Christmas Song

Last night we did a little Christmas caroling with some of the students, most of whom are in the choir. They started to sing a Slovak song that was really cool and that they managed to sing in parts even while walking. I coerced them into standing still and singing it when we got back to school, and took this video. Enjoy.

St. Nicholas' Day

I feel somewhat mystified by Slovakia today, and also that I should have my camera with me at all times, even during class.

Tomorrow is St. Nicholas' Day, which in many places in Europe is a day when small gifts are given. St. Nicholas (Mikulaš here) is often accompanied by a weird goaty dude. St. Nicholas rewards the good children, and the goat-dude punishes or eats the bad children.

This morning I was having class with my 5As when someone knocked on the door. I expected it to be someone bringing the class book in, but in came four students (fourth years): one was dressed as St. Nicholas, one as the goat-dude, one as a devil, and one as an angel. They were delivering what amounted to Christmas candy-grams. It was rather unexpected, though. St. Nicholas had a big crook and everything.

Then at lunch, after the lady handed me my plate of food, she also gave me a bag with a banana, a tangerine, a juice box, and a chocolate bar in it. None of my students were in the cafeteria, else I would have asked them what that was all about. I figured it was a St. Nicholas' Day thing, but I was a bit confused, still.

Then this afternoon I went shopping at the larger store, over by the school, and when I went in there were St. Nicholas and the goat-dude. This St. Nicholas looked pretty much like Santa Claus; the goat-dude had a furry head--honestly, I didn't look that hard, because he had a broom and I wasn't sure if it was part of some tradition to whack unsuspecting people with the broom. But obviously all this means that I must carry my camera around with me more often.

Tomorrow: pig-killing! Well, the pig'll be dead by the time we get there, but there are sausages to be made.

Thanksgiving

You have no idea how much I'm thankful for this year.

First and forever and always I am thankful for my family and my friends. I hope they already know that, but I'm just throwing it out there.

One of the things that I am most thankful for is the magic of Skype. It truly is magic, and wonderful and amazing. Without it I would be very sad/poor, because I would either not get to talk to people at home, or have to buy many, many international phone cards.

I am thankful that I have been safe and secure all this year, especially here in Slovakia. I've never felt in any danger...although I have been slightly menaced by the čuvačy.* If you see a big white dog in a field in Slovakia, DO NOT mess with it or its sheep.

I am indeed thankful for my school and my coworkers and my students. Of course, without them none of this would be possible. I feel very lucky that I teach at one of the best schools in the country, and that we have such a nice facility. The other teachers are all easy to work with, which is wonderful. And the majority of my students are lovely, amusing people.

Since I teach a class that's about life and institutions in English-speaking countries (realia), I was able to impart the time-honored tradition of the hand turkey on most of the first years. I made an example turkey and wrote on the back one thing I am thankful for, which is the school. The kids all traced and cut out their hands, some of them with a great deal of concentration, then decorated them and wrote something they were thankful for. The first class who did it had a lot of "I am thankful for my family and friends," so in the subsequent classes I said, "Mine says I am thankful for this school, but yours can say anything, like 'I am thankful for Kofola and karate and puppies,'" and I began to get more varied responses. Some of the students wrote that they were thankful for 1A or 1B, one wrote that she was thankful for 3A, and my favorite said something like "I am thankful for my family and friends and chili pizza and my home and my school and gummi bears."

Happy Thanksgiving!

*That plural form is purely conjecture. One is a čuvač, but I'm not entirely sure what more than one should be.

Snow

Videos!

*When I first posted this, these videos were on Google Video. Next month [May 2011] Google Video is shutting down completely, so the videos are now embedded from my YouTube account. I'm leaving the text as is, though.*

Here are links to some vids I put on Google Video. I was unable to embed them as I wanted to; maybe I'll figure that out in the future. I really wanted to get these up ASAP. I'm aware that the quality is somewhat poor, as they were taken on my digital camera, but I hope you enjoy them anyway.

St. Stephen's

Stužková (full description at a later date)--Mike and Majka dancing, the band playing

Folk singing/dancing/bagpipery from Pribelce group at Čierny Balog festival

Cheeseburger in Paradise

On Saturday we took three buses and a train to get from Tisovec to Vienna. I didn't get to see everything I wanted to see, but what I saw was pretty great.

From Bratislava it's about an hour by train to Vienna. Once you get into Austria things are almost immediately different; of course the signs are suddenly in German, and the general topography isn't radically different, but you can definitely tell you're in a wealthier country. Some travel guides lump Vienna in with Eastern Europe, but I would classify it as Western, without a doubt.

When we got to Vienna, the first place we went was to Stephensplatz to see the cathedral. Part of the outside has scaffolding on it, which is not very impressive, but overall the effect is striking. St. Stephen's is quite big. The inside was even better. I must say that it reminded me of the (fake) cathedral interiors in "A Knight's Tale"--I think it was the amount of space inside. It seemed to me that St. Stephen's is bigger than St. Patrick's. It's certainly older. The ceiling had an interesting vaulting that I couldn't and still can't place; if someone knows, tell me. Parts of the ceiling were just a ribbed vault, but then there were crazy parts too.

While we were there we heard some musicians performing. I'm not sure why, but there was a choir and an orchestra somewhere. I have a short video that I haven't been successful in uploading here yet, but I'll keep trying (it doesn't help that the error message is in Slovak). The cathedral has not one but two pipe organs: the big one over the entrance in the front and a smaller (but still quite large) one nearer to the altar.

One of the chapels was the burial place of Prince Eugene of Savoy, and in the crypt are buried more members of the old Austrian nobility. Visitors can also go into the towers of the cathedral. There's even an elevator in one of them.

There was tons of stuff to see while we were walking around, but some of it I didn't know what it was because we were never able to look at the signs. We saw the plague column, and a place where there are some old Roman foundations, and a Steiff store with a huge stuffed bear outside.

Don't know what that is, but it looks pretty darn imperial

We also went to the Albertina to see the Van Gogh exhibit that's there until December 8. I was hoping that they'd have my favorite, The Olive Trees, on loan from MoMA, but they didn't. In fact, all of the pieces were new to me. Most of them were drawings, rather than paintings, and they showed Van Gogh's progression from realism to his iconic style later in life.

For dinner we ate at a place called 1516, a brew pub that people had recommended. Sure, it wasn't really classy Viennese cuisine, but there were cheeseburgers, and they were so good. So, so good. Apparently the beer was pretty good as well, but I couldn't say from experience. All I know is how good my cheeseburger was.

After dinner we walked around some and saw where the Christmas market is set up, although all of the booths were closed because it was late. We left for Bratislava again around 11:24. I wish I could have seen more, but if things work out I'll be back in Vienna next month.

Fall Break

This past week we had school on Monday and Tuesday, and then the kids had Wednesday through Friday off. We teachers sort of had Wednesday and Thursday off; we had a retreat at a hotel in a town near Brezno called Braväcovo. The hotel was called Penzion Schweintaal. Schweintaal was the German name for Braväcovo, where a lot of German miners used to work. We were told that Braväcovo means "pig town" in Slovak. There is also a "bull town" nearby.

We drove to Braväcovo on Tuesday after school and spent Tuesday evening, Wednesday, and Thursday morning there. The hotel was pretty nice, and it had some spa facilities that we could use, like a sauna, hot tub, and masseuse. There was also a swimming pool outside, but it was a bit chilly for swimming. The rooms were neat and clean, though ours was a bit oddly shaped. The bathroom made me sad, because it was about the size of the kitchen in my apartment and very nice.

On Thursday after breakfast we all departed our separate ways, which included two of my fellow teachers and me going to Liptovsky Mikulaš to visit some other Americans and go hiking. Unfortunately, public transportation was not on our side on this particular day. We tried to get on one bus that would have taken us straight there, but the driver basically wouldn't let us on because the seats were full. We could have stood, but we weren't able to argue that case. We waited for another bus, but there was such a crowd for it that we decided to try a train instead. We got on a train in Brezno and rode to Vrutky. The train was the kind with the little compartments, so that was cool. We got off at Vrutky and got on a train for Mikulaš, and we had to stand in the little entrance-way part for that ride. We finally made it there, but we didn't get to see much of the town because it was dark because this daylight savings time thing here means it's now completely night by 5:30.

I got up on Friday morning around 5:20. We ate breakfast, discussed the trails we might take, and got dressed to go. We went to the bus station (luckily the girls live about two minutes from it) and got on two different buses to take two different trails. Mine actually ended up being the larger group, doing an easier hike.

We got off the bus at Kvačany right around 7 and walked through the town to start the hike. It was very quiet, cool, and pretty. There were lots of leaves on the path; in some places they went nearly up to my knees. For most of the hike we could see or at least hear a river. I didn't jump in, but I did at least stick my hand in it. We hiked to a village called Huty, where the trail pretty much ended; then we turned around and met the others and all hiked back together. Slovak folk hero Juraj Jánošík, often called the Slovak Robin Hood, was from northern Slovakia, and there are many references to him throughout the country. On our hike we saw something called Jánošík's Face:

See it?

We hopped a bus back to Tisovec that same afternoon, and we were back around 6. October 31st isn't primarily Halloween here; it's more important as Reformation Day and All Hallows Eve. All this week people had been going to cemeteries, cleaning their relatives' graves and putting flowers on them; and last night they lit candles. We went up to the cemetery after dinner. Not all of the graves had candles on them, but a pretty good number did. It looked cool. I think it's a nice tradition, too.

Friday

Church Tour

Yesterday I went on a tour of seven churches in the area, led by the pastor of the church here. Luckily, he and his wife speak English, so they were able to translate for me. (Their toddler daughter also came; she can say "Thank you" and "How are you?" and can high-five.) Any dates I put here are accurate as they were told to me.

The decorations in these churches are not like those in almost any church I've been to. There are interesting painted wooden ceilings, and something called a chor,* which is a wooden balcony. Also, all the churches were colder than it was outside.

Rimavské Brezovo

At first this church didn't look very promising, because they're renovating--there was plastic sheeting over part of the Baroque pulpit, and over the entrance to a chapel to the right of the altar and pulpit. There also wasn't any altarpiece, and most of the ceiling was a simple barrel vault. Behind the sheeting and scaffolding, though, was something pretty fantastic. They are working on restoring the frescoes in the original chancel, frescoes which date from the 13th or 14th centuries. The last time I saw something comparable to these frescoes was in the Cloisters, where they don't allow flash photography and certainly don't allow you to touch the delicate paintings. I was a little bit horrified that one of the young men on the tour was taking pictures with a flash everywhere. There are three crosses painted on the wall of the chancel where the bishop blessed the church in the 12th century, and the pastor touched one of them. I was also a little horrified at that. But then I thought, I might as well touch the medieval stuff while I can, because I won't get many chances to.

Rimavska Baňa

I walked into this church and flipped out a little because it was so cool. The oldest part of it is a chapel that was built in the 10th century. The rest of the building was erected in the early 12th century, with 14th century frescoes. The whole churchyard is surrounded by a wall built to keep out the Turks and the Tartars. The altar is from 1842, and the pulpit and chor were also built in the 19th century. The organ is not real; it's a facade. One of the really cool things is the fresco showing how King Ladislav fought against the Turks to rescue a bishops daughter who had been kidnapped. At one place there are a few horses in a row, and the way they're painted they reminded me of Sleipnir. Because I am a nerd.

Hrachovo

This church was built in 1808, although there was a church on the same site before that. The altar is the oldest thing there; it's from the earlier church. The church is on ground that was described to me as "wet," so the building is suffering from that lack of a solid foundation. The steeple is the heaviest part, and it's pulling the front of the building away from the rest. There's a big crack where this is happening. There may be some water or even a geyser under the church. Near the altar is buried a servant of a queen who lived in Fiľakovo. He was such a good servant that the queen rewarded him by burying him in a place of honor. Now, though, they are afraid that if the water comes up into the church it will bring him with it.

Nižný Skálnik
If I heard correctly, this church is from the Neoclassical period. The pews are at least 50 years older than the actual building, and came from an earlier Baroque church. This church has its original brick floor uncovered, it has yellowish glass in the windows, and there was a small bat sleeping under the chor. Before the church was built, they were planning to build it in another village; but during the summer that they were to construct it, it snowed in the other village. They took that as a sign to build it in Nižný Skálnik instead.

Malé Teriakovce

The earliest part of the church is from the 13th century. The altar is from the 14th and the chor is from the 15th or 16th century. The newest part of the building and the chor was built in the 1770s. Right when you come in the door there is a rectangle cut from the wooden floor and covered with a piece of glass. Under the glass are old stones of the original floor, and some coins; but the glass was covered with condensation on the inside, so we couldn't really see through it. The pastor showed us some old wooden finials that were so full of wormholes that only the paint was holding them together.

Drienčany

At this site there was originally a Catholic church in the 12th century and then a Lutheran church in the 16th century. Unfortunately, in the 16th century the town was burned by Turks. The current church dates from 1799. A famous folklorist, Pavol Dobšinsky, is buried outside. The organ doesn't work because the pipes were stolen during World War II, but don't worry: they have a serious drum machine. To get to the church there was this little tunnel, like a covered bridge, over a set of stairs. I made it up okay, but somehow on the way down I whacked my head against one of the beams. And not even my forehead, the crown of my head. That took some special effort.

And then the bus ran out of gas!

Kyjatice

The last church we went to was from 1413. None of the frescoes have been restored at all, and they're in pretty amazing shape for being almost 600 years old. I don't have much more information on this one because at first I was told that the information sheet was also in English, so I didn't get any translation, but it turned out to be Slovak and German. I'm pretty sure it said the church was dedicated to St. Cecilia in 1688.

Bronze Age burial site outside Kyjatice
We stopped at a place where Bronze Age people burned their dead, from the 8th to 11th centuries BC. You can still find bones and artifacts in the field.

So that was my Saturday. Thanks to the pastor and chaplain, and the old ladies who shared their food with me.

*Chor sounds just like "whore," which is not really something you expect to hear your pastor keep saying in church.

Deep Thoughts

"What is the best of the American way of life?"

At the beginning of the year, I asked all of my first year students (that is, the freshmen) to write five questions they had about life in the United States. I wanted to gauge their facility with English, but I also wanted to see what they were interested in knowing. Many of their questions were things like "How many people live in the US?" and "What is the US like?" but some of them were funny or intriguing. One girl wrote, "What kind of boys are there in California?" One boy asked about trucks, another about why the US uses 110 volts while everywhere else uses 220. The funniest was, "Are refrigerators in the US bigger than in Europe?" (Yes.) But one of the questions I like the best was the one above.

I know it's worded a little awkwardly, but it sounds like an NPR question that way. And it made me wonder, what is the best of the American way of life? How can you describe to students all the great things about our country? I don't really know where to begin; In-N-Out keeps springing to mind, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. In-N-Out, county fairs, Fourth of July concerts, apples at an orchard market, tons of little things that you take for granted. So here's my question to readers: What, in your opinion, is the best of the American way of life? I doubt I'll actually get any responses, but I'd appreciate anything that comes this way. At the very least, I hope you all consider the question carefully, without cynicism or political bias.

And now here's a little Walt Whitman for ya.

1
A song of the good green grass!
A song no more of the city streets;
A song of farms--a song of the soil of fields.

A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork;
A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.

2
For the lands, and for these passionate days, and for myself,
Now I awhile return to thee, O soil of Autumn fields,
Reclining on thy breast, giving myself to Thee,
Answering the pulses of thy sane and equable heart,
Tuning a verse for thee.

O Earth, that hast no voice, confide to me a voice!
O harvest of my lands! O boundless summer growths!
O lavish, brown, parturient earth! O infinite, teeming womb!
A verse to seek, to see, to narrate thee.
--from "A Carol for Harvest, for 1867"

Račianske vinobranie

(Quick note for those of you unfamiliar with the Slovak language--the letter č is pronounced /ch/. Carry on.)

Last weekend we went back to Bratislava (often called "Blava" because, let's face it, we humans are lazy and Bratislava has far too many syllables) to visit with some of our fellow teachers and to celebrate some birthdays. We arrived on Friday evening and when we reached our pastor's apartment there was Mexican food and lots of friends waiting for us. It was great. Once we finished eating there was birthday cake, and after that we retired for the night. I stayed with friends who live at the very top of their building in a cool apartment. It has an excellent view of the castle from their excellent deck.

Saturday morning some of us went to one of the malls. This one had a supermarket inside. It also had a huge revolving door which was rather impressive.

We did not, however, go all the way to Bratislava to go to a mall. No, we had a far more important objective: the Račiankse vinobranie, or Rača Wine Festival. I was told that this was where we were going, although at the time I did not know A) where or what Rača was and B) what one is expected to do at a wine festival. I don't even really like wine, but I was determined to go and have an experience. It turned out to be quite fun.

Rača is about a 20-minute tram ride from the Old City. It's sort of an outlying neighborhood of Bratislava; I wasn't sure whether it was a neighborhood or a separate town, like a suburb, but it belongs to Blava. (I found out much of this information on Wikipedia, so it may or may not be correct.) So it's more of a neighborhood.

Unlike some other wine festivals I know of, this one didn't take place in a big field somewhere. It was on two streets in Rača. There were booths with people selling their wine or food, and one or two souvenir booths. There was also a band playing polka tunes on a small stage. Wine, food, polka. What else do you need?

Wikipedia says that Rača is first mentioned in the 13th century as a vineyard. Therefore it's a good place to have a wine festival. The particular type of wine we were celebrating was something called burčiak. Burčiak can be described as "new" wine. It's unfiltered, thus thicker than regular wine, and it tastes more like the actual fruit. It's almost like a wine smoothie. It's not as acidic, and it doesn't seem as alcoholic as regular wine. Of course, it is; but, as we were forewarned, since it tastes like juice, it's easy to drink too much without realizing how much alcohol you're having. It wasn't a problem for any of us, but the warning was nice. I liked the burčiak because I like juice. There were two kinds, červeny and biely (red and white). We all agreed that the red was better. We also had some warm medovina (honey wine).

Instead of hot dogs, you get sausage here, and instead of hamburgers they had cigansky. I think. That may not be the right plural form. Anyway, most of us had a ciganska, or sandwich of a cut of chicken or pork grilled up and served on a big bun with mustard and grilled onions. They were really good. There were also different kinds of lokša, or flat bread with different fillings (reminiscent of a quesadilla), and palacinky. A palacinka is a big, thin pancake, or crepe, that you can get filled with usually sweet things. I shared a nugat palacinka with two friends. The man made the palacinka and then spread a chocolate-hazelnut filling on half of it. Then he folded it, sprinkled powdered sugar on top, and added whipped cream and chocolate syrup. There were no utensils or napkins available, but we managed to eat it without getting it all over ourselves. For me, this was quite an accomplishment.

It sprinkled on us much of the time we were there, but it wasn't full-on raining. Had it actually been sunny and warm, I think it wouldn't have been as comfortable. Sharing umbrellas created more of a feeling of camaraderie between us all. There aren't a lot of pictures to put up, because there wasn't a lot to take pictures of; most of them are just of people I know but you don't, and nobody likes looking at that kind of pictures. The first picture is of a bar in Rača that I should have looked more closely at; the second is of the street just past the end of the festival. There were some carnival rides, but they were off to one side, and didn't seem to be getting a lot of custom. The oddest thing we saw was a group of performers playing (and selling) South American music, the kind with panpipes; but they were dressed as American Plains Indians. One of the performers even had a big feathered headdress on. I'm fairly certain they weren't expecting anyone to see them who had been to quite as many powwows as I have.

Welcome

Just wanted to send out a big what up to all the eighth graders who might be reading this blog. Go Huskies!

Banská Bystrica

Yesterday we took the bus to Banská Bystrica. The weather could not have been more beautiful--it got rather chilly all of a sudden, and the sky was perfectly clear and sunny. Taking the bus here isn't like getting on a bus in New York or Chicago; nor is it like hopping on the Greyhound. You buy your ticket on the bus, for starters. The bus has upholstered seats which are fairly comfortable, but even if it's going between towns, people are allowed to get on if there's only standing room. The driver doesn't make any announcements, either, so you have to keep an eye out for your stop. This wasn't a problem yesterday, but I imagine late at night it could be.

When we got to Banská Bystrica we found that there was a fair going on. It was in the town square, which is really pretty. From what I gathered, from the 11th to the 14th of September are "Banská Bystrica Days." There were lots of booths set up selling mainly traditional crafts, like wooden spoons and medovina (honey wine); there was a stage with children in traditional dress singing, dancing, and playing music; there was a man in old-fashioned dress making rope. It all touched my medieval heart. We also went to the mall and walked around the carnival portion, but those weren't nearly as interesting.

Key vocab of the day: šunkovy sendvič (ham sammich).

Afternoon Hike

Views from our hike up to the cell phone tower this week. The last picture is the tower as seen from my room on the third floor. And here's today's tip: do not trifle with a čuvač, the big white Slovak herding dog. It will not be amused.

Picture of the Day

Slovak Pub and Slavin

Today is streda.

A popular name for restaurants here appears to be "_____ Pub"; note at left Slovak, Europa, and Celtic Pub. Yesterday night we went to Slovak Pub. I figured with a name like Slovak Pub it had to be good, traditional food, and I was right. It was cool. They were carved wooden bits and antlers and cool stuff, and the menu had all kinds of different Slovak food. I believe my meal was ordered off the part of the menu called "Grandma's Favorites" or something like that (the menu was handily in Slovak, English, and German). I had pirohy (pierogies) filled with cabbage and minced pork, I guess. They had fresh sour cream and bacony bits of fat on the top. We also had a soft drink called Vinea, which is a really light grape soda. My plate of pirohy was only about 130 SK, which is less than seven dollars. Not too shabby, eh?

I need to learn how to say "delicious" in Slovak.

Today I went on a walk with some fellow teachers and we had some good views of the hrad. A-like so:

At one point we saw in the distance this big statue on a hill of a figure with a long pennon or flag flying around him. Although we weren't trying to get there, we ended up getting to see it up close. The area is called Slavin, and the statue is part of a memorial to and burial ground for Russian soldiers who died during the Second World War in Slovakia. Our Slovak teacher later told us that the Soviets helped liberate Bratislava from the Nazis. The sign at the memorial said that 6,850 Russian soldiers were buried there; there were some headstones with men's names on them, but it seems that most of them were buried in mass graves. It's a period of history that I learned about academically, but that many people here actually lived through. The effects of the war and the post-war years are still acting on the country.
And finally, a few more views of the city from Slavin.

The Danube (Dunaj) is the light-colored area at the left, and the round thing is one of the bridges.