in the tub. I was worried I was going to choke her! It was a wild time.
Ruth and I were going to go to mass today (rather than Sunday) at the church at the base of the hrad because it's Angels Day, another special Catholic day. Unfortunately, dog-washing took so long we were too late to go to the service. Smutne!
Much love!
(I wrote this post on Saturday, and then right as I went to press the "publish" button, the wi-fi died. So you can translate all the "today"s and "tomorrow"s, etc.)
Yesterday at Silvia's house she showed me a print they had framed on their wall; it was a copy of an ancient sketch of Nitriansky hrad, as it was back in the 1300's, I believe. I would never have recognized it as the building I see from my window every day! There was a moat and a fortified lower wall (some ruins of which can still be glimpsed today), but the big difference was in the architecture and size. It was several times the size it is now, and the design style is completely changed. Silvia and Ruth were drawing from their shared knowledge about it, and they thought it had been burned down twice... Well, that explains something. Also in this sketch was the "ancient church" (that's what I call it in my head, because I don't know the actual name). It's this simple, unadorned building all alone on a cliff at the far western edge of Zobor. I'd always wanted to get a closer look of it, which I actually did today, while I saw another hrad...
Today Tibor, Ruth, Silvia, and I went to Bojnice to see its hrad, known as the prettiest castle in all of Slovakia. Well let me tell you, of that I have no doubt! But I won't get ahead of myself.
Bojnice is a town very close to Kremnica. But we took a different route to get there than the highway I've been on three times now. I was very grateful for the alternate route; new scenery to take in! A fun surprise as well for me, because the road happened to go right past the ancient church. I could crane my neck to look up the rock cliff and see it perched there. Silvia said they hold a mass there once a year. It would really be worthwhile to look into the date...
The countryside was Slovakian countryside. Always beautiful. The sunflowers are still not ready for the harvest, so as far as the eye could see it was gentle hills of drooped black heads. From a distance, they were actually lavender-toned, blending so gracefully with the green cornfields and pastures. It was a gray-sky day, so the higher hills were just faint outlines in the distance. I like them best that way.
We passed through some villages and towns I hadn't seen before, including Topol'cany, which I've been curious about for a while since a few of my classmates at school are from there. There was one village that Tibor said had been home to Tolstoy's doctor. Hmm! I really tend to prefer the rural settings to the industrialized cities, so I always enjoy these kinds of drives.
Bojnice was a smaller city. It's main attraction is its hrad, though there also is a zoo next door (which we didn't go to-- Ruth says it's not a very nice one, so I'm happy to skip it; things like that usually depress me). Please take a second and google image search this castle... If you do, you'll say, "wow!", but the reality was a thousand times more amazing.
My first impression was that it looked exactly like the castle from Beauty and the Beast (okay, minus the gargoyles). How to describe this... It was, simply put, the perfect castle. (I should probably use the word "castle" in lew of "hrad," because in Slovak there are two words for castle, based on if the function is primarily defense or pleasure, and this particular castle fits more into the latter category, but I don't remember the word for it.) It was huge--all in solid stone, plastered white--and exquisite from every angle. The spires were bronze (long turned green), and there was one section of roof that had a gorgeous inlaid design. There was a partial moat (you could see where there could be water, but the lake didn't go all the way around) with willows, ducks and even a white swan (sadly, only one). When we entered the first archway into a courtyard, I honestly felt I was stepping into a fairytale. There were a few delicate trees with black bark and lovely yellow leaves amid exposed rock, the ground dusted with fall's first leaves...
We got a tour, and while this castle had me sold just from its exterior, the inside was incredible too. Every room was fully furnished in period style with countless treasures; a rich feast for the eyes. There was an oriental room with silk screens with passages from the Koran on them, Japanese tapestries, huge Chinese vases and a Buddha, and a large mirror. Of the latter, the tour guide said, "If you smile in it, tomorrow you will be prettier." Soon we'll see how well that worked...
The previous owners (royalty) seem to have been infatuated with details; even the smallest or most ordinary thing had some secret worked into it. Somehow I picked out a serpent in what seemed to be wallpaper of just ivy! There were hidden faces everywhere; a little disturbing, actually. I realized one seemingly plain vase actually had many people etched into it subtly. One room had a whole ceiling studded with a hundred identical "cherub" faces... I use the quotation marks because there was nothing angelic in their expressions. No matter how I squinted, they looked downright evil, with their lips puckered in a grimace, mouths open-- I felt if I put my finger in one of them, it would bite me! In that same room there was a strange painting... I didn't know why, but of the dozens around it, I felt like it was radiating something unpleasant, melancholic at best, but maybe sinister. And to my surprise, the tour guide singled out this painting, drawing our attention to one of the apparently unremarkable background people. What! The artist had actually painted two faces on her! Very disturbing.
And on the subject of pictures, there was another that caught my interest, of a woman standing by a pond in a garden with a staircase behind her-- on the staircase are some nondescript, mysterious figures. The tour guide said the perspective was such that no matter where you stood in relation to the painting, it would look like the stairs were directly in front of you. I tried it; it was true.
Probably my favorite painting I saw there was a very large one of some ancient Grecian ruins. I love paintings in this style that can make the ruins look like they're in another world, or perhaps the only things left on the earth after some devastation. I could have looked at it for a very long time.
Sadly, the portraits were not the prettiest. That's speaking euphemistically. Really, I kept wondering if the portrait-sitters had realized how completely foolish-looking they had been immortalized. I hope they got their money back...
There was one part where there were three small dog statues. One had its mouth open excitedly, one had its paw raised (just like Phoebe always does!), and the last one I couldn't really see well. The tour guide told us each to pick one. Ruth and I both picked the one closest to us, the one with its mouth open. The worst one, it turned out! It symbolized a wild, lawless person. The dog with the raised paw (Silvia's pick) symbolized intelligence. And the last dog was the best: the well-rounded one who lives a good life. Oh well!
There was also periodic entertainment for us on the tour, as people dressed in full period-wear would be waiting in rooms to perform various skits. Twice we saw sword fights-- except these were with real metal swords, and they were doing some impressive moves! I was getting really nervous watching, even though I could guess how extensively rehearsed it was. There was one time when they were asking who wanted to shoot their crossbow. (Yes, a real crossbow with metal-headed arrows.) All of these audience participation sections were designed for the little kids--we had two in our group-- so at the crossbow part (yes, for little kids) I didn't go forward. But Silvia and Ruth started going, "Come on, Rhiannon, you should totally do it!" so finally I gave in to peer pressure. I ignored the weird looks the guys with the crossbow gave me. Whatever, I'll never see you again! But they kept giving me instructions on how to hold the crossbow in Slovak, and I kept doing it wrong, and Silvia kept translating... Finally the stars aligned and I got it right; I only half-glanced at the target and then fired... It was only a few inches off dead center. By far the best (yes, I beat some little kids), but they didn't give me the souvenir card. Fine then.
Another audience participation thing I did was learning the period dance... I didn't want to do it because of course, I wouldn't be able to understand their instructions in Slovak, but Silvia wanted to do it, so I went if she was going to. Actually, it turned out I did understand the Slovak instructions, so no translations required, and it was pretty fun. Thankfully easy! I'm terrible at learning dances unless they're left-right-left, which this one was.
To top it all off, the castle even had a cave underneath it. The caste is built on a--let's see if I can get this right from memory-- collapsed thermal cover? Does that sound plausible? Well, the cave was large and there was a lot of (drinkable) water down there. Also down below was the tomb of the last of the Palfi family, who owned the castle for centuries. It was very impressive, ornately-carved pink granite. Huge! I missed the date in Slovak as to when he died and was buried, but some time afterwards a honey-like liquid began to seep from his tomb. People said he was crying because the castle hadn't been turned into a museum immediately following his death, as he'd wanted it to be. Years later, in 1992, they discovered the liquid was actually...him. The metal structure within the tomb that had supported his body had partially collapsed, and well... Ruth told me this story, and I immediately said, "What? Why did no one assume from the beginning the liquid was him? Why would they assume it was anything else?" It seems pretty obvious to me that if something's seeping out of a tomb, it's going to be organic material! But Ruth said, "Here, people always want to assume first that it's something magical happening." That's a very interesting cultural thing. Who jumps first to science, and who looks to the supernatural?
So, a wonderful tour and time at the castle. We spent many hours there walking around and enjoying ourselves. It's such an incredible place. Okay, I was only 7 when I went to Europe the first time and saw castles, so I've definitely forgotten a lot, but I don't think I've ever seen a nicer castle. I'm not sure how it would be possible!
Outside the castle Tibor bought me a package of what looked like edible plates-- they're plate-sized, thin, beige sugar-wafers--in a souvenir box (which pictured Bojnice castle on one side, and leopards from Bojnice zoo on the other). I can't remember the name for this food, but they're more souvenirs than sustenance. An outline of the castle and a fountain is embossed on each one. So, here's the part I don't get: Coming home in the car, Silvia told me that these are traditional "spa food." What? "Slovakia has a lot of spas, you know. When you go to the spa, you buy these. You can only buy them near spas." "So what, you eat them there while you swim?" I asked. "No, you don't actually eat them there, you just buy them and bring them home for your friends to say like, 'hey, look, I went to the spa!'" I kept pressing Silvia for what the correlation was between sugar-wafers and spas, and she didn't know. That's just how it is! So, I found out there is a spa near Bojnice castle, and that's why we were able to get these there.
Coming home at 3, we went to lunch at a traditional Slovak restaurant near Bojnice. I knew what I wanted: vyprazany syr! (Breaded and fried cheese.) I actually decided on vyprazany encian instead; encian is a particular kind of cheese which tastes roughly like bleu cheese but is completely oozy when you cut open the fried shell (that's the "vyprazany" part). To drink, of course Kofola; and for a side... hmm, why not knedl'a? "Knedl'a?" Ruth asked. I knew before I said it that my Slovak friends would find it a very weird combination with vyprazany encian. But hey, it tastes good. "I know it's a weird combo," I said. "Can I take a picture of you with it when it comes?" Ruth asked. Wow, okay, apparently very weird! Tibor ordered for everyone, and when he said my order, he laughed and winked at the waiter, who gave me the strangest look as he shook his head in disbelief, chuckling. That American! Ruth did in fact get a picture when my food came, but it took so long I'd finished my Kofola by then... Too bad, because Kofola, knedl'a, and vyprazany encian define my favorite Slovak foods.
Ruth and I got home to something very unpleasant. Stara mama and stary otec were off to the spa, so now we have Molly and Lilly, two more Yorkies, to look after. And Molly is terrible as far as "house-trained." She just isn't. I can't believe how much she's gotten around in such a short amount of time! Everywhere...
Well, Ruth and I had an adventure, because this afternoon, when the dogs first arrived, we gave them all baths! Molly and Lilly were filthy and stank. Neither of us wanted to even touch them, let alone have them running all over the furniture... Phoebe and Roxy were also due for baths. But wow, that was a painful process. Well, for Ruth, anyway-- I thought it was really fun. Most memorable was Lilly, who is a mutant Yorkie. I call her "Vel'ka" and "Med'ved" ("the big one" and "bear"). She's enormous. She's about half the size of a big lab and just as heavy! Stara mama doesn't believe in cutting the dogs' hair at all, so Lilly is just a shaggy mess. Not only did we have to cover more surface area in bathing her, it was denser as well! And she's a sweet dog, but it was very traumatic for her. The whole time I had to have both hands wrapped around her neck (above her collar bones, you see) applying constant pressure to keep her down in the tub. I was worried I was going to choke her! It was a wild time.
Ruth and I were going to go to mass today (rather than Sunday) at the church at the base of the hrad because it's Angels Day, another special Catholic day. Unfortunately, dog-washing took so long we were too late to go to the service. Smutne!
Much love!
Friday, October 1, 2010
Je kulturalne, a viac
["It's cultural," and more]
Minutes before my alarm went off this morning at 6:15, I was intending to start off this post with "So, today I met a very haggard (poor man) President Obama here in Slovakia..." It makes me so sad to wake up from vivid dreams and have to face the facts. Ah well.
So, no U.S. presidents' visits; just everyday life and my ruminations on culture. Here goes.
Yesterday after dinner Ruth and I were telling each other about horror movies we'd seen and watching various trailers online for them (though neither of us is a horror buff). There was an interlude, and then Ruth opened a new tab on the internet and typed in allrecipes.com. Nice, Ruth. Very subtle. "So, what do you have in mind?" Ah. Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Deirdre and I had tried the Quaker oats recipe for those cookies once, and it had turned out wonderfully. So Ruth and I looked up the Quaker recipe. We had half the amount of butter, no flour, and not nearly the 3 1/2 cups of oats required. Ruth was devastated. "I really, really wanted them right now..." I had no homework to do, or really anything to do, so I was happy to walk to the grocery store in Mlyny. Ruth protested again and again that it was a far walk, and it was dark, etc; and finally we compromised--she came with me.
Surprisingly, there were a lot of people around at 7:30 at night. The streets were well-lit, but Ruth and I kept freaking out at little things in the darkness off the street... That's what you get for discussing scary things at night. Not a smart thing to do.
We had some strange things happen in the supermarket. First, we saw a giant Christmas display. Seriously? That's not okay. While we were remarking about how ridiculous it was, a very strange man came up to us and started gesturing--it seemed-- about how absurd it was as well. He was moving his mouth and smiling and making hand motions, but he was completely mute! Very strange, and we moved on quickly. Then, right afterwards, there was a woman making loud, realistic pig snorts! She was behind me, and for a while I thought it was the same man following me down the baking aisle. That would have been really creepy.
Somehow, what is a five-minute walk each way to Mlyny, turned into over half an hour. Well, we had a lot of groceries to get and the lines were long, I guess. We continued talking about horror (why?!) on the way back to the flat, and as we approached the doorstep we started getting more and more terrified. We could make out the outline of a man standing on the steps, turned towards us expectantly, just waiting. Ruth was hyperventilating more and more, and I was getting ready to run, when suddenly I realized, "It's Tibor!!" We hadn't been able to see him in the darkness, but I had just then seen Kora sniffing around near him. Whew! Tragic slaying averted.
It took us an hour and a half to make and bake the cookies (three batches). It didn't feel half that long, but the clock never lies. Ruth and I have had such incredible luck baking together. Every single thing we've made has turned out perfectly! These most recent cookies are no exception. Unfortunately, after the second batch of Fudge Quickies, the jar of peanut butter I brought with me is now empty. (It was good for three batches of peanut butter cookies and two batches of Fudge Quickies. Wow!) Ruth has never seen peanut butter here in Slovakia, but she looked online and found out we can get it at Tesco (apparently a British company), so we'll investigate that soon. Vanilla extract is a more pressing issue. There's not much left, and everything we would bake requires it. And you can't get it here! Maybe Austria?
Okay, the rest of this post I'm going to devote to interesting cultural differences I've observed, mainly at school.
When people enter the classroom in the morning, they say "Ahojte!" or "Caute!" These are the ways to say hello when you're addressing more than one person ("ahoj" or "cau" are the singular forms). So everyone is in a way saying hi to everyone in the class at once. And they don't go unnoticed; most people respond back "ahoj!" to each person! I think it's a nice way of greeting your classmates. There are also physical greetings to accompany the spoken ones; girls will kiss and boys will shake hands. Hugging is not so common; when it happens, it's more a kind of embracing. Oh, and while I'm still on this topic, it's interesting that there's a rigid code for the more formal greetings. "Dobre rano," which means "good morning," is exclusively used before 8 o'clock AM. For all daylight hours after that "dobry den" (good day) suffices. I wonder if people are actually looking at their watches before they speak? I'm guessing it's probably very internalized and comes without thinking, but I've listened carefully, and they have it down practically to the minute. It's not even just by class schedules that they know! Once, the teacher entered the room maybe two minutes early, and it was "dobre rano" to her (teachers are always greeted). 8:01 it's "dobry den, professorka!"
Grades are determined differently here. For one thing, instead of the letter system of A, B, C, etc., they have numbers 1-5, 1 being the A equivalent. (One boy once asked me if failing in America was worse than getting a 5. I didn't know what he was talking about, and then he said "Because "F" is the sixth letter. So is it a 6, then?" Haha.) But as far as I know, there are no points for participation and no points for doing your homework. Instead, your grade is made up of written tests and oral tests.
Oral tests! This was hard for me to get used to. I still sort of wince when things go badly. The teacher calls up a student to the front of the class--I'm not sure if kids know beforehand; I think sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't-- and then asks them questions. They respond, and the teacher (rather subjectively) decides what s/he's going to give them. Different teachers have different ways of carrying this out. I have one teacher who takes the student to a discreet corner and very quietly talks with them; everyone else is allowed to talk and do whatever they want, so the person being quizzed is unheard and unwatched. Other teachers make a big deal out of themselves standing in the back of the classroom while the person being quizzed is front and center, and insist that everyone else pay attention to what is being said. One teacher I have does sort of dueling quizzes, where she has two people up at the board at a time, and at the end she asks the class, "Who did better?" It's not a popularity contest here; everyone shouts the correct name. The teacher marks the grades accordingly.
Some teachers will help out the student, giving hints, etc.; others wait in silence. And the grades themselves are pretty subjectively decided. Maybe you knew most of it and you get a 1 from your Biology teacher, but your Geography teacher gives you a 2... or even a 3! Who knows. The other big revelation for me is that grades are universally known; there are no secrets. After these oral exams, the teacher shouts out the grade for everyone to hear. Passing back written tests, the teacher will often call out each person's score. For smaller written quizzes, everyone stands up after the quizzes have been corrected, and the teacher calls out, "Sit down if you missed six... if you missed seven..."
At the Rotary weekend, they gave presentations on culture, and one thing I noted was they said "Cheating in school is common." I had noticed that during most written tests, unless the teacher was especially threatening, everyone would whisper among themselves and basically work communally. I assumed this was the extent of the above statement. Today I got a more severe taste of it. Two periods before the test, I saw a boy photocopying the answers (I've always wondered how people even get their hands on them!) in miniature form (maybe three inches square) thirty times. In the break before the class, the little squares were all cut out and universally distributed. The best and the worst students alike spent the whole twenty-minute long break working to memorize the sheets.
So here's where my musings come in. I would say I think cheating in this form is morally wrong-- you should study for the test and do your own work. But I hesitate to condemn anything as wrong, repeating to myself the Rotary maxim, "not better, not worse, just different." In an extreme example, Osama bin Laden would find the way I dress very morally wrong indeed. So who's to say? I find his terrorism very morally wrong. I think the Rotary saying is important, though not universally true. Maybe it's in Osama's terrorist subculture to kill the evil capitalists. That doesn't mean we can't say he's evil or condemn him. ...But that's a pretty absurd example since it's so extreme. In general terms, thinking about culture as far as "not better, not worse, just different" is probably a really good idea. Uggh, I'm twisting myself into philosophical knots here. Cheating is. I'm not going to do it. So there.
On a lighter note, math is done in pen! Which I love, because that's how I always did my math at home. Everyone uses blue ink for everything here. Power to the pens! That's the way I like it. I had a really hard time at the beginning deciphering teachers' writing on the blackboard, because not only does everyone use cursive, it's a different cursive from the one I learned! I've gotten much better at reading it now, but it can still be hard if they write sloppily. T's and K's in particular can be hard to distinguish; they both look completely different from anything you've ever seen, I bet. Slovak words can go many letters without a single vowel, so sometimes it's hard for me to recognize if what I copied down was an actual word or not... Well, I can't read the notes regardless, so I guess it doesn't matter.
Thinking more generally about school, students can't choose what classes they will take. And they take the same subjects every year. So, a student graduating from gymnazium has had ten or so years of biology, chemistry, etc.! But they're just starting cellular biology in the sophomore-equivalent grade, after supposedly many years of biology already, so I don't get it. At the end of gymnazium you have Maturita exams. They fill every gymnazium's students nightmares for years. Ruth will be heading into the maelstrom soon enough; everything gets intense in December. Maturita is how you graduate gymnazium and is one of the big determining factors universities look at. It's also kind of controversial, because it counts for so much, but it's not standardized. Every school has their own exams, and teachers are the ones administering them. What happens, at least at Ruth's school, is for each subject you get a giant list of eighty or so very in-depth questions which are picked from everything you've ever learned ever. You know that in May, when the oral exams are, you will be asked a few of the questions from that list. So, ideally, you have to be able to answer every question there. Written exams take place in March, so you have to be prepared by then. Students choose I think three subjects to take Maturita in; Slovak Language/Literature is the required fourth subject. What I don't understand, is if it's so incredibly intense, as everyone wholeheartedly assures me it is, how does anyone pass? People talk about "oh, that's the bad university, anyone can get in there"-- but obviously to get in to that university, bad students or not, they had to pass Maturita. There's something strange here.
In preparing for Maturita, you're required to attend long extra classes before and after school. But kids who aren't in the fourth grade (seniors) are also taking extra classes. A fair amount of people go to language school. This can be private (very expensive), but the school also puts on extra foreign language classes after school, which (at least at Golianove) go from 5:30 to 8 at night. I don't know if you have to pay for them or not. I haven't met anyone yet who tells me they really like foreign languages or who is especially good at them, but everyone takes them seriously. (Okay, maybe not German...Most people hate it and figure they're okay as long as they've got English.) In a sense, it's a matter of survival! Just about every job requires you to "speak" another language (a minimal level of proficiency, anyway). But also, if you have any hopes of ever leaving the borders of Slovakia, even only to travel, you need another language. Which is hard for me to imagine, since I'm so used to everyone understanding me, no matter where in the world I want to go. But no, Slovaks are stuck if they just speak Slovak. Even a lot of Czechs can't understand them. I find this kind of sad...
A lot of young people tell me about their dreams of traveling the world (London! America! New Zealand!)--a lot of them seem to have this wanderlust, to "get out"--but actually most Slovaks I've known have lived their whole lives in the places they grew up. Culturally speaking, I think families are much closer than in America (certainly they tend to be geographically, if they're all in the same city), and, to quote the Rotary presentation, "friendships are more profound." Being friends, being family, and being friends of family are all very important bonds. You'll go a long way for someone you have a connection with. I think it's a very nice, warm environment.
Maybe it's because people tend to stay in the same city? Dialects are, to quote my learn-Slovak book, "strong and varied." And such a small country, too! As Mario said, "A man from the West can have a very hard time understanding a man from the East. That's why, when they were writing down the rules of Slovak back around the turn of the twentieth century [Slovak is a very modern language in this way], they pulled it from the middle of the country, where things were more balanced out." At the Rotary weekend I was talking to a girl who is living in Roznava, in the East near Kosice, and we were comparing common slang. I'd never heard of hers, and she'd never heard of mine!
Talking with Ruth, I was amazed to find out that even cities (plus their suburbs) have their own dialects! I was wondering why it sounded like the accent was on the second syllable in "Topol'cany" (a small town twenty kilometers from Nitra). "Mhmm, that's probably because of the "L'," Ruth said ("L' " is supposedly the hardest letter to pronounce correctly in Slovak). "But here in Nitra, we don't say it like [insert sound here], we just say it like a normal el." "You know, I thought I hadn't heard it!" I exclaimed. I'd always thought it was just too subtle for me to distinguish. I don't know how you pronounce it, so I guess it's lucky for me that I'm here in Nitra and don't have to! But Ruth says in the East they really accent that sound, along with others that fit in that category-- I don't know how to describe them. But even in Bratislava, just an hour from Nitra and also in the West, they speak differently! Ruth was saying how it really irritates her how people there pronounce "I don't know" as "neviem." (That's the way it's spelled.) Here in Nitra, and officially, it's pronounced like "nyeviem."
Ruth and I were talking about languages, and I said I thought English pronunciation must be hard (as opposed to, say, Spanish). She said yes, she thought that was the hardest thing about it (at least for her), "because, in English, there's only one right way to say it. No matter where you go, if you don't pronounce it exactly that way, it's wrong. Slovak... Well, you have a lot more room for variation." This is interesting for me to consider, because I'd never though of English pronunciation as especially rigid, but now that an outsider has pointed it out to me as such, I can't imagine what "non-rigid" pronunciation would be like!
I should further mention that all the people in Ruth's parents generation grew up learning Russian. Tibor and Aneta were talking about this, and they said it was called their "duty." It was required under Communist rule, and they all absolutely hated it-- because they hated the Russians! So Ruth says, even though they all learned Russian, no one from that generation would ever speak Russian unless they absolutely had to. They're just so bitter. I guess tension has cleared since, though, since at Golianova they actually have a special Russian program, unique among the gymnaziums in the area.
Well, I wrote this post Friday afternoon, and then before I could post it Ruth and I had to literally run to catch the bus to Klokocina; it turned out to be one of those moments of absolute luck, and had anything detained us for even a second, we would have missed it. We were going to Silvia's home. I was very surprised at the route the bus made; I'd never known the extent of Klokocina. Silvia lives at the very edge of the hill. It was so neat to see this completely new view of the city. There was a beautiful church with a very unusually-shaped bronze roof that I'd never seen before, and a very long strand of poplars in the distance, looking like dark sentinels in the misty, gray late-afternoon. The stare mesto from this vantage was I think more accurately presented than from my window: the big double-spired church, the hrad, and Ruth's school's church looked very spaced out, very far from one another. As it actually is! From where I stand, they all look side by side. They're the largest things around, and they're roughly in a line, so it's only when looking from that other side, up on Klokocina, that you can see how much is really in between!
We went to Silvia's because Ruth and Silvia are working on learning this dance that the Black Eye Peas did for Oprah; as the oldest class at the gymnazium, at the upcoming prom-equivalent, they will have to perform a dance for the school. Ruth and Silvia are organizing the choreography for this dance, and they're learning it from a flawed YouTube video... I don't envy their job! It's really hard work.
A few hours later the three of us walked to the Klokocina church, which is fifteen minutes away from Silvia's flat. I think I've mentioned before that it's the newest church in the city; Ruth had her Confirmation there when it was brand-new, three years ago. A few weeks ago when I was at the Rotary weekend in Strecno, Ruth went to mass on Friday at this church and got recruited for a fledgling youth group (just after joining the Sunday Chrenova one!), so now she and I have been going there every Friday, but it has yet to happen.
This Friday we had mass, and then we all (there were lots of teens, all of whom were from Ruth's school) hung around for a while: the teens are the ones who clean the church after everyone clears out. (Which I think is a good practice. And I've always appreciated how spotless this particular church is, with its granite floors gleaming. Now I know why!) But despite our waiting, the youth group again did not take place. I'm not sure why. Veronika, Ruth, and I took the bus at 8:30 back home, though Ruth and I got off before Veronika did, since the latter lives all the way at the "top" of Zobor (that is, at the top of the Zobor community, which is at the base of Zobor itself).
Happy October!
Much love!
Minutes before my alarm went off this morning at 6:15, I was intending to start off this post with "So, today I met a very haggard (poor man) President Obama here in Slovakia..." It makes me so sad to wake up from vivid dreams and have to face the facts. Ah well.
So, no U.S. presidents' visits; just everyday life and my ruminations on culture. Here goes.
Yesterday after dinner Ruth and I were telling each other about horror movies we'd seen and watching various trailers online for them (though neither of us is a horror buff). There was an interlude, and then Ruth opened a new tab on the internet and typed in allrecipes.com. Nice, Ruth. Very subtle. "So, what do you have in mind?" Ah. Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Deirdre and I had tried the Quaker oats recipe for those cookies once, and it had turned out wonderfully. So Ruth and I looked up the Quaker recipe. We had half the amount of butter, no flour, and not nearly the 3 1/2 cups of oats required. Ruth was devastated. "I really, really wanted them right now..." I had no homework to do, or really anything to do, so I was happy to walk to the grocery store in Mlyny. Ruth protested again and again that it was a far walk, and it was dark, etc; and finally we compromised--she came with me.
Surprisingly, there were a lot of people around at 7:30 at night. The streets were well-lit, but Ruth and I kept freaking out at little things in the darkness off the street... That's what you get for discussing scary things at night. Not a smart thing to do.
We had some strange things happen in the supermarket. First, we saw a giant Christmas display. Seriously? That's not okay. While we were remarking about how ridiculous it was, a very strange man came up to us and started gesturing--it seemed-- about how absurd it was as well. He was moving his mouth and smiling and making hand motions, but he was completely mute! Very strange, and we moved on quickly. Then, right afterwards, there was a woman making loud, realistic pig snorts! She was behind me, and for a while I thought it was the same man following me down the baking aisle. That would have been really creepy.
Somehow, what is a five-minute walk each way to Mlyny, turned into over half an hour. Well, we had a lot of groceries to get and the lines were long, I guess. We continued talking about horror (why?!) on the way back to the flat, and as we approached the doorstep we started getting more and more terrified. We could make out the outline of a man standing on the steps, turned towards us expectantly, just waiting. Ruth was hyperventilating more and more, and I was getting ready to run, when suddenly I realized, "It's Tibor!!" We hadn't been able to see him in the darkness, but I had just then seen Kora sniffing around near him. Whew! Tragic slaying averted.
It took us an hour and a half to make and bake the cookies (three batches). It didn't feel half that long, but the clock never lies. Ruth and I have had such incredible luck baking together. Every single thing we've made has turned out perfectly! These most recent cookies are no exception. Unfortunately, after the second batch of Fudge Quickies, the jar of peanut butter I brought with me is now empty. (It was good for three batches of peanut butter cookies and two batches of Fudge Quickies. Wow!) Ruth has never seen peanut butter here in Slovakia, but she looked online and found out we can get it at Tesco (apparently a British company), so we'll investigate that soon. Vanilla extract is a more pressing issue. There's not much left, and everything we would bake requires it. And you can't get it here! Maybe Austria?
Okay, the rest of this post I'm going to devote to interesting cultural differences I've observed, mainly at school.
When people enter the classroom in the morning, they say "Ahojte!" or "Caute!" These are the ways to say hello when you're addressing more than one person ("ahoj" or "cau" are the singular forms). So everyone is in a way saying hi to everyone in the class at once. And they don't go unnoticed; most people respond back "ahoj!" to each person! I think it's a nice way of greeting your classmates. There are also physical greetings to accompany the spoken ones; girls will kiss and boys will shake hands. Hugging is not so common; when it happens, it's more a kind of embracing. Oh, and while I'm still on this topic, it's interesting that there's a rigid code for the more formal greetings. "Dobre rano," which means "good morning," is exclusively used before 8 o'clock AM. For all daylight hours after that "dobry den" (good day) suffices. I wonder if people are actually looking at their watches before they speak? I'm guessing it's probably very internalized and comes without thinking, but I've listened carefully, and they have it down practically to the minute. It's not even just by class schedules that they know! Once, the teacher entered the room maybe two minutes early, and it was "dobre rano" to her (teachers are always greeted). 8:01 it's "dobry den, professorka!"
Grades are determined differently here. For one thing, instead of the letter system of A, B, C, etc., they have numbers 1-5, 1 being the A equivalent. (One boy once asked me if failing in America was worse than getting a 5. I didn't know what he was talking about, and then he said "Because "F" is the sixth letter. So is it a 6, then?" Haha.) But as far as I know, there are no points for participation and no points for doing your homework. Instead, your grade is made up of written tests and oral tests.
Oral tests! This was hard for me to get used to. I still sort of wince when things go badly. The teacher calls up a student to the front of the class--I'm not sure if kids know beforehand; I think sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't-- and then asks them questions. They respond, and the teacher (rather subjectively) decides what s/he's going to give them. Different teachers have different ways of carrying this out. I have one teacher who takes the student to a discreet corner and very quietly talks with them; everyone else is allowed to talk and do whatever they want, so the person being quizzed is unheard and unwatched. Other teachers make a big deal out of themselves standing in the back of the classroom while the person being quizzed is front and center, and insist that everyone else pay attention to what is being said. One teacher I have does sort of dueling quizzes, where she has two people up at the board at a time, and at the end she asks the class, "Who did better?" It's not a popularity contest here; everyone shouts the correct name. The teacher marks the grades accordingly.
Some teachers will help out the student, giving hints, etc.; others wait in silence. And the grades themselves are pretty subjectively decided. Maybe you knew most of it and you get a 1 from your Biology teacher, but your Geography teacher gives you a 2... or even a 3! Who knows. The other big revelation for me is that grades are universally known; there are no secrets. After these oral exams, the teacher shouts out the grade for everyone to hear. Passing back written tests, the teacher will often call out each person's score. For smaller written quizzes, everyone stands up after the quizzes have been corrected, and the teacher calls out, "Sit down if you missed six... if you missed seven..."
At the Rotary weekend, they gave presentations on culture, and one thing I noted was they said "Cheating in school is common." I had noticed that during most written tests, unless the teacher was especially threatening, everyone would whisper among themselves and basically work communally. I assumed this was the extent of the above statement. Today I got a more severe taste of it. Two periods before the test, I saw a boy photocopying the answers (I've always wondered how people even get their hands on them!) in miniature form (maybe three inches square) thirty times. In the break before the class, the little squares were all cut out and universally distributed. The best and the worst students alike spent the whole twenty-minute long break working to memorize the sheets.
So here's where my musings come in. I would say I think cheating in this form is morally wrong-- you should study for the test and do your own work. But I hesitate to condemn anything as wrong, repeating to myself the Rotary maxim, "not better, not worse, just different." In an extreme example, Osama bin Laden would find the way I dress very morally wrong indeed. So who's to say? I find his terrorism very morally wrong. I think the Rotary saying is important, though not universally true. Maybe it's in Osama's terrorist subculture to kill the evil capitalists. That doesn't mean we can't say he's evil or condemn him. ...But that's a pretty absurd example since it's so extreme. In general terms, thinking about culture as far as "not better, not worse, just different" is probably a really good idea. Uggh, I'm twisting myself into philosophical knots here. Cheating is. I'm not going to do it. So there.
On a lighter note, math is done in pen! Which I love, because that's how I always did my math at home. Everyone uses blue ink for everything here. Power to the pens! That's the way I like it. I had a really hard time at the beginning deciphering teachers' writing on the blackboard, because not only does everyone use cursive, it's a different cursive from the one I learned! I've gotten much better at reading it now, but it can still be hard if they write sloppily. T's and K's in particular can be hard to distinguish; they both look completely different from anything you've ever seen, I bet. Slovak words can go many letters without a single vowel, so sometimes it's hard for me to recognize if what I copied down was an actual word or not... Well, I can't read the notes regardless, so I guess it doesn't matter.
Thinking more generally about school, students can't choose what classes they will take. And they take the same subjects every year. So, a student graduating from gymnazium has had ten or so years of biology, chemistry, etc.! But they're just starting cellular biology in the sophomore-equivalent grade, after supposedly many years of biology already, so I don't get it. At the end of gymnazium you have Maturita exams. They fill every gymnazium's students nightmares for years. Ruth will be heading into the maelstrom soon enough; everything gets intense in December. Maturita is how you graduate gymnazium and is one of the big determining factors universities look at. It's also kind of controversial, because it counts for so much, but it's not standardized. Every school has their own exams, and teachers are the ones administering them. What happens, at least at Ruth's school, is for each subject you get a giant list of eighty or so very in-depth questions which are picked from everything you've ever learned ever. You know that in May, when the oral exams are, you will be asked a few of the questions from that list. So, ideally, you have to be able to answer every question there. Written exams take place in March, so you have to be prepared by then. Students choose I think three subjects to take Maturita in; Slovak Language/Literature is the required fourth subject. What I don't understand, is if it's so incredibly intense, as everyone wholeheartedly assures me it is, how does anyone pass? People talk about "oh, that's the bad university, anyone can get in there"-- but obviously to get in to that university, bad students or not, they had to pass Maturita. There's something strange here.
In preparing for Maturita, you're required to attend long extra classes before and after school. But kids who aren't in the fourth grade (seniors) are also taking extra classes. A fair amount of people go to language school. This can be private (very expensive), but the school also puts on extra foreign language classes after school, which (at least at Golianove) go from 5:30 to 8 at night. I don't know if you have to pay for them or not. I haven't met anyone yet who tells me they really like foreign languages or who is especially good at them, but everyone takes them seriously. (Okay, maybe not German...Most people hate it and figure they're okay as long as they've got English.) In a sense, it's a matter of survival! Just about every job requires you to "speak" another language (a minimal level of proficiency, anyway). But also, if you have any hopes of ever leaving the borders of Slovakia, even only to travel, you need another language. Which is hard for me to imagine, since I'm so used to everyone understanding me, no matter where in the world I want to go. But no, Slovaks are stuck if they just speak Slovak. Even a lot of Czechs can't understand them. I find this kind of sad...
A lot of young people tell me about their dreams of traveling the world (London! America! New Zealand!)--a lot of them seem to have this wanderlust, to "get out"--but actually most Slovaks I've known have lived their whole lives in the places they grew up. Culturally speaking, I think families are much closer than in America (certainly they tend to be geographically, if they're all in the same city), and, to quote the Rotary presentation, "friendships are more profound." Being friends, being family, and being friends of family are all very important bonds. You'll go a long way for someone you have a connection with. I think it's a very nice, warm environment.
Maybe it's because people tend to stay in the same city? Dialects are, to quote my learn-Slovak book, "strong and varied." And such a small country, too! As Mario said, "A man from the West can have a very hard time understanding a man from the East. That's why, when they were writing down the rules of Slovak back around the turn of the twentieth century [Slovak is a very modern language in this way], they pulled it from the middle of the country, where things were more balanced out." At the Rotary weekend I was talking to a girl who is living in Roznava, in the East near Kosice, and we were comparing common slang. I'd never heard of hers, and she'd never heard of mine!
Talking with Ruth, I was amazed to find out that even cities (plus their suburbs) have their own dialects! I was wondering why it sounded like the accent was on the second syllable in "Topol'cany" (a small town twenty kilometers from Nitra). "Mhmm, that's probably because of the "L'," Ruth said ("L' " is supposedly the hardest letter to pronounce correctly in Slovak). "But here in Nitra, we don't say it like [insert sound here], we just say it like a normal el." "You know, I thought I hadn't heard it!" I exclaimed. I'd always thought it was just too subtle for me to distinguish. I don't know how you pronounce it, so I guess it's lucky for me that I'm here in Nitra and don't have to! But Ruth says in the East they really accent that sound, along with others that fit in that category-- I don't know how to describe them. But even in Bratislava, just an hour from Nitra and also in the West, they speak differently! Ruth was saying how it really irritates her how people there pronounce "I don't know" as "neviem." (That's the way it's spelled.) Here in Nitra, and officially, it's pronounced like "nyeviem."
Ruth and I were talking about languages, and I said I thought English pronunciation must be hard (as opposed to, say, Spanish). She said yes, she thought that was the hardest thing about it (at least for her), "because, in English, there's only one right way to say it. No matter where you go, if you don't pronounce it exactly that way, it's wrong. Slovak... Well, you have a lot more room for variation." This is interesting for me to consider, because I'd never though of English pronunciation as especially rigid, but now that an outsider has pointed it out to me as such, I can't imagine what "non-rigid" pronunciation would be like!
I should further mention that all the people in Ruth's parents generation grew up learning Russian. Tibor and Aneta were talking about this, and they said it was called their "duty." It was required under Communist rule, and they all absolutely hated it-- because they hated the Russians! So Ruth says, even though they all learned Russian, no one from that generation would ever speak Russian unless they absolutely had to. They're just so bitter. I guess tension has cleared since, though, since at Golianova they actually have a special Russian program, unique among the gymnaziums in the area.
Well, I wrote this post Friday afternoon, and then before I could post it Ruth and I had to literally run to catch the bus to Klokocina; it turned out to be one of those moments of absolute luck, and had anything detained us for even a second, we would have missed it. We were going to Silvia's home. I was very surprised at the route the bus made; I'd never known the extent of Klokocina. Silvia lives at the very edge of the hill. It was so neat to see this completely new view of the city. There was a beautiful church with a very unusually-shaped bronze roof that I'd never seen before, and a very long strand of poplars in the distance, looking like dark sentinels in the misty, gray late-afternoon. The stare mesto from this vantage was I think more accurately presented than from my window: the big double-spired church, the hrad, and Ruth's school's church looked very spaced out, very far from one another. As it actually is! From where I stand, they all look side by side. They're the largest things around, and they're roughly in a line, so it's only when looking from that other side, up on Klokocina, that you can see how much is really in between!
We went to Silvia's because Ruth and Silvia are working on learning this dance that the Black Eye Peas did for Oprah; as the oldest class at the gymnazium, at the upcoming prom-equivalent, they will have to perform a dance for the school. Ruth and Silvia are organizing the choreography for this dance, and they're learning it from a flawed YouTube video... I don't envy their job! It's really hard work.
A few hours later the three of us walked to the Klokocina church, which is fifteen minutes away from Silvia's flat. I think I've mentioned before that it's the newest church in the city; Ruth had her Confirmation there when it was brand-new, three years ago. A few weeks ago when I was at the Rotary weekend in Strecno, Ruth went to mass on Friday at this church and got recruited for a fledgling youth group (just after joining the Sunday Chrenova one!), so now she and I have been going there every Friday, but it has yet to happen.
This Friday we had mass, and then we all (there were lots of teens, all of whom were from Ruth's school) hung around for a while: the teens are the ones who clean the church after everyone clears out. (Which I think is a good practice. And I've always appreciated how spotless this particular church is, with its granite floors gleaming. Now I know why!) But despite our waiting, the youth group again did not take place. I'm not sure why. Veronika, Ruth, and I took the bus at 8:30 back home, though Ruth and I got off before Veronika did, since the latter lives all the way at the "top" of Zobor (that is, at the top of the Zobor community, which is at the base of Zobor itself).
Happy October!
Much love!
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