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.